The Phenomenology of Flow, Well-Being and Self-Transcendent Experience
My dissertation develops a phenomenological account of autotelic experiences, which are states we value for their own sake and whose goals are internal to the activity itself. Such experiences are central to various accounts of well-being, ranging from the Eudaimonist tradition, which describes virtue as autotelic, to the positive psychology of Csikszentmihalyi, which characterizes flow states as autotelic. However, despite the centrality of autotelicity to both the moral and psychological approaches to well-being, there has been little sustained theoretical effort to clarify how the moral and psychological senses of autotelicity relate.
To address this gap, I draw on Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to provide an account of the norm-governed temporal micro-structure of autotelic states. I argue that such states, when iterated across time, can reshape our sense of self, thereby providing the basis for practices of moral self-cultivation.
My project also demonstrates how a phenomenological approach can address puzzles in the psychology of flow. One such puzzle concerns the altered sense of self which leads subjects to experience an intensified sense of agency coupled with a sense of self-transcendence and absorption in a larger process which they experience as the driver of their action. By bringing greater clarity and precision in our description of flow, we achieve a more rigorous understanding of how flow states contribute to well-being. We also make way for a cross-pollination of insight between the literatures on positive psychology and moral self-cultivation.
While the phenomenology of mental disorder has been the subject of rich and detailed study, the phenomenology of well-being remains underexplored. By offering a phenomenological description of flow, I aim to lay the groundwork for a general phenomenology of well-being and of the experiential structures that make it possible.
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 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.
Works in Progress
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 well as identifying the transcendental sources of justification for levelled representations of massively entangled systems like the brain. I also explain how my study evinces a fundamental methodological reorientation: by using phenomenology to disclose the hidden structure of scientific image-making, we reverse the scientistic approach 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:
- a paper comparing Husserl’s paradox of subjectivity with Merleau-Ponty’s paradox of expression. The aim of this comparative exercise is to provide a new angle for exploring the relation between phenomenology and ontology with respect to the problem of the constitution of sense;
- 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;
- 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.
Feel free to reach out for drafts or discussion!