What does Gendlin’s “reflexivity” not mean?

I recently wrote a blog post titled McKeon’s “Reflexive Principles” & Gendlin’s “Reflexivity”, discussing the correlation between the two ideas. Not only did I discuss “both McKeon and Gendlin place great emphasis on Aristotle when discussing the term ‘reflexive’” in this article, but I also wrote other two posts. They are Thomas Aquinas, McKeon, & Gendlin and Descartes, Spinoza, McKeon, & Gendlin. These three posts discussed how Gendlin’s idea of “reflexivity” is in continuity with certain philosophers in the history of Western philosophy through McKeon’s Philosophic Semantics.

Naturally, however, Gendlin’s idea of “reflexivity” has its originality that cannot be contained in a mere repetition of McKeon’s view of the history of philosophy. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I fully understand its originality yet. Therefore, as a preparatory step for my further understanding in the future, I will attempt to trace Gendlin’s additions and modifications to the traditional concept of “reflexivity. In what follows, I will try to answer the question, “What does Gendlin’s ‘reflexivity’ not mean?”

After Gendlin proposed “reflexivity” in “Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (ECM)” (Gendlin, 1962/1997), it seems that he thought his discussion had been misinterpreted due to the conventional meaning of the word and that he had not conveyed his original point through it. In later years, he cautioned against equating his reflexivity with “reflection,” such as “phenomenological reflection” and the like.

Gendlin wrote in ‘Reply to Mohanty’ (Gendlin, 1997), included in “Language Beyond Postmodernism” as follows:

Now I can explain why I am not concerned with a "reflection" which seeks to mirror experience while only "swimming after [Nachschwimmen]" it. Mohanty sees that I don't share Husserl's assumption that a single act cannot be both meaningful and reflexive. Reflexive need not mean reflection. Reflection, like "swim after," is indeed a separate act. It means looking back at what just happened. We do indeed sometimes reflect, and this is a separate act as Husserl said. A felt sense of what happened also comes as a separate act, although it is a large change, not a reflection. But we usually know what we are doing, quite without any separate act, as I said above. Aristotle had no problem pointing out that perceiving and thinking are always inherently what he called "auto." That kind of reflexivity is not reflection. Mohanty allows me to "assert unambiguously the thesis of reflexivity," but we saw that this is an intricate relation, not the impossible identity between different times. An identity would turn the implicit into an explicit we want and fail to capture. The ..... is itself a carrying forward, and it is also not to be equated with how it is further carried forward. (Gendlin, 1997, p.189; cf. Mimura, 2009; bold added)

The word “auto” means “identical” in ancient Greek, and was already mentioned in his earlier paper “Ultimacy in Aristotle: in essence activity” (Gendlin, 1991/1995) as follows:

Commentators call the self-knowing "reflexive," but that latin word can mislead us if it means a later looking back on what was already thought. Nor does Aristotle mean a reflection, like an image in a mirror. There is not something added. Aristotle does not use words like "reflexivity" or "consciousness." Throughout his works, where we would use those words, he has always only his little word "auto." He says that thinking knows itself when it thinks, not afterwards, not by something added. (Gendlin, 1991/1995, p. 138; bold added)

In other words, Gendlin seems to have thought that the term, which originated in Latin and was used by medieval commentators, did not adequately express what he wanted to say.

In his later paper, “The new phenomenology of carrying forward” (Gendlin, 2004), he also examined the difference between reflexivity and reflection:

To speak with and from what is more than the categories, we employ the capacity of language for new sentences. This capacity of language is rooted in the human body as reflexively sensed from inside. The reflexivity is currently being missed, because attention is understood along the lines of perception, as if a neutral and unexamined person over here directs a neutral beam at some already separate object over there. If we attend to experiencing directly we find that we live with situational bodies which always sense themselves in sensing anything else. (Gendlin, 2004, pp. 128–9; 2018, pp. 81–2)

I must point out the sharp difference between this reflexive re-reception internal to experiencing, on the one hand, and what we call "reflection" on the other hand. The reflexive re-reception generates the process. It generates each next bit of process. A first-person process happens through this reflexive re-reception. On the other hand, when we reflect, we take a separate stand in relation to the past. The reflexivity of carrying forward is not the past, not reflection. It is the self-generating of the present. "Reflexivity" is a more complex concept of the present. (Gendlin, 2004, pp. 146–7; bold added)

I have been arguing against the assumption that consciousness is a mere addition to events considered as if they could happen in the same way without consciousness. The reflexivity of the person is not a mere "consciousness-of," not an addition to perceived things, as if percepts existed as mechanical events, leaving consciousness an empty "of," which can seem unnecessary. The current concept of "consciousness" is the poor remainder that is left-over when reductive science defines the content as if it consisted of events that can occur alone. To split the things away makes us a mere "of," of events in a third-person world without us. The third-person science needs to be augmented by a first-person science. (Gendlin, 2004, p. 149; bold added)

It is precisely because of the above that Gendlin discussed “simultaneous aspects” in the “definition of experiencing procedure” in Chapter V of “Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning” that there is neither “looking back on what was already thought” nor “taking a separate stand in relation to the past”:

The terms just mentioned specify different "experiencing procedures," that is, experienced transitions between one step of thought and another. In discussing such transitions, ... the experiencing in a transition in thinking may be viewed as “one” experiencing of which the two steps of thought are simultaneous aspects (although they are specified at successive times). (Gendlin, 1962/1996, p. 179; bold added)

Meanwhile, Gendlin did use the terms “reflection” or “reflecting” when discussing “reflexivity” in ECM:

Furthermore, one traditional fashion of defining or accounting for “meaning” is as a reflection of a faculty upon itself. (Also, as St. Thomas puts it, “the understanding turning upon itself with a full turn.”) (Gendlin, 1962/1997, p. 182; bold added)

Here then we have an experiential version of the reflexive definition of “meaning” as (a faculty of) experiencing considered as an instance of itself (turning or reflecting on itself). (Gendlin, 1962/1997, p. 186; bold added; bold added)

However, he was already dissatisfied with the meaning implied by the word “to reflect upon”:

... one may reflect upon a transition that has already occurred in thought, and seek to specify the "experiencing procedure" that has occurred between the two steps of the given transition. In either case, the experiencing may be conceived of as "one" with several specifications of it. (Gendlin, 1962/1996, p. 179)

Perhaps he was not fully satisfied with the word “reflexivity” either. When we understand Gendlin’s reflexivity, we need to pay attention to a different aspect of the word than what it usually means.

So, would Gendlin have been fully satisfied with Aristotle’s philosophy before the Latin influence?　On this point, see the sequel article, “Not only the product but also the process: contribution of Gendlin’s philosophy to “reflexivity.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nikolaos Kypriotakis for his help with the meanings of the Greek word.

References

Gendlin, E.T. (1962/1997). Experiencing and the creation of meaning: a philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective (Paper ed.). Northwestern University Press.

Gendlin, E.T. (1991/1995). Ultimacy in Aristotle: in essence activity. In N. Georgopoulos & M. Heim (Eds.) Being human in the ultimate: studies in the thought of John M. Anderson (pp. 135–66). Rodopi.

Gendlin, E.T. (1997). Reply to Mohanty. In D.M. Levin (Ed.), Language beyond postmodernism: Saying and thinking in Gendlin's philosophy (pp. 184–9). Northwestern University Press.

Gendlin, E.T. (2004). The new phenomenology of carrying forward. Continental Philosophy Review, 37(1), 127–51.

Gendlin, E.T. (2018). Saying what we mean (edited by E.S. Casey & D.M. Schoeller). Northwestern University Press.

Mimura, N. (2009a). Gendlin und Husserl: Phänomenologie der Fortentwicklung (carrying forward) [in Japanese]. Dilthey-Forschung (Dilthey Gesellschaft in Japan), 20, 63–79.