Human Studies 27: 343-353, 1994.

© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in Ihe Netherlands.

Making sense: The work of Eugene Gendlin''

DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN

Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-1315

1.

Challenging the rationalism of his time, Pascal (1958: 78) proclaimed a

different logic: "The heart has its reasons," he wrote, "which reason does not
know." Disturbed by the skepticism that was beginning to take hold in the
seventeenth century, he wanted to argue for a logic of the heart, a discourse
bom of feeling, that could make sense out of connections that reason refuses
to recognize. Our own century is of course very different from Pascal's. And
yet, we still seem to need the Pascalian reminder. Perhaps no-one has given
the grain of truth in Pascal's assertion a more timely, more convincing demon-
stration than Eugene Gendlin. To be sure, there is a crucial difference between
Pascal and Gendlin: Gendlin's work involves not only a new understanding
of language, of how language works, but also a new way — or new ways — of
using language, to articulate certain roles that the body performs in the for-
mation of meanings.
Gendlin's thinking works with a different kind of experience: something
that he calls our "bodily felt sense" of the situations in which we find our-
selves. His theory of language — and the way he actually works with words —
show us how new meanings can be drawn from a bodily felt sense.
Everyone today, even Jiirgen Habermas, the contemporary standard-bearer
of the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism, speaks of the need to think of
reason as intersubjective and embodied; but they all leave the question of
what, very concretely and very precisely, this actually means and involves,
utterly unanswered. With an extraordinary respect for embodied experience,
Gendlin is almost alone in exploring the role of the body in the context of an
excitingly new theory and practice of language.

* This and the following papers were presented at a symposium organized by David M.
Levin honoring the work of Eugene Gendlin at meetings of the Society for Phenomenol-
ogy and the Human Sciences, Boston, October, 1992.
344

Now, according to Gendlin, one cannot talk about the body, experience,
rationality, and indeed anything at all, without taking account ofthe fact that
there are always many different ways of talking about them. Insisting that
there are many different orders, many different systems, many possibilities
for the construction of meaning, he brings out the importance of implicit
contexts for a kind of order different from those recognized by any other
philosopher. Thus, against poststructuralism, he has insisted that the altema-
tive to the prevailing stmcture is not disorder; nor is it only other stmctures.
Many of those stmctures are in fact implicit, but the implicit dimension of
meaning is not a texture of conceptual distinctions.
At the heart of this project is his demonstration of a practice that works
with embodied meaning. This is a practice very different from Foucault's
"practices ofthe self," for the only practices ofthe self that Foucault consid-
ers are practices of subjugation, processes of subjectification through which
the individual submits to the imposition of social forms and passively medi-
ates this imposition. By contrast, the "felt sense" of a situation to which
Gendlin draws our attention is immensely more intricate, precise, and open
for creativity than are the meanings imposed on us by social training.
Gendlin (1992: 51-2) observes that, in philosophy, we must always be
prepared to substitute other words, other conceptual forms, for what we have
said. He believes - and his own use of language demonstrates again and
again - that the meaning achieved by a sentence is far greater than the cat-
egories we try to substitute for it. Thus: "If someone asks, 'What do you
mean?', we feel a need to answer with clear categories and known meanings.
We defend what we said by claiming that we 'really' meant those clear cat-
egories. If we cannot say we meant them, if they don't cover what we said,
then what we meant is uncovered - nakQdi in what we said. But such naked
saying makes us uncomfortable. This philosophical discomfort is bodily, a
physical sensation, isn't it? Yes, our bodies are capable ofphilosophical dis-
comfort! But the word 'bodily' changes in our saying this. For example,
what does the phrase 'philosophical discomfort' mean? Nakedly, it means
this, which my sentence says. But is it our old habit, or is it a fear of not
being able to defend, or is it what we think philosophy should be, or what is
it?" "We can pursue the question," he tells us, "if we thinkfrom this discom-
fort - and if we let it continue to function, whatever we say about it."
Gendlin makes his concepts for thinking and talking about language from
practice, by reflecting on actual processes of meaning-formation, such as the
poet's attempt to fmd the right next word for her verse. According to Gendlin,
the poet's sense of the next line is more precise than what can be said in
common phrases. Gendlin writes it as five dots," " Such a comes
to us at the edge of our thinking whenever we think further about anything.
This is a priceless gift, because it lets us think (into) a spacing, an
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openness, that is both vague and precise, both more determinate and less
determinate than the conceptual stmctures which appear to surround and con-
trol it. The reserves, articulates, a spacing that exceeds the ready-made
structures: a spacing resonant with implicit meaning that becomes noticeable
when our attention goes to the edges of the structures our words have formed,
or into the unsaid, where our words break off From instances of how a
•. • •. fiinctions (e.g., for a poet), Gendlin makes concepts such as "carrying
forward," "crossing," and "pre-separated multiplicity." For him, the so-called
"nature" of anything is really rather than any of the forms it seems to
have. Although a is full of implicit language, it always exceeds language.
In steps of interplay with language, it leads to the formation of new meaning.
Over the years, Gendlin's work, both in philosophy and in psychotherapy,
has been concemed with language and its interactions with processes of
experiencing. What interests him is the fact that experience is neither the
interpretation that we make of it nor an already formed given. In response to
any interpretation, the body of experience talks back with more intricacy
than was contained in the interpretation. To notice this intricacy one needs to
attend to one's sense of the implicit meaning and its response to what one
has said. There are many different kinds of response and many different roles
that the implicit can play. The implicit dimension plays those roles in the
sentences that Gendlin uses to tell about them.
According to Gendlin, language can function this way only to the extent
that the new uses of words newly make sense. The very nature of language is
a new metaphorical sense-making, which cannot be attributed to the old
meanings. New sense arises from the body of felt experience. This experi-
ence is never purely interior; it is always interactive, always our living in
situations. Therefore, when new sense-making emerges within the existing
society, it radically transforms social and cultural forms. Schools, churches
and work places are changed when they include new meaning-formation.
Consequently, Gendlin's methodologically grounded process—or say practice
- of languaging lived experience constitutes a political experiment with
potentially far-reaching and radical implications.

2.

Bom in 1926 in Vienna, Gendlin studied at the University of Chicago, and in

1958 he received his doctorate in philosophy. In 1962, his first major work.
Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, appeared in print. In 1963, he
was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. He is still
teaching there today.
Contributing to philosophy as well as to psychology, Gendlin has drawn on.
346

and carried forward, the thought of many philosophers: most of all, perhaps,
Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dewey and
McKeon. He has gradually elaborated a very powerful philosophy - and
practice — of language, demonstrating the creative formation of meaning.
In a recent work of memory, Gendlin recalls that, even as an undergraduate,
he was fascinated by the variety of different systems, challenged by the
question of how one could make use of two or more different systems of
thought. Recollecting the beginning of his intellectual project, Gendlin says:

As an undergraduate, I developed a method for communicating with

religious people and atheists, Marxists and McCarthyites, behaviourists
and Freudians. My method was to accept each one's entire system — for
the moment - so as to use their terms to express whatever point I wanted
to make. I would explain that I did not agree with it all, and that I was only
postponing all other arguments, so that I could rnake just one point. In this
way, I found out that I could always formulate this one point in any system.
I knew, of course, that "the" point was not the same in the differen^t terms
of the different systems of thought, since "it" also had all the different
implications I was postponing. The differences were clear to me. But what
was the sameness? In what respects was "it" still "that" point, moving
across all the different formulations? For myself, when I "had a point,"
I would try to formulate "it" another way, and then another. "It" was not
the common denominator — which is nearly nothing. Rather, "it" has
this odd "order" of responding to different formulations differently - but
each time very exactingly, just so to each one. And not only to different
systems. "The" point would also respond just so when put in relation to
different purposes, different backgrounds, even loyalties to different
groups. What seemed to me, if anything, more interesting than the mean-
ings that my "point" formed in each ofthe different contexts in which I
put it was the fact that no single consistent pattem could incorporate all
that "the point" could be. In this way, I gradually leamed that, when I
had a point to make, I did not need to frame it in one of the systems
already existing. I learned that I could create a quiet space within me and
let my own words come. If intermpted at that stage, I might of course
forget what I was about to say. But then I would simply burrow in some
murky way to get "it" back again. " O h . . . yea! . . . that's what I was about
to say!" And that "that" was charged with implicit language, but was not a
set of words.

What, in particular, claimed Gendlin's attention were the questions: How

are new meanings formed? How do they change? How can we bring about
the conceptual changes we want? It seemed to him (1) that the uses of words
- and the philosophical accounts intended to interpret them - always concealed
their rootedness in the body of felt experience, (2) that there was very little
understanding of how words are actually used, and (3) that in the philosophical
discourse about language, there was very little insight into the ways that
different conceptual systems cross and interact. Gendlin therefore began to
 347

study how experience and concepts interact, so that concepts freshly generated
by the body of experience can in tum change this experience.

3.

I would now like to indicate, if only very briefly, some of the connections I
can discem between Gendlin's philosophical work and that of three other
philosophers: Adomo, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. I would like, of course,
to see further exploration of these connections - much more than I can
accomplish here.

Adorno

In a late essay, "Subject and Object," Theodor Adomo (1987: 505) observed
that the "categorial captivity of individual consciousness repeats the real
captivity of every individual." In Negative Dialectics (1977), a major late
work, Adomo attempted to formulate a critique of prevailing practices of
concept-formation, framing his diagnosis in terms of negative dialectics.
According to Adomo (1977: 150), "Traditional philosophy believes that it
knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing it really knows
only itself The idea of a changed philosophy would be to become aware of
likeness by defming it as that which is unlike itself [i.e., unlike the prevailing
philosophy]." Arguing that "Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of
philosophy" and that philosophy "must strive, by way of the concept, to
transcend the concept", Adomo (1977: 13, 15) sought to use the logic of a
"negative dialectics" to break the spell of metaphysics within philosophical
concept-formation. He was concerned, in particular, to subvert the domina-
tion of "identitarian thinking," i.e., the dangers in a kind of thinking that (1)
conceals and denies all traces of its conceptualizing activity in its formula-
tion of concepts, thereby making its conceptual systems appear to be natural,
rather than constructed, inevitable rather than contingent, and fixed rather
than alterable, (2) can only order things according to a principle of sub-
ordination, a principle that masks or denies fundamental differences, (3)
refuses to acknowledge the telling traces of any other reality, anything on the
other side of the boundaries its concepts lay down, and (4) can only identify
things in such a way that it precludes any recognition of the possibility that
these things might be different, might be differently conceptualized and
changed.
Negative dialectics opposes such thinking in the name of, and for the sake
of, a logic of difference. Suspicious of all positivities, negative dialectics
348

restricts itself to immanent critique, dialectical subversions from within the

system that claims totality. "Totality [the system imposed by identity-thinking]
is to be opposed," he (1977: 147) says, by demonstrating and "convicting it
of non-identity with itself- ofthe [very] identity it denies according to its
own concept." For Adomo, no concept can rule over the totality of the
discursive field, because a concept can be defined only in so far as it is
internally differentiated from that which it recognizes as its other. He (1977:
137) accordingly asserts that "Nonconceptuality, inalienable from the concept,
disavows the concept's being-in-itself." In a statement that succinctly
formulates his method while hinting at the larger social vision - a vision of
reconciliation - that is at stake, Adomo (1977: 10) declares that "the Utopia
of knowledge would be to use concepts to open up the non-conceptual with
concepts, without making it [the non-conceptual] equivalent to them."
Adomo, however, was so afraid ofthe power of identitarian thinking that
he refused to attempt any further elaboration of the Utopian moment, the
moment of reconciliation, in the formation of concepts. He (1977: 6) would
say only that reconciliation, if it could ever be achieved, "would release the
nonidentical, would rid it of coercion; it would open the road to the multi-
plicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them." Thus,
in the final analysis, he (1977: 145) betrayed the process of concept-formation,
leaving it hopelessly trapped within the self-defeating circulation of a "nega-
tive dialectics," a dialectics the logic of which "is one of disintegration: the
disintegration ofthe prepared and objectified form ofthe concepts which the
cognitive subject faces, primarily and directly."
Without yielding to the dangers that Adomo tried to avoid, Gendlin makes
and uses concepts in precisely the way thatAdomo's "utopia" calls for. Gendlin's
theory and practice demonstrate the interactions ofthe conceptual with its other
- t h e implicit or the more-than-conceptual, without ever equating the implicit
with any explication. The body's felt sense performs certain functions in lan-
guage which can be said by language, provided that these functions are them-
selves being perfonned in the saying and continue to exceed the concepts that
are employed. This is what makes the seemingly impossible possible.
Since, for Gendlin (1987: 256), this implicit dimension of meaning is
bome by the body as a felt sense, he rejects Michel Foucault's assertion, in
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," that the human body is without dimen-
sions, nothing but a surface "totally imprinted by history."

Merleau-Ponty

Like Adomo, Merleau-Ponty recognized that conceptual meanings are formed

in a preconceptual and nonconceptual matrix. But this matrix is thought only
 349

in terms of the individual's prepersonal and personal experience. There is no

explicit recognition of the social imposition of meaning, no phenomenological
account of the operations of powerful ideologies in what Adomo called "force
fields." Consequently, in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, the articulation
of a distinction between the dominant conceptual structure and its
preconceptual and nonconceptual matrix, which for Adomo promised the
possibility of an immanent dialectical critique of ideological structures, loses
much of its critical and emancipatory potential.
In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1962: 182) shows
us that we can find, "beneath the conceptual meaning of the words, an
existential meaning which is not only rendered by them, but which inhabits
them, and is inseparable from them." He (1962: 179) shows that there is, in
fact, a certain "gestural meaning" operative in speech: a meaning that is
prereflective and prelinguistic. That is why (1962: 179) he could argue that
"there is . . . a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by
intellectualism." This assertion represents a momentous challenge to the
philosophical tradition, although his use of the word "thought" can be mis-
leading enough to obscure its true significance. Misunderstanding can easily
be avoided, however, when one recognizes that he is addressing intellec-
tualism from a position within its discourse, following the practice of
"immanent critique." Against intellectualism, Merleau-Ponty (1962: 178)
wants to argue, then, that the speaker who listens to herself while speaking
"receives thought from speech itself." If this be so, it is an experience that
radically contests epistemological assumptions that have prevailed in
philosophy, beginning with Descartes and continuing, through Kant, to
Husserl: fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of the mind, the nature
of the body, and the nature of their involvement with language. Thus, when
Merleau-Ponty (1962: 197) asserts that "speech or gesture transfigure the
body," so that "the body must in the last analysis become the thought or
intention that it signifies for us," what he is trying to tell us is that there is a
dynamic — or say dialectical — interaction between body and speech, body
and thought, and that the thought which figures in speech is a thought for-
ever indebted to the sense and sensibility of the body.
Gendlin begins his work where Merleau-Ponty leaves off. Having demon-
strated the role of the "lived body" in the processes of meaning-formation,
Merleau-Ponty brings his phenomenological work to an end. In other words,
he does not attend to the interaction between his use of language and that
which he is purporting to describe. What Merleau-Ponty's arguments have
accomplished must not be underestimated. But it seems to me that Gendlin
has carried forward the work that Merleau-Ponty began, articulating pre-
cisely how one's bodily felt sense can enter between each step of thought and
the next, so that there can be a shift in meaning and concepts can be used in
350

a new way.
Moreover, Gendlin attempts to take account of the social imposition of
meaning. Thus, in his work with implicit orders of meaning, he shows that
they can never be totally controlled by the dominant conceptual order — if
one senses the greater intricacy with which any situation is actually ex-
perienced, and if one carries that forward by steps of interplay between speech
and action. Thus he shows that individuals can often encounter and reject
socioculturally imposed meanings that had been implicit in their oppressive
experience. This is a beginning of major significance; but there is still much
that needs to be done. For we need to understand very precisely — and for me
that means, among other things, with an experiential vocabulary — how
phenomenological interpretations of individual experience function in the
larger sociocultural structures and systems.

Heidegger

Finally, let me connect Gendlin's work on the formation of meaning with

Heidegger's analysis of a famous poem by Goethe in his Introduction to
Metaphysics (1961). Gendlin has discussed many of Heidegger's topics, and,
in particular, Heidegger's concepts of Beflndlichkeit (which Gendlin would
want to reinterpret as one's bodily felt sense of the situation in which one
happens to find oneself),^awen (building), and Wohnen (dwelling) (Gendlin,
1978, 1983, and 1992). According to Gendlin (1983: 31) "In his last works,
Heidegger comes close to the more-than-conceptual thinking that opened in
his early more-than-concepts, with their beautiful precision. . . . But it [his
call for 'dwelling', for this more-than-conceptual way of thinking and liv-
ing] was a call to think only beyond the most over-arching assumptions....
Heidegger could not think how that which is more than form actually functions
— as I would say — in each situation and each moment of thinking." He
(1983: 30-31) was right in his conviction that it is only by thinking with and
through the conceptual determinants that we may hope to think the openness
of being. But, according to Gendlin (1983: 31), "he could not investigate
further just how the historical determinants [our given conceptual forms]
actually work (as I would say) implicitly, and how they change by working-
in a wider intricacy."
Here, then, I would like to consider, if only very briefly, a question in
Heidegger's work that Gendlin does not himself discuss, but that lends itself
to a reading in which some of the significance of Gendlin's thinking can be
brought out.
In "The Question of the Essence of Being," chapter 3 of his Introduction
to Metaphysics (1961), Heidegger focuses on different sentential uses of the
 351

word "is." One of the uses he examines figures in a linefi-omGoethe's most

famous poem: "Uber alien Gipfeln / ist Ruh," "Over all the summits / is
rest." (Ruh is a difficult word to translate. It may also be rendered by the
words "peace", "silence" and "serenity".) Observing that, in each of the
examples he presents, the "is" is meant differently, Heidegger proceeds to
render interpretations for each of his examples. But when he (1961: 75) comes
to Goethe's verse, he is at a loss to propose a satisfying paraphrase: "Does
the 'is' in these lines mean 'is situated,' 'is present,' 'takes place,' 'abides'?
None of these will fit. And yet it is the same simple 'is.' Or does the verse
mean: 'Over all the summits peace prevails,' as quiet prevails in a class-
room? No, that won't do either. Or perhaps: 'Over all the summits lies rest —
or holds sway'? That seems better, but it also misses the mark."
"Strange," he (1961: 75) comments, "how we hesitate in our attempted
paraphrase and in the end drop it altogether, not because the understanding is
too complicated or difficult, but because the line is spoken so simply, even
more simply and uniquely than any of the other familiar 'ises' that are forever
dropping unnoticed into our everyday speech." He takes his examples to
"show one thing very clearly: that being discloses itself in the 'is' in a diver-
sity of ways.' Thus, once again, "the assertion, which at first seemed plausible,
that being is an empty word, is shown—more compellingly than ever—to be
untrue." (1991: 76). Moreover, "the diversity of its meanings is not arbitrary
diversity." (1991: 76). This he believes he has demonstrated by running
through the different examples and exhibiting their different meanings in
paraphrase. But he (1961: 77) avers that "It remains difficult, perhaps im-
possible, because it is contrary to the very essence of being, to pick out a
common meaning as a universal generic concept under which all these modes
of 'is' might be classified as species. And yet, a single determinate trait does
run through them all. It directs our contemplation of 'being' to a definite
horizon, in which understanding is effected."
Gendlin's work gives us much to think about with regard to Heidegger's
example. It seems to me that the difficulty that Heidegger encounters calls
for an analysis of the functioning of implicit dimensions of meaning.
Heidegger does not see, when he lifts out the "is" from Goethe's line of
verse, that in the place which the line has made for it, the implicit dimension
is still speaking - speaking in the silence (the Ruh) left by the word.
Were we to work with Gendlin's philosophy of language in order to dis-
cover how it could move us past the point where Heidegger's engagement
with Goethe's "is" leaves us-the point, namely, where Heidegger concludes,
from the difficulties he has encountered while trying to find a satisfactory
paraphrase for this word, that the being that "is" names cannot be a common
meaning, cannot be a universal generic concept - then we would use what
Gendlin writes as a
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Now consider what Gendlin has to say in a recent essay. "Certainly," he

(1992: 22—23) says, "the more intricate order includes the forms: explicit
and implicit forms always play some role in it. There are always both. But
we can inquire into their ways of functioning together — if we find a way to
let them function together in our very thinking and saying how they function
together. So the forms are always at work; but we do not always get just what
can follow logically from the forms. The result can be much more — and also
something different. This is because what the forms work in talks back [to
the explicit forms] — not with disorder, but with more precision. The order
that is more than formfunctions in language and cognition in many vital and
noticeable ways. There will be a way to notice them and let them flinction in
our thinking. Rather than replacing them with explications, we can let these
fiinctions continue to operate in and after our explications of them. If we can
find a way to do so, then the word 'explication' will change from its tradi-
tional meaning."
Gendlin (1992: 23) observes that "Many people today do find the vast
intricacy of experience and know that it does not all derive from imposed
[pre-existing, ready-made] forms. But then they attempt to think of it in just
one way, and stop. We need a way to think further with and from this intri-
cacy." Gendlin (1992: 23) believes that the kind of thinking that he has been
trying both to argue for and to exemplify "alters certain very deeply-held
assumptions which inhere not only in the very stmcture of most concepts,
but also in the usual manner of using concepts in theoretical thinking." Thus
he contends that our task is not merely to reject these assumptions, but to
notice that they have been built into the structure of most of our concepts,
and then to make new and more intricate concepts by working with the fact
that our experiential sense of the context into which our conceptual struc-
tures are woven always exceeds the old schemes.
Gendlin (1992:24) shows that the foremost assumption we need to examine
"is the assumption that order can only be something imposed on experience;
the assumption that forms, distinctions, rules, and concepts are the only
possible kind of order— so that there is nothing else, no 'other,' and hence no
possible interplay between the forms and something more. Supposedly,
nothing but disorder talks back! "There is an explanation forthis long-standing
assumption: "The assumption of a one-way imposition was adopted to correct
an earlier mistake. It corrects the mistaken view that science copies or pictures
nature. But [in truth,] the order of nature cannot be represented or approxi-
mated, because no such ?,v!\g\&formed order of nature is simply there, waiting
for us to get it right. The correction assumes that nature is nothing but what-
ever order we impose. But this," he argues, "is an over-correction." (1992:
24).
But if there is a sense in which what we might call, borrowing a phrase
 353

from Derrida, this "resistance to structure" situates Gendlin within the dis-
course of poststructuralism, there is also a sense in which it does not. For
Gendlin is not against structures as such, but only against the assumption
that they are the only order. The that can always be found to exceed any
of our conceptual structures is not an abyss, not nothing, but an opening into
other kinds of order.

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