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With love and gratitude and in memory of Maria Kirsten 1966–​2021
CONTENTS

Living Bodies and Consciousness: Foundations  viii

Introduction  1

1 Existential Experience and Epiphany  13

2 Change: Nature, Beauty, Art  29

3 Touch, Beauty, Place  45

4 Art and Its Functions: Some Comments About Freud and Jung  60

5 Nature, Beauty, Art: Foundations of an Ethical Life  73

Appendix: Personal Experience  82

References  85
Index  92
LIVING BODIES AND
CONSCIOUSNESS
Foundations

Our human consciousness and what ‘it’ is, remains a mystery that so far has eluded
us, something about which we remain largely ignorant, even with recent insights.
This is not, from a scientific point of view, wilful ignorance. No-​one knows or
has discovered the key to this mystery although there are many well thought-​
out guesses based on research and argument, many beliefs, many attempts to cap-
ture consciousness (Blackmore, 2005; Dennett, 1992; Metzinger, 2009; Prinz &
Oxford University, 2015). So, many theories about mind, consciousness, the brain
have emerged with the development of neuroscience over the past 60 years. On
one account, the mind and/​or consciousness can be thought of as function: con-
sciousness is the way in which the brain functions (Levin, Fall 2018).1 Or, per-
haps the brain can be thought of as a sophisticated computational system like a
Turing machine or a system of neural networks (Rescorla, 2020). Or, the mind
and consciousness might emerge from the way that the brain is as either a parallel
or supervenient system (Stoljar, 2020). Or, consciousness might defy the attempts
of neuroscientists and philosophers and remain as a hard problem, the hard problem
or question (Chalmers, 1995, 1996, 2018). This focus on the nature of conscious-
ness (or even its mention) has been a fairly recent development in analytic Anglo-​
American philosophy. When I was a young student, it was the mind that occupied
pride of place in theorising human being. That said, Indian philosophies have taken
consciousness very seriously for a very long time. In Europe, phenomenology and
existential philosophies, and of course, psychiatry and psychology have been the
trendsetters in this domain. That said, the mechanism, if there is one and whatever
it is, of awareness and self-​consciousness exceeds our current knowledge or is even
unknowable, something many of us are too proud to admit—​that there are limits to
human knowledge and even experience.
So we are in a position in which the scientific and philosophical literature on
consciousness, bodies, brains, and computers (specifically artificial intelligence in
 Living Bodies and Consciousness ix

the case of the latter) is vast, often contradictory and argumentative, and comes to
different conclusions depending on the model developed and explored (Berent,
2020; Churchland, 2007; Churchland & Sejnowski, 2017; Colombetti, 2014; Currie
& Ravenscroft, 2002; Dennett, 1992; Gallagher, 2017; Goff, 2017, 2019; Heinämaa,
2007; Koch, 2012, 2019; Metzinger, 2009; Noë, 2016; Penfield, 2015; Penrose, 2016;
Prinz, 2012; Prinz & Oxford University, 2015; Rescorla, 2020; Thompson & Varela,
2001; Zahavi, 2005, 2007).2 As I have indicated, the research is inconclusive, for
while neuroscience, for instance, might show us that the brain is involved in various
structural and functional activities of consciousness, it does not show us how these
activities produce imagination, and insight. Nor does the research show or explain
how it is that one can feel and know that one is feeling: there is little, if any,
definitive explanation of the meta-​activities of consciousness, the hows and whys
of self-​awareness. David Chalmers’ ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ (how come
I experience, how come my brain ‘produces’ both experience and me) remains.
Throughout this book, and given the above, I assume the following:

1. Consciousness and life belong together: consciousness is a property/​quality/​

aspect of any living thing including the living body of a human being.
2. The brain (in humans at least) is the originary site of consciousness: no human
brain no human consciousness, and no mind.
3. We do not, in spite of current research, know what consciousness is, nor do
we know what life is, even if we do know some of the fundamentals of both
consciousness and life (for example that consciousness involves awareness and
responsiveness and that carbon is fundamental to life on Earth (as we under-
stand ‘life’)).
4. We do not know how material bodies and consciousness are related to each
other, even though there appears to exist some causal relationship which
is bidirectional. As argued by Markus Gabriel, I am not identical with my
brain: the brain is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for being me (Gabriel
& Turner, 2017).
5. Drugs affect the human body, and some drugs directly affect consciousness and
the mind. How does this happen?
6. Many animals experience and are, therefore, conscious.
7. Human consciousness and perhaps the consciousness of some other apes is
capable of self-​reflection.
8. Human consciousness is the origin of constructed culture, literary imagination,
and elaborate symbolic systems
9. Human consciousness is the basis of individuation.3
10. Computers are inorganic machines and are not capable of consciousness: life
is a necessary condition of consciousness, or in other words, to be conscious,
you must be living/​alive.
11. This is not to say that computers cannot imitate human consciousness; that is,
they appear to be like humans say from a computational perspective (IBM’s
Deep Blue). Computers have been hypothesised in fiction to the extent
x Living Bodies and Consciousness

of appearing to be humans (David in the Steven Spielberg film AI: Artificial

Intelligence; the TV series, West World and Humans). By definition, computers are
not living beings: they are machines, ingenious, magnificent with great cogni-
tive power (Damasio, 2000, 2003). Although they might engage in reasoning
and can ‘remember’ (memory on a basic computer) and communicate (Siri)
they do not breathe, give birth, eat, or drink. And we are not computers; we
are organic beings.
12. Philosophers have also argued about the conceivability/​inconceivability of
what David Chalmers refers to as philosophical zombies, a replica of a human
being but lacking in self-​consciousness, or an inner life. I am agnostic about this
debate amongst philosophers.That said, the debate revolves around whether or
not the brain gives us the full story about consciousness and the mind. As I’ve
indicated, I do not think it has, but I am inclined to believe that they are con-
ceivable. See Kirk (2021) for a full discussion of zombies.
13. Finally, I would like to note that sometimes I shall refer to consciousness, some-
times to mind or self or soul. These terms are all related to each other, with
consciousness at their centre. Body and soul we are, each one of us. In a foot-
note in Chapter 1 of The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum remarks on her
use of ‘soul’:

The word “soul,” here and elsewhere, simply translates Greek psuchē, and,
like that term, does not imply any particular metaphysical theory of the per-
sonality. It stands, simply, for all the life-​activities of the creature; in the case of
Hellenistic contrasts between body and psuchē, it is especially important to
insist that no denial of physicalism need be involved, since both Epicureans
and Stoics are physicalists. The contrast is simply between the material
constituents of the organism and its life-​activities, its states of awareness, and
so forth.
Nussbaum, 2013: 13

I follow suit, noting that I have questions rather than theories about the metaphys-
ical nature of personality.
I do not argue for any of these assumptions or points of view. In my opinion,
there is more missing than there is found and secured in scientific research and
phenomenological studies of human consciousness. So in what follows, there will
be reference to some of these views, and, hopefully, why I accept judiciously, and
perhaps tentatively, the above.
My own understanding of consciousness begins with the basic idea that con-
sciousness or awareness is responsiveness. Responsiveness to what? Consider this

Husserl takes up again the Critique of Judgement when he talks about a tele-
ology of consciousness. It is not a matter of duplicating human consciousness
with some absolute thought which, from outside, is imagined as assigning
to it its aims. It is a question of recognising consciousness itself as a
 Living Bodies and Consciousness xi

project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces

nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed –​and
the world as this pre-​objective individual whose imperious unity
decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal.
Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: xvii–​xviii, my emphasis

Merleau-​Ponty’s remark that consciousness is a project of the world suggests that it

broadly inhabits the world, for he seems to be attributing to consciousness an exist-
ence deeply embedded in the structure of the world. The world is directed through
its own striving, as Baruch de Spinoza would have it, always towards something
which is in its own purview. The world, of which humans are part, is the home of
consciousness, and in which humans live but which is not the product of human
existence. The world is a conscious world which gives birth to humans who enjoy
the fruits of awareness and responsiveness. The idea that consciousness is a project
of the world foreshadows the recent renaissance of panpsychism as a possible way of
understanding consciousness. David Chalmers signalled this possibility and Christof
Koch has taken it up in The Feeling of Life Itself.
Hence, ‘consciousness’ here is not to be understood as a property/​feature/​
quality/​of human beings alone. Rather, ‘consciousness’ permeates the world: in
other words, ‘consciousness’ is found as part of this world in its evolution. In this
conception of consciousness, if some living thing is responsive, it is conscious. Thus
if we observe a sunflower and we see how it moves with the sun, how it responds,
how it strives in its own being, to exist, we are observing a form of primitive con-
sciousness. This is cellular awareness in a sunflower.4 Cellular awareness, responsive-
ness is intrinsic to all consciousness.
But, and this is a big ‘but’, the awareness in terms of responsiveness and awareness
that is present in plants is qualitatively unlike that in human beings. From both
an evolutionary and a bio-​ structural perspective, the sophistication of human
awareness/​responsiveness/​consciousness is way more complex, more intricate. We
might think of this as a kind of hierarchy of sophistication in which smaller and
simpler organisms are conscious, but less so, than those that are bigger and more
complex. The human brain has developed from a fight/​flight organ whose basic
function is preservation of life, based upon feeling and emotion, into the simple
core consciousness and the multifaceted extended consciousness about which
Antonio Damasio writes (Damasio, 2000: 16).
Although it is common practice amongst researchers in this area, I shall not
talk of consciousness in terms of representation. I do not believe that I represent
myself to myself nor do I represent the world to myself. I experience and engage
with myself and the world. In my view ‘represent’ as a way of speaking about con-
sciousness is ill-​chosen and reflects underlying misguided ontological assumptions.
Antonio Damasio, for example, slips into its use early in The Feeling of What Happens
(Damasio, 2000: 22). I say ‘slips into its use’ while acknowledging that he does dis-
cuss its meaning in the Appendix to The Feeling of What Happens. He says that it is
‘a problematic but virtually inevitable term in discussions of this sort’ followed by
xii Living Bodies and Consciousness

My mental image of a particular face is a representation, and so are the neural

patterns that arise during the perceptual-​motor processing of that face, in
a variety of visual, somatosensory, and motor regions of the brain. This use
of representation (his italics) is conventional and transparent. It simply means
“pattern that is consistently related to something,” whether with respect to
mental image or to a coherent set of neural activities within a specific brain
region.
Damasio, 2000: 11, 320

Damasio goes on to explain that even if you and I form comparable images of an
object, it is because of the way in which our brains work, rather than mirror-​like
fidelity to the outside world because we have no way of knowing whether or not
the image we form is an exact copy of that object, even though an ‘external reality’
might ‘prompt’ its creation. He argues for an interactionist view of the images
we form in our minds. This interaction between objects and the brain’s neural
activities is what creates those images of objects (Damasio, 2000: 320–​321). I sus-
pect Damasio’s use echoes a ‘naturalised’ Kantian ontology. Immanuel Kant also
had argued representations and the faculty of representation (Vorstellungen) (Kant,
1933: 34, 75, 77 passim) related to his metaphysical distinction between appearances
and things-​as-​they-​are. The point that Kant argues is that we humans do not have
an immediate and direct relationship with an external world, but that we represent
it to ourselves the world through appearances for which our minds and cognition
are responsible.5
It is clear that images and representations are closely linked. However, note that
Damasio’s rendering of ‘representation’ is visually oriented, even though his discus-
sion of ‘image’ invokes sound (Damasio, 2000: 318). This seems to be in keeping
with other work on the relationship between consciousness and the external world
and our experience of it in which work on consciousness and cognition focuses (no
pun intended) on vision, together with colour perception (Varela et al., 2016: 147 ff).
Even if it can be shown that many different factors affect colour perception it does
not follow that we are engaged in representation. What we touch and are touched
by, as I shall argue shortly, cuts across the idea of representation as outlined here.
In my view, we also have no way of knowing that images we form are not exact
copies, in some respects, of an object. This does not mean, though, that the mind
is always or is never a mirror image of the world we live in. We do not experience
the world in micro-​detail. A snake about to strike me is a snake about to strike me,
just as lightning is lightning and death is death. From a phenomenological per-
spective, the world is as it is, unless we have clear reason to believe that is not the
case. The natural attitude, which can be thought of in terms of the world’s being
what we experience it to be, grounds our very understanding of ourselves and the
world. Of course we do make judgements, we can be right or wrong and we can
invoke the epoché as Edmund Husserl argued, to get at the essence of things. But on
an everyday basis, we are not mistaken for most of the time. We might hypothesise
and discover the subatomic world, but we cannot and do not experience that world
 Living Bodies and Consciousness xiii

from the inside as it were. And we use the furniture of this world as we understand
and experience it, to make these hypotheses and discoveries (electron microscopes,
Large Hadron Collider). We shall come to this point again, in the next chapter.
For now, I maintain that our experience of the world gives us the best possible
idea of ourselves and our environment, importantly from the inside, and from a
manufactured ‘outside’ in which others like-​us become objects-​to-​us.
Pierre Hadot distinguishes between the world of science and the world of
everyday perception. He regards the world of science as unrepresentable, constructed
by scientists. He says:

The world of science does indeed, by means of its multiple technical

applications, radically transform some aspects of our daily life.Yet it is essential
to realise that our way of perceiving the world in everyday life is not radically
affected by scientific conceptions. For all of us –​even the astronomer, when
he goes home at night –​the sun rises and sets, and the earth is immobile.
Hadot, 2011

As we shall see, this does not mean that we are limited by our everyday perceptions/​
conceptions of the world. Epiphany, transformation are always possible. That is per-
haps one of the great gifts diversely offered to us by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and
their teachers and peers.What that means is that consciousness (and, indeed, uncon-
sciousness as a mode of existential experience) is central to all of this. Without
responsiveness, without awareness and its development, we do not exist as self-​
reflexive creatures. Merleau-​Ponty’s idea that consciousness is a project of the world
is spot-​on, but the origin of consciousness and the world, how they come to be
in the first place, is unknown and probably unknowable. What we do know, now,
however, is that human beings are not the only living beings who are conscious.
Christof Koch’s discussion of his relationship with his dog is a beautiful and illu-
minating illustration of this (Koch, 2019).
At its basis, the idea that we represent the world to ourselves arises because of our
failure to acknowledge the interconnectedness of humans and Nature, even with
say, a Buddhist mindfulness orientation (Thompson, 2010;Varela et al., 2016). So by
way of contrast, I want to note that for some Buddhists, consciousness and suffering
are intertwined. On the whole, Buddhists attempt to explain the cause of suffering
and argue that it is because we have the mistaken notion of a self, yes, connected to
consciousness, that we suffer. It is important for them, therefore, to show that the
cause actually does not exist: if there is no self, there will be no suffering. But this
is something that we have to learn by un-​learning what might be thought of as
our ontological commitment to self. In this view, one realises that one experiences
nothing but experience(s): consciousness if ‘emptied’ of self. There is no self that
experiences, there is simply conscious awareness, and constant change. In effect,
this is to attribute moral and psychological dispositions to an error of judgement,
and that error is that we are ignorant in believing in an ontologically grounded
reality. Perhaps what is needed is an idea of self that does not rely on the idea of
xiv Living Bodies and Consciousness

an unchanging substance, but, instead, incorporates change and fluidity. This would
agree with the changeableness we all experience in our lives. However, it would
not address the central role of conscious awareness and memory with which most
of us identify.
Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche remarks that

Our instinctive, emotional attachment or clinging to a vague notion of self

is the source of all our suffering. From the idea of ‘self ’ comes that of ‘other’.
It is from the interaction of ‘self and ‘other’ that desire, hatred and delusion
arise. There are many kinds of desire including greed, envy and miserliness.
Hatred can take the form of jealousy, anger and resentment. Delusion includes
mental dullness, stupidity and confusion. From these unhealthy mental states
arise actions motivated by them, and their results.The results take the form of
all kinds of sufferings, which one cannot escape as long as one identifies with
the ‘self ’ who is suffering.
Gyamtso, 1986/​1988/​1994: 33

In my view, the idea of self does not precede the idea of other, if that is what is
meant by ‘from the idea of ‘self ’ comes that of ‘other’. The connection is there, but
reversed and is a given of phenomenology as we have just seen in Merleau-​Ponty.
The interaction of self and other might be a cause of suffering, but that it is patho-
logical is not a given as Gyamtso’s claim suggests. Self and other interact in mul-
tiple ways, all of which do not result in suffering. Certainly if we grasp at things
or experiences or other persons, and are unsatisfied or disappointed in our efforts,
suffering will ensue. And cognition plays an important role in this, for knowledge
and ignorance, important cognitive elements are at the forefront to some kinds of
conscious awareness. And learning to deal with all of this helps with our capacity to
individuate, to become a self-​reflecting conscious presence in the world.

The Enactivist Approach

Enactivism (neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology) implicitly acknowledges our
complete immersion in the worlds in which we find ourselves. Enactivism has been
developed and further explored by Thompson (2010, 2011), Shaun Gallagher (2017)
and Giovanna Colombetti (2014) amongst others.They take seriously phenomeno-
logical insights arising from Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger,
and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty. In earlier work, I have referred to Brentano’s inten-
tionality thesis (Gray, 2012, 2016). My emphasis there has been, primarily, on tracing
possible influences that Brentano might have had on C. G. Jung. Mostly, my interest
has been in the representational aspects of intentionality—​that is to say the notion
of there being an object of mental events and whether or not such objects need
be conscious, a problem with which Brentano concerns himself (Brentano et al.,
1995 II: Inner Consciousness). Indeed by far, the bulk of scholarship on Brentano’s
idea and the idea of intentionality subsequently has revolved around the status of
 Living Bodies and Consciousness xv

mental objects, and it appears that such debates and controversies also have some
bearing on the relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology (Jacob,
2019; Siewert, 2017).
As Varela, Thompson and Rosch point out, representation has been a key theme
in cognitive science and computer modelling. But enactivist theorists rethink the
notion of intentionality away from representation and towards the mutuality, even
the reciprocity, of activity, of being in the world in the mode of Merleau-​Ponty. For
them, cognition is ‘always about or directed toward something that is missing’, a next
step or a situation in the world (Varela et al., 1991: 205). And Varela,Thompson, and
Rosch explore cognition through cognitive science and its origins, and phenomen-
ology. They introduce the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as a possible avenue for
bringing together the whole of human experience in a way that is understandable
from scientific, phenomenological and personal, experiential perspectives.6
Specifically, the Buddhism to which they refer is Tibetan in the tradition of
Mahayana, the Buddhism of Gyamtso. They argue, using the Buddhist Aggregates
(forms; feelings/​ sensations; perceptions (discernments)/​ impulses; dispositional
formations; consciousness), that all ‘five together constitute the psychophysical
complex that makes up a person and that makes up each moment of experience’
(Varela et al., 2016: 64). They imagine what it would be to be in pursuit of the ‘real
self ’ which each of us takes ourselves to be. They conclude that the real self is not
in any one of the aggregates, nor is it in the sum of the aggregates, that ‘no such real
self is given to us in our experience’ (Varela et al., 2016: 69). After exploring and
rejecting alternatives from the Western tradition (Descartes’ res cogitans and Kant’s
transcendental ego) they conclude that the search for a real, substantial self will
always be frustrated. From the perspective of the present moment, we cannot dis-
cover a self that persists in our experience.
The trio identifies a circularity in thinking about cognition: ‘that our cognition
emerges from the background of a world that extends beyond us but that cannot
be found apart from our embodiment’. In their research, they argue that there is
no abiding self, no foundation, no objective ground that can be identified as an
unchanging, foundational self, always present in experience. The self is an illusion:

(w)hen we tried to find the objective ground that we thought must still be
present, we found a world enacted by our history of structural coupling …
organism and environment fold into one another in the fundamental circu-
larity that is life itself.
Varela et al., 1991: 217

How do they get to this position? In part, they accept the Buddhist idea of no-​self.
In Buddhist traditions, meditation, sometimes characterised as mindfulness
(becoming aware that one’s mental life is composed of a succession of present
moments that slip away and can never be held) and Zazen bring about the realisa-
tion that change means that there is no substantial self. Buddhists argue either that
there is no substantial self or that they are agnostic about the self.7 It is the practice of
xvi Living Bodies and Consciousness

meditation that brings one to this conclusion. With practice, fully engaged medita-
tion is a non-​narrative experience in which focus on the breath or bodily sensations
becomes a conscious, sensuous experience, unfettered by any assumptions or onto-
logical commitments. The silence and peacefulness that ensue bring relief from
suffering. In my view, the success of this practice is a cognitive insight: you have
to be able to do it though. Doing it, though, does not provide the grounds for the
ontological assumptions that Buddhists have developed out of meditation. Indeed,
the focus on one’s own consciousness foregoes the possibility of taking seriously
the claims of phenomenology, and of enactivism, and Buddhism. Hence I wonder
about the conclusion, an ontological claim, that the meditator reaches—​that there
is no substantial self. That is, a basis of their claim, that experience of the ever-​
changing mind/​consciousness does not entail the conclusion that there is no self,
so something more is needed.
So although I have just said that mindfulness is unfettered by any assumptions
or ontological commitments, which amounts to a commitment to groundlessness,
viz. that everything is empty and constantly changing, there seems to me to be an
enthymeme operating here, that there is a ‘my’ to the awareness and experience
I take to be mine. Meditation on the succession of present moments, it is held,
shows that self is not substantial. However, the discovery of groundlessness or no-​
mind is based on the practice of conscious, watchful awareness on the part of the
meditator. I wonder then, about the conception of no-​self which is the result of the
practice: who or what is experiencing, and who or what is aware? I might say, for
instance, ‘So what? I know I am constantly changing, but it is the I (me) that knows
this that is in question, not what I know to be the case in my changing world, i.e.
that my self changes. What is the “I” that cognizes?’
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch imagine that a reader might pose a question
related to my concerns:

How is it, if we have no self, that there is a coherence in our lives? How is
it, if we have no self that, that we continue to think, feel, and act as though
we had a self –​endlessly seeking to enhance and defend the non-​definable,
non-​experienced self?
Varela et al., 2016: 110

They appeal to the Buddhist understanding of karma which they characterise as

an ‘historical formation of various patterns and trends in our lives’ and assert that
it is ‘this accumulation that gives continuity to the sense of ego-​self, so evident in
everyday, unreflective life’ (Varela et al., 2016: 116). In other words, they conclude
that karma provides an answer. There is a couple of problems with this.
Firstly, what does it mean to say that the self is non-​ definable and non-​
experienced. Certainly, the self, as a substantial entity, might not be definable, and
non-​experienced? But perhaps the self is simply the experience, the referential,
reflexive experience that takes one back to one’s consciousness in memory and
reflection? And that does not have to be definable, and will it always be given
 Living Bodies and Consciousness xvii

in experience because that is the nature of consciousness? There needs to be an

argument that shows the necessity of conceiving of the self as a persistent, unchan-
ging, substance. That is not provided, merely assumed. And this brings me to my
next worry about this solution. As I see it, the language of having serves only to
exacerbate the problem because it raises this question: what is it that has a self?
If there is nothing that has, then there is no having in the first place. This lan-
guage surely underscores the whole question of mind and consciousness: just what
exactly are they? Speaking of the Buddha or the wisdom mind further highlights
the quandary—​in the process of realising groundlessness or emptiness, it seems clear
that something does the realising. Some ‘thing’ or phenomenon is enlightened or
at least there is an enlightenment experience, but it makes sense that if there is an
experience, then there must be an experiencer if there is awareness. And, yes, there is
awareness! I am reminded here of Nietzsche’s and Russell’s claims that there does
not have to be an experiencer for there to be an experience. One is pressed to ask
can there be thinking without a thinker? Perhaps Descartes assumed that there
needs to be a thinker, his I, but how does one prove that one is an I? And surely if
there is awareness of experience (thinking, believing, opining, and experiencing itself),
it is clear that something is aware: there is a subject of awareness, and this is perhaps
the reflexive understanding of ‘self ’.
I am also puzzled about the ready acceptance of the inference made to the onto-
logical stance that everything has the same groundless status as self is problematic.
One realises in experiencing the skandhas or the Five Aggregates, in which one
cannot locate a self, either individually or as a whole that something else might
be going on. And we do not have to take the Buddhist line on this. Aristotle, for
example, notes that

(i)n the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality
is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts,
there is a cause; for even in bodies contact is the cause of unity in some cases,
and in others viscosity or some other such quality.
Aristotle & McKeon, 1941: 1045a 8–​12

If we think of the self as having several ‘parts’ (constituents, aspects) and the self
as a totality, which is not a mere heap, but something besides the parts (a reflexive
awareness for example) which is not merely the ‘circular structure of habitual
patterns’ and that the whole (the parts and the something besides) has a cause, then
we might be able to come up with a working notion of self that does not depend
on the notion of self as persistent, unchanging substance. We might, for example,
argue that self is indeed caused by the world in which we live, together with the
(reflexive) workings of consciousness, itself a property of the world, in this case, of
human beings in the world; and human beings are bodies. Thus consciousness is a
property of bodies and self is its reflexive awareness. This is a view in which the
causal nexus is viewed as the phenomenological coexistence of consciousness and
other, in which ‘I’ and ‘self ’ are experiential ‘parts’. And it is paradoxical, yes.
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xviii Living Bodies and Consciousness

Hence we could discern here, a primitive notion of the self as both an effect of
cause(s) and a constituted entity beyond what constitutes it (that’s the paradox). We
acknowledge the phenomenological nature of self and other, and at the same time
preserve the ontological integrity of other. There is a strong, ontological sense in
which the world, in other words, is (not can be) separate from phenomenological
consciousness (the world pre-​exists any consciousness as it will post-​exist it), while
at the same time, self is both epistemologically and phenomenologically dependent.
This is the sense in which the world and consciousness are intertwined. One’s being
as a self is phenomenological being. This enlightened view is an aspect of individu-
ation. I shall have more to say about this in the following chapters.We can retain the
idea that self is enacted, but that enactment is phenomenological, and self requires
the ontological, participatory, integrity of the world.
Lastly, I maintain that there are two moments of consciousness: pre-​narrative and
narrative consciousness, about which I also shall have more to say in later chapters.
A basic division, then, exists between unconscious, primitive experience and self-​
conscious, aware, experience. The importance of these assumptions about bodies
and consciousness will become clear as I discuss what I think of as psychological
epiphany, Nature, Beauty, and Art and their dependence on the idea of change. The
link to individuation, to the deep awareness of self as reflective consciousness, vital
and ever changing but nonetheless persistently aware, will become clear, I hope.

Notes
1
Functionalism is the doctrine that what makes something a thought, desire, pain (or
any other type of mental state) depends not on its internal constitution, but solely on
its function, or the role it plays, in the cognitive system of which it is a part. More pre-
cisely, functionalist theories take the identity of a mental state to be determined by its
causal relations to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and behavior.
Levin, 2018
2 This is a small sample of what is available in the research.
3 When I use the term ‘individuation’ I am using it in a Jungian sense as I have in my pre-
vious books.
4 See Atamian et al. (2016).
5 See Kant (1998: passim) and Brook and Wuerth (2020). Note that there is much written
on this topic.
6 A new edition of which was published in 2017 with a Foreword by Jon Kabat-​Zinn, a
master of mindfulness teaching. Francisco Varela died in 2001; the new Introductions are
by the surviving co-​authors.
7 See, for example, Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness in which Rinpoche argues
that ‘the self is simply a vague and convenient concept that we project now here and now
there on to a stream of experiences, and is nothing in or of itself ’ (Gyamtso, 1986/​1988/​
1994: 31).
INTRODUCTION

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the
reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections.
Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and div-
ision, settle everything somehow, and never wonder.
Charles Dickens Hard Times 691

In many ways, this book is a footnote to my previous books. It returns to narrative,

to subjectivity, to Jung and philosophy. But it alludes to Jungian themes, rather
than critically examining them. Fundamentally, epiphanic moments are about indi-
viduation. I hope that this becomes clear as the book develops. The context of this
whole project is in the following:

Suddenly the piercing cry of a night heron awakened me as if from a dream.

All the confusion, all the agony that had obsessed me disappeared with
the morning mist. Something I call ‘true nature’ was revealed. I had been
transformed body and soul … The peaceful beauty of the world became viv-
idly apparent to me. I was overcome with emotion and reduced to trembling
… I became as light as the wings of a dragonfly, and felt as if I were flying as
high as the mountain peaks.
Fukuoka, 2021: 2

I hope this book brings you to Nature, Beauty, and Art through phenomen-
ology,2 and psychology and then on to Ethics and the Moral Life as practice and
transformation.

In Cartesian Philosophy and the Flesh, I worked with Pierre Hadot’s idea that phil-
osophy is practice. Hadot developed his thesis from his intensive study of ancient

DOI: 10.4324/9780429022975-1