My dissertation is titled “Experience For Its Own Sake: A Phenomenological Account of Well-Being in Flow States.” It develops a phenomenological account of the so-called flow state, which is a state of absorption in effortless, spontaneous and autotelic action (i.e. action that is experienced as its own reward). Flow is also a self-transcendent experience of oneness insofar as it involves a dissolution of the boundaries between the self, other agents and the world. Flow has been a subject of increasing interest in positive psychology, cognitive science, the philosophy of agency, and the philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, the psychological literature raises three conceptual issues that have yet to be resolved:
First, it does not explain how the elements that make up flow hold together to form a coherent state: flow involves altered self-awareness, time consciousness, skilled agency, and norm consciousness, but how they cohere into a unified phenomenon remains unexplained.
Second, the empirical literature does not explain the kind of self-experience that constitutes flow. Instead, the literature presents a puzzling picture of the so-called autotelic self (the self capable of experiencing actions as their own reward and of maintaining internal harmony through life’s vicissitudes): it is presented as having a maximally enhanced agency, while at the same time ceasing to experience itself as the sole or primary author of its actions. But what must the self be to make possible this simultaneous sense of enhanced agency and authorless action?
Third, the empirical literature fails to distinguish between optimal functioning, enjoyment, and virtue. It also incoherently depicts optimal experience as intrinsically valuable and as valuable only insofar as it facilitates the realization of a self-transcendent goal. These conceptual confusions with regards to the normativity of flow lead positive psychologists to formulate confused prescriptive judgments concerning the nature of well-being on the basis of empirical evidence about enhanced agency in flow.
My project aims to resolve these three issues by providing a phenomenological account of the invariant experiential structures that make possible flow. It describes the norm-governed temporal micro-structure of flow states, while also describing the alteration of self-experience and of our sense of agency that such states involve. In so doing, my account explains how such states, when iterated across time, can reshape our sense of self in order to make possible a deep-seated sense of well-being. My project ultimately demonstrates how a phenomenological approach can bolster the theoretical foundations of the positive psychology of flow. It shows how phenomenology can bring greater clarity and precision in our description of flow. This enables us to achieve a clearer understanding of how, when, and to what extent flow states can contribute to well-being.
At the same time, my project strives to contribute to our understanding of what makes possible both our experience of agency and its enhancement over time. It does so by describing its difficult-to-articulate features of agency, such as pre-reflective, dynamically reconfigured bodily attunement with the environment. Such features escape the purview of currently influential accounts of agency, which tend to narrowly focus on the sense of control, effort, autonomy, and reflective deliberation. Flow, as a state in which the source of one’s agency is not an experience of autonomous control and effort, but is rather a sense of increased oneness and effortless attunement with the world, is an empirical counterexample to such accounts.
My ultimate goal is to pave the way for a cross-pollination of insight between positive psychology and phenomenology. It is also to help lay some of the conceptual groundwork for a general phenomenology of well-being and of the experiential structures that make it possible. This matters because, while the phenomenology of mental disorder has been the subject of rich and detailed study, the phenomenology of well-being remains relatively underexplored.
In addition, I pursue a number of other projects each of which, in its own way, explores the ongoing relevance of phenomenology for contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, moral psychology, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.