My dissertation develops a Husserl- and Merleau-Ponty-inspired phenomenological account of the structure of autotelic experience (i.e. intrinsically rewarding experience), particularly as exemplified in the so-called flow state, which is a state of absorption in effortless, spontaneous action characterized by a merger of action and awareness. Flow is a self-transcendent experience of oneness insofar as it involves a dissolution of the boundaries between the self, other agents and the world. Flow is also a liminal state of agency insofar as it exhibits a blurring of the usually sharply demarcated boundaries between agency and passivity, effortful control and an effortless self-surrender that lets things come together of their own accord, intelligent steering and absorbed abandon. Flow is philosophically interesting insofar as it is one of the most readily accessible altered states of consciousness. As such, it reveals aspects of the experience of agency that are overlooked by accounts that focus on reflective, deliberative action. My dissertation focuses on explicating the crucial roles played by altered self-, time- and norm-consciousness in constituting flow states.
My dissertation is built around three puzzles that I argue are revealed but unsolved by psychological accounts of flow:
First, psychological accounts of flow present a puzzling picture of the self in flow as attaining self-realization through a self-forgetful, seemingly authorless act. In such states, subjects experience a maximally enhanced agency while also experiencing diminished self-awareness and ego-boundary dissolution. How is such action that affords our self-realization as agents through a seemingly self-forgetful movement possible?
Second, psychological accounts describe group flow, which is a flow state that is shared by multiple individual participants engaging in joint actions such as group musical improvisation or philosophical debates, as an experience in which the source of one’s agency is a sense of oneness with others rather than individual autonomy. In group flow, agents cease to experience themselves as the sole or primary authors of their actions. But what must the agent be to experience intertwining with others as a source of intensified agency, such that she no longer appears to herself as the primary source of her action, but rather feels herself carried along by a process she participates in without controlling?
Third, I introduce what I call “the puzzle of autotelic experience”: autotelic experience appears as both intrinsically valuable (since the experience is its own reward) and as valuable only insofar as it orients the subject to a self-transcendent source of value. Prima facie, this is a contradiction: the experience both does and does not derive its value from within itself.
My phenomenological account aims to dissolve these puzzles by describing the invariant experiential structures that are conditions for the possibility of flow states. My account describes the norm-governed temporal micro-structure of flow, while also describing the puzzling alteration of self-experience and of our sense of agency that such states involve. In so doing, my account allows us to understand the structural features of flow that remain puzzling at a psychological level of description. My account also explains how flow states, when iterated across time, can reshape our sense of self to make possible a sense of enhanced agency and deep-seated well-being.
My project ultimately strives to demonstrate how a phenomenological approach can bolster the theoretical foundations of the positive psychology of flow. My account shows how phenomenology can bring greater clarity and precision in our description of flow and in our interpretation of empirical data about it. 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 (e.g. Korsgaard’s), 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.
Phenomenological Philosophy of Mind
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. In my work, I bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on specific problems left unsolved in philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I do this by showing how supplementing empirical, psychological accounts of cognition with a phenomenological approach brings greater clarity and precision to our understanding of how pre-reflective, embodied experience of time’s passage makes possible self-experience, our sense of agency, and our responsiveness to norms.
Upon completing my doctoral research, my next project will be a phenomenological account of how our increasing participation in algorithmically-mediated informational environments reshapes our practices of self-constitution.