Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World by Ralph D Ellis

Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World by Ralph D Ellis

Combines phenomenology with the "enactivist" approach to consciousness theory and recent emotion research to explore the way self-motivated action plans shape selective attention, exploration, and ultimately the mind's interpretation of reality - in philosophy, psychology, cultural awareness, and our personal lives.

Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World combines embodied consciousness research, existential phenomenology, Gendlin's "focusing" concept, and recent self-organizational work on basic emotions (e.g., Panksepp, Frijda), to explore the way patterns of motivated action shape our interpretations of reality-personally, biologically, and within a sociopolitical community. Like a bat projecting sonar, we understand our world by sensing patterns of resistance against our own self-initiated actions. If hammering is the action, we find "nails" and "non-nails." Actions in turn express a self-organizing process rooted in motivational structures that presuppose values. These patterns of motivation therefore prefigure the shape of what we think or perceive. But the emotions, feelings, "sensings" through which we discern motivation are never just about what they seem, especially given ample incentives to distortion and self-deception. The "trigger" is the tip of an iceberg. This book works toward a coherent method for getting at the basement level of the action trajectories that motivate exploration, selective attention, and thus interpretations of reality-a crucial question in an age of motivated disinformation.

"This book is the result of combining, in a remarkable and quite concrete way, three different trends or methodological resources: emotion research, enactivism, and focusing I cannot even try to do justice to the book in all its complexity and richness" — Antonio Zirión Quijano, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology

"This is a further step in the development of a new understanding of meaning, not derived from language and concepts, but from the actual process of living. This is of more than academic interest: it is at the root of many of today's most pressing problems. The discussions of the authoritarian personality, enactivism, and denials of intrinsic meaning are particularly interesting." — Rob Parker, the International Focusing Institute

Ralph D. Ellis is Professor of Philosophy at Clark Atlanta University.