The Phenomenology of Flow, Well-Being and Self-Transcendent Experience
My dissertation develops a phenomenological account of the so-called flow state, which is a state of absorbed, 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 special modes of 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?
The third problem the empirical literature raises concerns its notion of “optimality.” It 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 optimized agency in flow.
My project aims to resolve these three issues by providing a phenomenological account of the norm-governed temporal micro-structure of flow states and of the autotelic self expressed in them. 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 enriches our understanding of the experience of agency. It does so by highlighting dimensions of agency cannot be accounted for by standard accounts, such as Korsgaard’s, which focus on the deliberative, reflective agency of autonomous subjects. Flow, as a state in which the source of one’s agency is a sense of oneness with the world rather than of individual autonomy, is an empirical counterexample to such accounts. As such, it enjoins us to provide a phenomenological description of pre-reflective, bodily dimensions of agency that slip through the cracks of Korsgaardian and other related 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, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.
Paper Abstracts
Paper on the Phenomenology of Collective Agency in Group Flow (title removed for blind review)
Abstract coming soon.
Paper on Altered Self-Consciousness in Flow States (title removed for blind review)
One of the key markers of the so-called flow state, as described in positive psychology, is a seeming loss or diminishment of our ordinary consciousness of self. However, psychologists and philosophers have provided various inconsistent interpretations of what this feature of the flow state amounts to. Some, like Jay Garfield in his work Losing Ourselves, (2022) have argued that loss of self-consciousness in flow supports a no-self account of experience as ultimately selfless, authorless, and ownerless. I argue against Garfield’s interpretation and show that flow states are not cases of loss of self-consciousness but are rather instances of altered self-consciousness. I give a Husserl-inspired phenomenological account of the experiential structures that jointly constitute this altered and diminished sense of self-consciousness.
Invited Chapters
Circling Around the Transcendental: the Conscious Subject as the Limit of Nature in Raymond Tallis’ Philosophy and in Phenomenology – Forthcoming in The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophical Humanism of Raymond Tallis, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter reconstructs and critically assesses Raymond Tallis’ critique of scientific naturalist accounts of consciousness, which for all their diversity share a basic commitment to explaining consciousness by reifying it. My aim is to bolster Tallis’ critique of naturalism by drawing on the theoretical resources of Husserlian phenomenology. I reconstruct Tallis’ argument that consciousness, as the condition of possibility for explicitness, cannot be explained with reference to empirical objects and their causal relations. I show that this Tallisian argument structurally parallels Husserlian arguments for the explanatory primacy of consciousness understood as the condition for the intelligibility of objects. I then show that in spite of Tallis’ advance over naturalist accounts, he maintains a residual, problematic objectivism insofar as he, too, ultimately looks to the mode of being of objects when identifying the principles for the individuation of conscious subjects. I argue that this residual objectivism leads Tallis into the circularity of individuating consciousness, the condition of possibility for explicit things, by referencing an explicit thing: the body, understood as an object in space. In contrast, I argue that the principle for the individuation of the subject is the self-constitution of internal time consciousness as described by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I conclude that to resolve this circularity and bolster his anti-naturalist position, which sees consciousness as not only epistemically foundational but also as ontologically irreducible in a way that is inconsistent with scientific naturalism, Tallis would benefit from more explicitly engaging with transcendental phenomenology.
You can find the above chapter draft: here
Works in Progress
Distorting Agency: A Phenomenological Critique of Active Inference Accounts of Action in Flow
In this paper, I use phenomenology to show how recent Active Inference accounts of the flow state fail to individuate the intentional and temporal structures that constitute skilled agency in flow. I then argue that their failure in this regard is indicative of more general issues with the fundamental assumptions Predictive Processing accounts have concerning the structural principles that individuate cognitive agents. Drawing on recent Enactivist critiques of Active Inference, I show how Husserlian and Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology of flow as a state of complete absorption in skilled action can bolster such critiques, while complementing and extending their search for the historical and worldly sources of our sense of autonomous agency in skilled action.
Experience For Its Own Sake: Towards a Phenomenology of Well-Being
In this paper, I illustrate how phenomenology can bring greater clarity and precision to our folk concept of well-being. I introduce well-being as a phenomenological problem by explaining how (1) states of well-being must be individuated in terms of their invariant experiential structures before they can become intelligible targets of empirical description and explanation, and (2) the inherent normativity of occurrent states of well-being can be elucidated through phenomenological description. Moreover, I provide a phenomenological account of well-being as a state which allows for the most unhindered expression of the autotelic structure of the self-conscious subject. Thus, I argue that well-being is not tied to having experiences with a certain privileged class of contents. I then show how it is at a phenomenological level of analysis that we can distinguish between distinct senses in which autotelic experience can carry normative weight. I conclude by giving a Husserl-inspired account of the intentional, temporal micro-structure of autotelic states that allows us to make a principled distinction between the distinct forms of autotelicity evinced in neutral exercises of skill and in actions that facilitate the cultivation of virtue.
Imagining the Brain: A Phenomenology of the Neuroscientific Imagination
This paper gives a phenomenological account of scientific imagination and visualization which focuses on how neuroscientists use diagrams to understand the brain as a multi-level, hierarchically-organized structure. Drawing on the diverse, burgeoning literatures on the pervasive use of diagrams and of the levels metaphor in scientific representation, I give a Husserl-inspired phenomenological account of key experiential structures, such as image consciousness, the eidetic intuition and the figure/ground structure of object-directed experience, which jointly regulate the scientific visualization process. I also draw on Pessoa’s discussion, in The Entangled Brain, of how scientists project a multi-level, hierarchical structure onto the otherwise seamlessly interconnected architecture of brain regions responsible for so-called “lower-level” affective processing and “higher-level” cognition. I offer a phenomenological reconstruction of neuroscientists’ imaginative reliance on the eidetic intuition to generate hierarchically-organized, multi-level images of these brain regions. I then describe how these images guide scientists’ imaginative exploration of the target neural phenomena and constrain the space of possible model-building. I conclude with a reflection on how phenomenology can shed light on the ubiquity of the levels metaphor in the scientific imaginary as it comes to grip with massively entangled systems like the brain. I also explain how my study evinces a fundamental methodological reorientation: by using phenomenology to disclose the foundational role of image-consciousness in science, we reverse the usual explanatory procedure evinced by approaches that seeks to “naturalize” phenomenology by bringing its results into conformity with neuroscience. Instead, in a manner consistent with arguments provided by Thompson, Frank and Gleiser in The Blind Spot, we “phenomenologize” neuroscience by laying bare its experiential presuppositions.
Early stages works-in-progress:
- an article that explores how Husserlian phenomenology enjoins us to rethink the hard problem of consciousness;
- an article that explores whether, and in what sense, neurophenomenology is based on a category mistake;
- a paper on phenomenological explanation that explores the sense in which Husserlian phenomenology functions as “first philosophy” by enjoining us to rethink what counts as an explanatory first principle.
Feel free to reach out for drafts or discussion!