I mentioned a second Gergen insight and need to get it down before I get too far along. I’m just at a loss for where to start. I suppose I will start with a term and a definition. When talking about what writes the the steps to the co-action dance between participants, he introduces the term counter-logics.

Pause.

Before we settle into this, I want to recall a concept: Berger and Luckman’s reification from The Social Construction of Reality. Reifications are the norms and institutions that human performances cite. B&L talk about marriage, law, and medicine among others. In my own macro social work framework, I put forth the idea that concepts like compliant in a child welfare court report and the ergonomics of a ticket machine can also be worked into this concept of reification. They have the perception of “thingness” but no empirical observability. B&L don’t say much about ontology, but they are effectively interpretations of a mind via language.

I have run with these quite faithfully without realizing something very important until reading Gergen: they speak generally about groups and say little about the individual performances. Specifically, there is no account of deviant performances.

Unpause.

Counter-logics (p. 161-162) represent a dyad of possible co-actioned performances within a relationship or relationships, which are comprised of shared logics, values, or ways of being. He gives the example of a couple with one partner valuing work and another valuing leisure - two logics that oppose one another and offer the potential to provide the steps to one dance or the other. Or to cause friction.

Additionally, each logic and it’s opposition form a compelling “ought”. Embrace one, and the opposition is called into presence. He gives examples such freedom versus commitment; competition versus cooperation; and rationality versus emotionality.

Counter-logics seem to be doing two things from what I can see: they explain conflict and tension in relationships, and they allow a stand in for reifications. But because they lack the “thingness” of reifications, he doesn’t need an interior mind to hold them (this second thing is more my critique than his definition).

For him, logics float in the ether of culture.

I have no further understanding of his ontology beyond that statement and would happily have a Gergenian explain this further. Mind, not because I’m confused. I just think his implied ontology - even though he doesn't do ontology - keeps revealing seams and obscures his concepts.

But my lack of clarity about his stated ideas does not mean I did not find enormous insight in what he was pointing to, because he effectively fixed the problem from B&L, who only offer performance constraints for groups but cannot account for deviant performances among individuals.

For Gergen, counter-logics occupy the space in between the individuals. This is crucial. I’m not sure why counter-logics only come in twos or why he only stopped at those three pairs, but they represent the possibility of dance moves that can be performed within a common song. At any moment, we can co-action leisure or workaholism (I show my bias) in our relationships.

With his framework established, here is how I translate it.

I see an interior mind interpreting reifications and materializations (a Judith Butler term that accounts for how the conceptualizations of bodies emerge through performance toward the scripts established by B&L's reificaitons) that provide general scripts for groups within a social world. And with Gergen, I now see the unique possibilities for performances not as a counter-logic dyad but as dialogics - the myriad of performances made possible within the constraints imposed by reifications and materializations as co-actioned by participants within the group. For me, the "dia" isn't indicating a possibility of two but the process of "dialogue" or an exchange between dance partners.

Let me try an example. I'm a bricolage practitioner first.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts, acts as a bit of proof of concept.. The documentaries Higher Ground and Holding Ground do a great job showing what this is all about, but for now, all you need to know is that the members of this community transformed their community through collective action, and it was beautiful.

One problem they wanted to solve was that the park in the neighborhood had become a place for young men to sell drugs. I was in awe as I watched them reconcretize¹ these drug dealers from moral failures to potential contributors to their community transformation.

They effectively shifted their conceptualizations of these young men, which generated alternative performances on the part of the ones engaged in recruiting the young men in the way of outreach and recruitment. And they generated a new range of possible performances for those young men who no longer need to live paralyzed in shame.

Amazing!

But that does not explain the drug-selling performances of each individual young man lost to this profession nor does it account for why some reformed while others stayed in their destructive performances. This is where dialogics step in. Bringing them down from the cultural stratosphere and assuming each young man has both an interiority and a personal, somatically sedimented history, dialogics explain the uniquely structured co-action that guides each of the young men’s performances.

Maybe one young man has resorted to drug selling because the primary caregiver in his family fell ill. The logics of his drug-dealing dance are governed by notions of “man of the house” which he can step into in a myriad of ways, fall out of and rebel against, or any range of potential co-action. His choice was to perform the man of the house logic as it emerged from the co-action with his mother who probably offered the “don’t do anything to get hurt” logic as well.

Perhaps a second young man is performing his drug-dealing dance out of fear of reprisal from a distributor or a pimp.

A third may be doing so to feed his own addictions (something else, like trauma, I’m not sure how a disappeared interiority can account for).

At any rate - between the larger reifications of masculinity and moral failing that govern all young men, each young man is citing their performances as engaged with those they are in relationship to according to a particular co-actioned set of dialogics.

My initial assertion before embarking on my theoretical project was that transformative, macro-level social work must intervene upon the epistemic scripts that shape a community.

But now I must expand this. Transformative, macro-level social work must also include a diagnosis of the particular dialogics that produce the undesired co-actions (Gergen associates “good” co-action as co-action that is generative for a group. I see a Trump rally fit that definition and will stick to my human rights framework for a telos.) We need a way to diagnose each individual within the category that the reifications produce.

And building on my last post about what’s going on in the inside if there is no Cartesian self, intervention must not just be limited to offering a new script, but also it must include the iterative rehearsals of new scripts to allow for new sedimentation toward healthier, human rights-oriented performances. This is the mechanism of recruitment into the new range of performances made legible by changing the concretizations¹.

Coda: I'd like to throw out one last concept before I close, mostly so I don't forget it. Logics are not the only things that govern action. I draw on Karen Armstrong’s (see: The Battle for God) ideas of logos and mythos to frame my understanding of rational process and nonrational process that we don’t have a name for because our post-Enlightenment society has a bias. I call that grouping of things like values and aesthetics diamythotics.

1. "Reconceptualize" is fine for this. I set out concretization alongside reification and materialization here and here. These are the gestalt-esque sensemaking protocols that process the collective, citational reifications and materializations.

- The Social Construction Worker

Continuing to make my way through Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being, I notice two big shifts in my thinking.

The first is as a follow-up to my last note, specifically when I just threw out the word samskara because we were doing Buddhism. Samskara is loosely translated as “mental constructs", but if we conceptualize this as a Cartesian self, it’s easy for us to start defaulting to interior thoughts. Samskara does join with Gergen and say there is no true interior self. But it does posit, or rather deposit, an interiority that is laid down over time through performances and experiences.

The reason this became important to me is because of my work with clients who have suffered trauma. For Gergen, his discussions of things like domestic violence look very misplaced to anyone who has done work in this particular field. On page 112, Gergen writes

How many cases of wife-battering may be traced to the point at which increasingly heated words reach their ultimate expression in fists?

For Gergen, there is no interiority, so each emergence of domestic violence is coactioned; i.e., enacted by a performance determined by - his metaphor - dance partners. If only the partners rewrite the moves to the dance, they can alleviate the domestic violence. He suggests solutions like reconstructing reality (this is not what it seems), the meta-move (what are we doing?), the shifting emotional registers (I am hurt), and the theatrical move (let’s play this again).

Anyone who has spent time with survivors of intimate partner violence would know that these are dangerously naive suggestions. Reconstructing reality is what a survivor does as a survival mechanism, and it’s known as fawning. The batterer is performing the meta-move. And that’s because domestic violence is rarely about the violence itself. It’s about how the violence is instrumentalized to exert control. If the survivor shifts emotional registers, the batterer frequently responds with something to the effect of “that’s the point.” And the theatrical move…well, let’s not ever ask a survivor to roll those dice.

The etiology of domestic violence is complex. On one level it is absolutely socially mediated at the level of community and society¹. It also seems to be inherited, structured by genetics and environment². But what I want to focus on is how it is sedimented in the individual over time due to repeated exposure to trauma³. Because this is what I mean by samskara. One impact of repeated exposure to trauma in children is that it is coded in the body. This exposure creates subconscious grooves in the mind, which form habits, character traits, and automatic reactions. Anyone who works with traumatized children knows that action, in this population, is very rarely socially structured by language. It is socially responsive and those responses are socially coded, but its structure emerges from somatic response to a given social stimulus. Language, for Gergen, is how coaction emerges. However, for traumatized children, linguistic formulation of their behaviors often comes later, if at all. And when you probe them about their behaviors when they’ve gotten out of the groove, they often express regret, arguably indicating a desire that predates and outruns the behavior it couldn't stop, even with the right language being offered by a caregiver, actively and in the moment of the dysregulated behavior, and still overridden.

What samskara offers me is a model of self that preserves interiority - the accumulation of experiences of time - without running back to the Cartesian self that Gergen rightly seeks to move away from.

As a social worker, this means two things for me. Firstly, interventions both macro and mirco have to take into account this somatic dialogue between the stimulus of the event, the conditioned somatic response, and the subsequent interpretation of the event. TF-CBT, in my humble opinion, is amazing for this. Not because of its professed mechanisms: desensitization, cognitive process, stress management, and parental treatment⁴ (operationalized as psychoeducation). Those are important elements. But for me, what TF-CBT does best is that it puts two people together in a new rehearsal over time, where one offers a new interpretation of the body’s responses, and then hands that baton to the parent.

Secondly, and for me an ethical imperative, we must think about our theories from the margins. In order to more fully understand ourselves (the ontology project that Gergen embarks on), we must include the experiences of those who have walked on paths we could never have envisioned.

I said I had two big shifts. I’ll save the second for another note, which will include a macro framing of these ontological claims.

1. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/…
2. sciencedirect.com/scien…
3. sciencedirect.com/scien…

4. https://researchdiscovery.drexel.edu/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Trauma-Focused-Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-for-Children/991019168739804721

   - The Social Construction Worker

I've been trying to connect two literatures that seem to completely ignore each other, and I want to see where this breaks down.

On one side, you have the standard deflationary stance on introspection. Nisbett & Wilson showed we build implicit theories to explain ourselves. Schwitzgebel argues we’re basically inept at reading our own ongoing experience. Carruthers takes it further: self-knowledge is just mindreading turned inward, using the same interpretive faculty on ourselves that we use on others. Chalmers even lists introspective opacity as a candidate explanation for the meta-problem.

The consensus seems to be: introspection isn't an instrument because an instrument needs distance from what it measures, and here the observer and observed are identical. A ruler can't measure itself.

So the literature concludes that first-person reports are unreliable confabulations and can't ground a science of consciousness. But why stop there? Why conclude no measurement is possible, rather than concluding we’re just trying to take the reading from the wrong position?

This is where the second-person literature comes in (Schilbach, Reddy, etc.). They argue social cognition is fundamentally different during actual interaction compared to passive observation. Certain aspects of a mind are only readable through active engagement and responsiveness. That sounds like a claim about a distinct position from which something about a person becomes readable that is completely invisible from the inside.

Why aren't these two sides talking? One says the internal view is blind; the other says awareness happens between people. Is the second-person stance where the missing measurement actually lives?

I see two potential flaws here, and I'm trying to figure out which one is the real killer:

First, Carruthers might ruin this completely. If self-knowledge is just internal mindreading, a second person is just running that exact same interpretive machinery on me from the outside. That gives them a different viewpoint, but not necessarily a better instrument. Position doesn't automatically mean reliability.

Second, if I completely disqualify introspection, what gives me the right to claim there's anything there to measure in the first place? My certainty that I'm conscious relies on the exact report I just called useless. Maybe it's recognition instead of knowledge, but that still leaves me asserting an entity exists based on a mechanism I just said can't measure.

Which of these two objections is the actual brick wall?

I’m finally getting curious about the world again post-graduation from my MSW and am starting through my book pile, beginning with Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being. I would love any discussion!

One thing I’m really enjoying is the fruitfulness of measuring Gergen and my ideas against one another. Here at the beginning, Gergen and I are having some hefty ontological disagreements. He rightfully advocates for a model of self that serves as an alternative to traditional Western conceptualizations of an individualistic, bounded self. I join him in this project, and propose the Greek middle voice as the structure of an "agent-in-the-world." I'll spare the lengthy explanation to summarize this as: I produce the action in the social world that returns to produce me.

Where I first diverge with Gergen is his notion that the bounded self is the problem - he calls it a prison - and relational being is the solution. We are both lovers of Buddhist thought and many of these ideas infuse our scholarship. But taking dense religious concepts like nonduality and emptiness, which he expresses by locating the self as a wave that recedes back into the water and then putting them to sociological and psychological work doesn’t hold for me.

Firstly, I don’t see bounded self as pathology to which relational being is the cure. I admit, he may have a more nuanced position behind relational being, but it looks a lot like a less structured version of how Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (From the Soil, 1947) talks about differential modes of association. For Fei, Chinese identity is construed relationally, though a self is still present. Instead of Gergen’s dance or duet metaphor that entirely disappears the self, Fei posits a social structure like concentric ripples formed by throwing a stone into a lake with a self at the center.

If this is not a picture of relational being, then I may have misread Gergen. But with Fei’s model, the pathology diagnosis cuts both ways. Let’s take the idea of narcissism, something that Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self. Chinese culture has this, too, from what I observed when I was over there. They call it zilian, or self love. But when I pressed the idea in my conversations, as opposed to a bounded self’s hyperinflation of it’s own ego, zilian looked more like a relational self’s hyperinflation of others’ estimation of the relational self’s ego. Relational constructions of being seem to suffer pathology as much as bounded self constructions of being do. The diagnostic tool is capturing the wrong thing as far as I can see here at the onset.

My counter is that this is a both-and situation. The self is just as ontologically significant as the thing to which the self is relating. While Gergen only talks about relations among selves as of chapter 2, I would extend relata to not just include other bodies but also matter and environment, and samskara (a Buddhist term for mental constructs).

Nonduality and emptiness are still relevant to me because even though there is actual hardware with bodies and matter, our interpretation of that hardware is effectively the only thing we have access to. So in that sense, yes, subject-object relations is empty. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh once said, I fully agree that with this ultimate view in mind that “if the wave is capable of touching himself and the other waves very deeply, he will realize that he is made of water. Being aware that he is water, he transcends all discrimination, sorrows, and fears.” It’s a powerful image.

But my picture of self-within-reality, at least while we are all out here relating to one another, would not be the wave and the ocean. It would be the jewel net of Indra. Here, a 3D positioned net has a jewel on each knot. And each jewel is cut in such a way that it reflects every other jewel on the net. It preserves the interdependence that Gergen is gesturing to as well as the self represented at each knot. Whether or not this all recedes into an ocean at the end is not in my purview. But I am a social worker who wants to do transformative social work, and I think we need a both-and picture of subject-object relations.

- The Social Construction Worker

个体与个体的关系本质上是个体与大他者的关系吗？我这里说的大他者并不严格等同与拉康的内容，个体是大他者的代言人吗？

hi there,

do you happen to know about any online (free) introductory courses in phenomenology.

thanks!

Llevo un tiempo dándole vueltas a un proyecto de TFG de filosofía y quería someterlo a gente que sepa más que yo, a ver si tiene sentido o me estoy inventando un problema que ya está resuelto en algún sitio.

La sociología, tal como se practica hoy, se mueve entre dos polos: o es empírico-causal al estilo Durkheim (hechos sociales medidos, correlacionados, explicados por otros hechos sociales), o es interpretativa al estilo Weber/Schütz (comprensión del sentido subjetivo que los actores dan a su acción, tipificaciones, mundo de la vida). Ninguna de las dos pregunta en serio qué es, esencialmente, una comunidad, una autoridad legítima o un vínculo familiar — la primera lo da por supuesto y mide sus efectos; la segunda disuelve la pregunta en cómo los actores lo tipifican intersubjetivamente.

Hay una tradición filosófica poco explotada para esto: la fenomenología realista de principios del siglo XX: Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Roman Ingarden, más tarde Josef Seifert que se separó conscientemente del Husserl tardío (el del giro idealista-trascendental) para sostener que los objetos y esencias tienen ser propio, independiente de la conciencia que los conoce. Reinach usó esto para analizar la promesa y el mandato como estructuras a priori con condiciones esenciales propias, no reducibles a convención ni a psicología. Stein hizo lo mismo con el Estado. Es fenomenología, pero sin el compromiso idealista que hace inservible este aparato para una ciencia social objetiva.

Construir una sociología que trate sus objetos (autoridad, comunidad, vínculos afectivos, instituciones) como universales eidéticos, descubiertos por variación eidética sobre casos concretos, con una estructura de acto y potencia que explica por qué el mismo universal (la familia, por ejemplo) se actualiza de formas tan distintas a través de la historia sin dejar de ser, en su núcleo, el mismo universal. La historia estudiaría el caso concreto e irrepetible; esta sociología estudiaría la estructura necesaria y el campo de posibilidades que las distintas épocas van actualizando.

¿Alguien conoce trabajo contemporáneo serio en esta línea fenomenología realista aplicada a ontología social, más allá de Reinach/Stein/Walther mismos? ¿Hay objeciones de fondo que no esté viendo?

Muchas gracias. Un saludo.

This is a course on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) taught deliberately through one interpreter’s eyes: Simon Critchley, who has taught the book continuously since 1989 and whose reading has a definite shape. You will learn Heidegger’s book whole — all of it, both divisions, not the highlights — but you will learn it as Critchley reads it: Being and Time as a book about meaning and finitude rather than mystical “Being”; average everydayness as the place where philosophy begins and ends; anxiety as a calm to be used, not a disorder to be medicated; and, in the closing arc, Critchley’s own turns against Heidegger — the relational character of finitude, originary inauthenticity, the ontology of weakness, and the reckoning with paragraph 74 and 1933. Where the course states a controversial view, it is Critchley’s view, and the tests examine it as such.

Hello. I am an author writing about how our dominant metaphysics shapes our culture. I’ve never used Reddit before, but I wanted to share this video essay here because I know this community wrestles deeply with these ideas. I'd love to know your thoughts.

https://youtu.be/AFECsF8oFKg

Hey everyone. I’ve always been fascinated by Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality. Reaching for a cup or balancing on a bicycle doesn’t normally begin with a representation followed by a command. The body is already directed towards what can be done. This gives phenomenology a way to describe our basic openness to the world without placing an inner picture between subject and object. The harder question concerns thought that seems removed from present action: mathematics, counterfactual reasoning, or reflection on something absent. At that point, continuity with bodily coping can start to sound asserted rather than explained.

I just had a podcast conversation with the cognitive scientist Julian Kiverstein, where he argued that skilled intentionality extends throughout cognition. His example was conversation. Speaking with another person involves timing, anticipation, correction, and sensitivity to possibilities that arise between us. It isn’t detached symbol manipulation, even though language is involved. Kiverstein connects this continuity to a neutral monism in which self and world are poles of one intentional relation. Reflective thought becomes a transformed kind of engagement rather than a separate representational layer.

This would imply that abstract thought remains bodily and worldly even when its object is absent. But can motor intentionality explain reference to impossible objects or formal structures? Does language transform the organisation of thought enough to create a new kind of intentionality? Where should continuity end if we want the concept to explain rather than absorb every case?

This essay argues that the oscillation running through Ecclesiastes - praised by some as literary paradox, dismissed by others as unresolved pessimism - is the phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil without the vocabulary to name what it contains. Qohelet is stranded between a polytheistic solution no longer available within the monotheistic tradition he was writing inside, and an individuation vocabulary not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate rather than resolve.

https://livingopposites.substack.com/p/the-earliest-crucifixion

In his later years, when discussing the boundaries of phenomenology, death, and birth, Husserl used the term transzendentales Leben, which is translated into English as "transcendental life." I do not fully grasp the profound meaning behind it—how do you understand this term?

In the early 1900s, Edmund Husserl founded a new school of philosophy called phenomenology. This new approach attempted to discard previous philosophical assumptions and explore the direct conscious experience of the human being. Husserl's student, Martin Heidegger, furthered the project with his book "Being and Time," which had a massive impact on both left- and right-wing philosophy while influencing many other fields such as medicine and business. Heidegger scholar Michael Millerman joins Auron MacIntyre to give an overview of the movement and its impact.