Embodied and Psychological Engagement with the World

All experience is found in our Being’s manifestation within the present moment, in the specific actualization stemming from the general overarching potentiality. In phenomenologically analyzing the expression of the totality of our Being as it actualizes itself in the present moment, we discover differentiable modes of being with specific characteristics. We can uncover concrete categories of existence that we designate as modes of being(s) by analyzing reflexively the realm of subjective experience and our orientation to our environment. These modes of being include phenomena such as sensation, perception, conscious awareness, thought, memory, sensory-motor activity, being-with-others, beings-toward-something in the environment, and in general the different manners in which we are modified given the innumerable factors that influence us. Everything that affects us in the moment, whether its developed or present, modifies our mode of being in a manner that is reflexive of the totality of our being’s conditional nature as it is so conditioned by the phenomena in the realm of content able to be experienced.

Certain modes of being stem from our activity acting in the world, in the manner we respond to our immediate environment, whether it’s the general modification of us by immediate phenomena such as objects, time, or others, or if it’s an external manifestation of our conditioned Being in its totality. The manner we interact with the world, experience the world, orientate ourselves within our environment, and spontaneously react to the content of the moment can be classified as a meta mode of being which contains activity and minor modes of being within it. The totality of our psychic state, as represented conceptually as our Being, insofar as it is affected genetically, environmentally, developmentally, and modified by its orientation within space and time, contains the potentiality of states and actions that we can actualize, whether from the meta mode of being embodily engaged with the world, or meta mode of being psychologically engaged with the world.

From the meta mode of being embodily engaged with the world, we are living as such, we are acting in accordance with our developed mode of being in a manner that is not cognitively interacting with the world. Immediate reciprocity, instinct, action or speech prior to conscious awareness, such as in free-flowing playing, dancing, talking, working, etcetera, all are momentary actions and modes of being. These momentary actions are absent explicit subjective awareness and conscious direction, to these minor modes of being, we group them under the meta-head of embodied engagement with the world.

Our embodied engagement with the world is characterized by the absence, or negative existence, of subjectively experienced internal content – which is often in the form of dialogue and conceptualization. The less such experience is explicitly recognized by ourselves, the more we are engaged with our immediate environment and living out our developed orientation towards the world. The set of modes of being that are unconsciously directed towards the immediate environment, whether it be that mode towards which objects are encountered as present at hand or ready to hand, a mode which has developed schematically through habitual tendencies, or that mode which produces spontaneous orientations of our bodies in response to the perceived environment and the content of the present moment, we will designate as characteristic of the meta mode of being embodily engaged in the world. This is differentiated from the mindful recognition of mental experience found in active thought, self-realization, and the awareness of the content of the present moment which can be experienced as being known to us in its most common form: conceptual representation. Conceptual representation is a form of abstract symbolic schema from which phenomena is classified and able to be delineated, in its manifestation within our experience we see one form of psychological engagement with the world.

This embodied engagement with the world we find in those manifestations of our being that are marked by accomodatory action in regards to an assimilated schema that is absent of the realization of subjective experience. These actions are lived through without consciously being considered. The subjective realization of our potentialities, the conceptual representation in the form of thought, the anticipation of the future, retrospective memory of the past, and the awareness of the present, break this mode of Being embodily engaged with the world. The spontaneous, instinctual, and developed reaction to the moment, is contributed to by every factor which enters our realm of influence.  All factors considered, the mode of embodied engagement is absent of abstract thought, and absent of a conscious awareness of the present moment. This categorization of a set of modes of being has its utility, and its drawbacks, in reference to psychological wellbeing.

Our psychological engagement with the world is in the subjectively experienced explicitness of our Being manifesting itself in accordance with the temporal moment we find ourselves in. As subjective experience is part of “our world”, it is in its experiencing, and dealing with such experience, that we attach to it as an “engagement with the world”. In the same manner that we develop an orientation towards embodily enacting pragmatic schemas that develop according to novel circumstances (Genetic Epistemology) in our embodied engagement with the world, we likewise develop our psychic realm in its manifesting content, and the manner in which we experience it, through the same assimilatory and accommodating process of dialectical development. As we experience more, and find the utility in different actions, movements, and symbolic representations used to order the chaos of existence, we develop mental patterns and reactive tendencies that are in alignment with a “successful” orientation towards the problem of our own Being – its explicitness and the implications of it being a problem for us.

The benefits of mindfulness and present moment awareness include establishing a knowledge of our mental experience and its characteristics, developing concentration and providing a training of the mind towards diminishing of unwholesome mental states and promoting wholesome mental states (Benefits of Mindfulness). Reflective analysis of our memories and a pointed directional thought towards anticipating and planning for the future provide a function of promoting learning and reorientation, allowing corrections for past sub optimality in navigation, promoting past success, and instantiating the lessons and developed goal fulfillment strategies which serve us to properly move forward in the world (actualization of our values and the subjective meaningfulness attached to such pursuits). This separation from an embodied engagement in the world is itself found in the world, produced by causal connectivity in its arising within the world, in reference to our Being-in-the-world, and informs our continued existence in the world as a causal precursor to further manifestations of our Being.

The engagement with the world absent of this explicit psychological engagement, which is our Being-in-the-world without the explicit recognition of it as such, enables us to embody the developed Being which is free of subjectively intuiting it as such. Taking objects up as tools as ready to hand, social situations, creating, building, working in general, become the object of engagement rather than the awareness of the experience of them as found in psychological engagement. This type of engagement with the world enables us to be unhindered temporally by mental deliberation and consideration, to act spontaneously without the problem of our Being interrupting the flow of life’s processes. This experience gained through embodied action provides developmental data that informs psychological engagement with the world, it acts as the basis of its interpretation of ourselves and the outside world. Without embodied existence, without our being-in-the-world, and the experience gleamed there, there would be no data to instantiate a psychological engagement that can characterize an optimal navigation of reality and our place in the world. Thus the literal interpretation of the old aphorism attributed to Aristotle “First live, then philosophize.”

Philosophy itself requires cognition that arises from the material substratum coupled with experiential “life” development in a certain manner in the form of being-in-the-world. Our genetic code instantiates a sensory-perceptive system (Merleau-Ponty), which forms sensory-motor accommodations that works to form schemas to assimilate experience in a pragmatic manner (Genetic Epistemology). From these systems we develop a manner of being-in-the-world that enables us to act and be that is sufficiently capable of operating in our environment. Everything in our immediate environment from which we are perceptively oriented towards, all introjected stimuli, has significance and meaning to us insofar as it modifies our Being. Once mental development reaches the point of symbolic representation, and then linguistic capability, and eventually abstract thought, we are able to conceptualize reality in a manner that makes sense to us. This representation of reality constitutes the formation of how we articulate an explicit philosophical belief and value system, and thus the capability of philosophizing emerges. When we are able to articulate subjective experience, and the construction of symbolic representation of different aspects of reality which occurs within it, we gain the capability of sharing information with other Beings who are able to deconstruct the linguistic symbolism and deduce relational meaning behind them. This knowledge is modified by our developed perspective and articulation of it, and constitutes the potentiality of philosophizing, prior to any logical, scientific validation. Embodied cognition is acted on by extended cognition of our environment and we have the potentiality of psychologically engaging with the content of consciousness within the present moment. This momentary subjective experience that is characterized by a psychological engagement with the world enables a subsequent conceptualization of the content located within itself, and this produces philosophy and sharable knowledge, as we know it today.

Due to the nature of such development we need to experience more of life itself in order to get a clearer philosophical picture. We must embodily engage with the world, psychologically engage with the world, then step back and articulate the content located within (by psychological engagement with the abstract representation of both modes in the form of language). This enables the production of philosophy. The degree of pragmatic utility, objective truth, and logical cohesion of one’s worldview, one’s manner of living – in short – one’s philosophical position, depends on one’s acquired knowledge and the wisdom in applying it. The more experience, the more data, the more knowledge, the higher intelligence and time in both experiencing life, and psychologically engaging with this endeavor of “philosophy”, like any endeavor, tends to constitute the universal categories of value that determine the success of it. Aristotle’s famous quote points to the wisdom in experiencing a range of life’s potentialities first, before psychologically analyzing them, and philosophically attempting to represent reality from the data. Without adequate experience, the philosophical interpretation is merely naïve and not grounded in reality. It takes living life itself, in embodied engagement with the world and the environment, in the situations, encounters, and experiences found there, to take place in order for us to make any headway in conceptualizing characteristics of reality. In looking to develop a moral code, and organizing a value system that is consciously articulable, we ought to have experiential data, and acquired knowledge, the more of which we can utilize to better inform our conclusions. Only once we contain adequate experience can philosophy be utilized towards the improvement of our lives.

In the admonition to first live, then philosophize, we are simultaneously warned against the opposite, which is to philosophize first, then live. This puts the cart before the horse, and as the existentialists conclude, existence precedes essence. Unlike Sartre who claims the implications of freedom in this statement, we find that in a deterministic development, our existence is still primary, phenomenologically, to the characteristics which we develop and attribute to it. We must be in order to become. While this becoming is understandable in causal terms, the production of the Being which we find ourselves manifesting today constitutes the essence of our existence as it has been modified by every experience and introjected perceptive content of our embodied Being. In striving to become the person we want to be, and in pursuing what we have developed as valuing, we ought to not merely think about the manner in which we do so, not merely conceptualize an optimal pathway, nor contemplate the nature of existence and reality, but we must simultaneously employ these conscious schematic rewirings through living as such, in our engagements with the world. It is through trial and error, experience and subsequent knowledge, prudence, differentiation, judgment, and post-acquisition of knowledge, that we become better informed to philosophizing, in any of its domains that we seek to do so. Whether its morality, metaphysics, politics, or philosophy of life, the pragmatic instantiation of philosophical models, the “taking up” of our positions and living them is essential to collecting the data that we can discern as being better or worse, good and bad, having more or less pragmatic utility. While pragmatic utility isn’t the only metric used to judge our behavior and beliefs, the objectivity of a claim can also be the standard used, but the value that objectivity in itself has for us is always mediated by the pragmatic nature it has of fulfilling the value of “objective truth”. Any way you slice it, the pragmatic truth is what matters to us.

The correct development of psychological engagement with the world provides the ability to consciously direct our being towards better orienting and experiencing the world, while embodied engagement lives out the conclusions, allows us to be in the world in a manner that isn’t scrutinizing every moment, and provides the necessary data for further analysis. The two systems develop cyberneticaly, and each domains success and pragmatic utility towards actualizing our goals and a life marked by subjective fulfillment is informed by the discoveries of the other.

Our developed value systems directionality based on meaningful pursuits are manifest actively in both forms of engagement with the world, and the ability to virtuously pursue what matters to us is only possible due to them both being employed in our lives. While the causal precursor to such engagements may be uncovered, represented, defined, organized, and represented symbolically in our psyche, it is lived out and expressed both in our psychological engagement with the world in every moment of subjective experience, as well as in every action taken in embodied engagement with the world. The significance and meaningful fulfillment of our values takes place only through authentic “care” or behavior predicated on the significance of content actuated in engagement with the world. Psychological engagement provides us with the potential of internal orientation necessary for proceeding with life in an optimal manner, and the embodied engagement with the world absent of explicit psychological engagement lives out our intuitions, beliefs, values, and conclusions.

We can discern the optimality of our system, and measure the appropriate balance between our usage of the two systems, only through psychological engagement, that is, in its ability to phenomenologically analyze past subjective experience that is the feedback to our Being-in-the-world. While this subjective feedback itself is the production of both types of engagement, it is itself reflexively analyzed within the present moment as a psychological engagement directed towards ourselves – upon the metric of these two meta modes of being. When we find negative subjective experiences stemming from a lack of proper orientation, our conscience forewarns us through negative conscious states such as anxiety, uncomfortableness, fear, regret, shame, or dread. In order to alleviate these unpleasurable modes of being, we ought to analyze the causal nature of those situations. We hold them in their proper place as isolated instances against the mode of being which acted them out, the perspective and mindset, actions and speech that lead to their arising. In most cases a minor mode of being that is running off an inadequate assimilatory schema is to blame, but sometimes the meta mode of Being itself is the culprit. If it is found that we were over analyzing a low value occurrence that produced negative subjective experience, we can look to if we ought to have been psychologically engaged at all, and if spontaneous embodily acting would have been preferred. If we are in an intellectual situation, whether its schoolwork, a research project, a critical thinking assignment for work, or a personal ambition to optimize our conception of reality, we cannot adequately do so merely by embodily being in the world, our sensory-motor system cannot alone solve the problem. Often times we find ourselves acting spontaneously in the moment and responding in a way that negative impacts those we value, or represents a character trait we don’t desire to have. We often have to be mindful of our actions and speech to guard against trespasses, especially once we’ve gone wrong in similar situations beforehand. In a balanced psyche, the constant recalibrating and transcendence of knowledge which takes place applies the dialectical movement of improved prudence in directing differing meta modes of being from which minor modes can spring from to adequately navigate our environment. In these situations, we can learn from the subjective experience and phenomenologically uncover the root cause of their occurrence. In learning the causal natures, applying wisdom to developing an optimal pathway to recalibrate our assimilated schema (conscious accommodation) we can train ourselves to modify our behavior in the subsequent occurrence of the situation.

Overindulgence in embodied engagement with the world has negative repercussions, both on an individual level, and a societal level. We all reach a point in conscious development where we have the potential to be aversive to our own nature, our own subjective experience, and this aversion leads to overindulgence in modes of being in the world that stem from the meta mode of embodied engagement. For many, when our own Being becomes such a problem that we can’t cope with ourselves, we attempt to distract ourselves from our very existence. This aversion can manifest itself in many different forms, and its characteristics can be identified retrospectively and interpersonally. It is broadly characterized by a constant directionality towards embodied engagement with the world, and a reluctance to engage in psychological engagement. This leads to a life of constant action, busyness, and external concentration, and is marked by an absence of pointed explicit awareness of internal dialogue, contemplation, and mindful subjective awareness. For many, this threshold of “perceived” inability to cope with subjective psychological life is crossed at some point in life, but for those of us who wish to deal with life on its own terms, and overcome psychological ailments, we must confront headfirst the problem inherent within our own Being, its very existence, and its developed essence.

For those that develop this inclination to engagement with the world, and sacrifice psychological engagement for the perceived benefit of its exclusion, spontaneity is the main indicator (Spontaneity and Conscious Direction). Immediate response to any stimuli, interaction, and situational encounters in life is responded by the assimilated schema without consciously directed contemplation, awareness, or accomodatory processes. Where accommodation still exists in response to novel situations, the process is solely unconscious if one’s life is predominantly oriented by the embodied engagement meta mode of Being. Psychological traits such as extroversion, openness to experience, and agreeableness become modified toward the higher end of the spectrum, as their manifestations provide the means to the ends of avoidance of psychological engagement, and promote embodied engagement with the world. Neuroticism in the forms of stress, anxiety, and unwholesome reaction to emotions, is also reduced. While their causal precursors may be the same, their experiencing consciously leads to less recognition and thus less influence over the individual’s life. This means someone who is actively engaging with the world is more than appearing to handle emotions better, they actually are, based on their reduced ability to subjectively experience, feel, and identify emotions as such. The psychological trait of conscientiousness is always reduced, as structured and orderly living requires planning, analyses, and mindful contemplation of activities. This is where we see the biggest detriment to the individual’s life, as conscientiousness plays the second most influential role in one’s “success”. A reduction in conscientiousness leads to less pursuance of meaningful activity, less accomplishment in work, less stability in home, business, and relationships. While someone who is characterized in such a manner may have an improved social position and reduced neuroticism, their ability to succeed at progressing in a skill, career, or other meaningful pursuits have a higher risk of potentially being hindered.

So long as we are in a social setting, or engaged in a physical task, activity, or occupation we can more readily avoid the explicit realization of our own nature. Embodied game playing, spontaneous speech, undiscerning decision making, and a lack of ability to judge people and life altering choices to be in alignment with one’s values are serious potential repercussions of aversion to psychological engagement. The rational faculty itself isn’t suspended, as it is embodied, but the critical thinking required in making long lasting decisions that affect us and those in our expanding circle of influence, necessarily requires causal chain analyses which becomes hindered. Spontaneity and the “whim of the moment”” take priority over delayed gratification with the view to long term meaningful solutions to life’s problems. In fact, in an absence of psychological engagement, life’s problems become subordinated to the problems of the moment, which, in many cases is the benefit of such an unbalanced psyche. The long term anticipatory problems that are inherent in our Being and manifest in psychological engagement are themselves a primary source of driving the individual away from psychological engagement. While the unpleasurable subjective experience is what drives some away from engaging with the inherent problems with our Being and consciously finding solutions, they simultaneously are the potential instigators of meaningful change and reorientation which is necessary to improve our lives.

Over indulgence in psychological engagement with the world also has its pitfalls, that hold the potentiality that can be equally detrimental to one’s wellbeing and life trajectory. Many in the modern era have become coerced to an overabundance of this meta mode of being, as its existential viability has become freer for expression, and it has become increasingly rewarded through social acceptance and the changing work environment. Despite this information, it still produced an unbalanced psyche, and holds a potential to leading to a variety of problems.  In finding pleasure in egocentricism, competence in one’s intellectual ability, and the reward systems craving for exploration of the unknown, the frontiers of the mind may become so captivating to cause one to be aversive to our embodied Being-in-the-world. The obvious repercussions of an unhealthy engagement with psychological content is that many of life’s tasks go undone. Where the predominantly embodied engager can lack stability through spontaneity and lack of structure, the predominantly psychologically engaged person can neglect socially accepted behavior as their dependence on external validation is reduced, which can likewise cause unstable living conditions. One pitfall that may occur is that the egocentric person can come to only seeks their own competence and self-sustained validation, which can lead to the value of career, family, friends, diet, and bodily health to drop below the levels which promote a holistically integrated psyche and lifestyle. The socially accepted values can be reduced in this individual; job importance, interpersonal importance, and the significance of social relationships all can be hindered by a self-interest that doesn’t place sufficient value on these areas of significant importance to our lives. Being that we are social by nature, and our wellbeing is inextricably tied with our Being-towards-others, and the social dominance hierarchies we find ourselves in, we will suffer a psychological toll from overindulgence in this mode of being. Health and romantic relationship repercussions may also follow a similar pattern, the ability for the individual to authentically represent himself in interactions is hindered by a mindful awareness of every moment, causing an impairment to his ability to act or speak naturally, as the “optimal” content is contemplated rather than “lived” out in the world.

In the relentless drive to psychological awareness and intellectual activity, one may succeed to levels unparalleled in a given field of competency which requires dedication and sustained critical thinking to make headway. In the aversion to sociability, a dedicated and conscientious pursuit of career, skill, or field of knowledge, the predominantly psychological engager can find success through the lack of opportunity cost in pursuing distractions, whims of the moment, or spontaneous acts. The psychologically engaged individual experiences a psychological trait modification towards higher degree of conscientiousness, and with it neuroticism, as their ability to experience, feel, and recognize emotional disturbances is increased, and thus the affect negative mental states have on the individual is also increased. Contrary to the embodied engager – extroversion, openness to experience, and agreeableness all decrease.

The two meta modes of being we differentiated, that of embodied and psychological engagement, cyberneticaly inform each other in a well-integrated individual.  This cooperation creates a cohesive, pragmatically beneficial, system from which differentiable modes of being spring from to adequately navigate us in the world. From this place of optimal pragmatic utilization of either mode of engagement we find the appropriate mode manifesting itself in response to the appropriate situation. In certain social settings we are embodied and living out who we are authentically, in intellectual discussions we speak from a more nuanced, intentional, conscious psychological engagement mode. Depending on our type of work, the appropriate mode will be employed. In schematic planning, problem solving, interpersonal and business relationships, and where awareness of one’s own internal disposition would be helpful, psychological engagement would be employed. When physical action in coherence with a plan, or where momentary reaction and intuition is optimal, embodied engagement is instantiated. When our spontaneous action isn’t calibrated enough for the situation, when we still don’t have the appropriate assimilatory schema and are still working to accommodate ourselves to a novel situation, or relationship, such as when we are learning a new skill or working a new job, we ought to be more mindful than in areas where we are competent and have a working schema that has proven itself successful. When acting from a place of balance between the two we find ourselves adequately responding to situational encounters throughout the day.

When they are working cohesively, successfully, and adequately, we find both a positive subjective experience, and a positive external environment. We find aspects of a well-integrated and healthy psyche, such as a solid friend group, good family relations, successful occupation, stable living place, and meaningful and productive hobbies. Our ability to manage our environment is optimized and our ability to cope with novel situations which arise in it are satisfactory enough to move us along through life in the direction of our values. Our internal disposition is authentically represented in our embodiment, and we live out the values we consciously ascribe ourselves to. While perfection in this regard is an impossible task, the integrated psyche succeeds to the degree in which our Being is experientially, intellectually, and competently prepared for the world. When we act out what we believe, and we believe that what we act out is authentically a representation of our psychological conclusions, we find a peace that is marked by coherentness and non-contradiction, in short, where there can be cognitive dissonance in one’s beliefs, so too can there be dissonance between ones psychological and embodied engagement.

While either extreme holds both potential positive and negative repercussions for the individual, we also hold the potential to select the best of both worlds. In seeking to counteract an unbalanced psyche in either direction, and to optimize the situational response we embody or psychologically engage with, in developing a discrimination of situations and environments which call for either in their optimality, we can improve our lives substantially. By subjectively analyzing our experience, realizing where we have tipped the scales of balance, and where we have unwisely acted from a meta mode of being that isn’t conducive to our goals and values, we can correct, and dialectically improve both our knowledge of when and how to act, and simultaneously the manner in which we instantiate different modes of being to act in accordance with our values. By improving ourselves in such a manner, we improve our lives, open ourselves up for growth, and become more competent individuals for a wider range of experiences. Our orientation towards the world is always modified by the mode of being we enact to counter it, and the meta mode of being which dictates whether we are embodied or psychologically engaged plays a crucial role in determining our pragmatic success of operating as individuals. By an awareness of these two factors, their characteristics, and a dedicated reorientation towards balance and optimal living in accordance with our values, we can modify ourselves to differentiate the manner we deal with situations in life. By prudently discriminating the modes of being which coincide with different experiences, we are better equipped with improving moral action, relationships, psychological wellbeing, and careers. The optimization of our meta mode of being system and its appropriate allocation to environments, situations, people, and novel situations, we improve our potential for living successful, meaningful lives. By firstly, living, then philosophizing, we are able to experience life in an authentic Being-towards the world, and can subsequently improve the system through analysis. By philosophizing, and then living out our ideas, we can optimize our experience, and test out the efficacy of our critical thinking applied to pragmatic utility. If we can utilize our ability to engage with the world appropriately from both an embodied, and psychological meta mode of being, and can live out our developed philosophy, we create the arena for active development towards greater heights of wisdom, wellbeing, and successful pursuit and actualization of our values.