Getting a Grip on Normativity: A Phenomenological Response to Maslow’s Call for a “Humanistic Biology”

In everyday English language, “get a grip” is a common idiom which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), implies one should “make an effort to control your emotions and behave more calmly.” When one is engrossed by a compelling narrative, one might describe the story as “gripping.” When we adopt these expressions in vernacular speech, we are implicitly accepting an understanding of normativity, one that has been explicitly articulated within the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012) describes a basic, pre-verbal, and pre-reflective form of normative perception which he calls maximum grip. This concept, in turn, can be traced back to Edmund Husserl, who identified optimal givenness as a phenomenological criterion for establishing normativity in perception (Doyon, 2018). The concepts of maximum grip and optimal givenness are key to the development a phenomenologically grounded cognitive neuroscience of normativity and, therefore, they contribute to a conceptual scaffolding for a genuinely humanistic biology.

In the past few decades, phenomenology has captured the interests of researchers in cognitive neuroscience, and theoretical orientations such as enactive phenomenology and neurophenomenology offer promising avenues to integrate first-person perspective (qualitative) evidence with third-person cognitive, behavioral, and neuroscientific methods (DeRobertis, 2015; Robbins, 2013; Robbins & Gordon, 2014). Among these efforts, we can witness real progress toward the development of a nonreductive, holistic, and nondeterministic humanistic cognitive science as the foundation for a humanistic understanding of biology, which (in principle at least) is respectful of individual dignity and difference, as well as cultural diversity. At the same time, the dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive sciences offers a framework to build a humanistic understanding of normativity (Hovhannisyan, 2018). In short, the phenomenological approach to experience and embodiment is a robust and sustainable answer to Abraham Maslow’s (1969) call for a humanistic biology.

In Husserlian phenomenology, consciousness is distinguished by intentionality, by which noetic acts of consciousness posit objects as meaningful within the noematic pole of consciousness (Hugo, 2017). In first-person perception of the world, objects reveal themselves through profiles of the object, yet the object’s meaning is viewed as meaningful throughout a multiplicity of profiles. I do not experience a sequence of profiles of an object but perceive the whole object intentionally through each of the profiles. The positing of any given object as a whole object is made possible through the temporal structure of consciousness (Husserl, 2019). In lived time, the living present is pregnant with retentions of past experiences with the object, and similar objects, which inform how I will anticipate my experiences with the object in the immediate future. For example, as I tour a new house and walk from the living room into the dining room, I effortlessly and pre-reflectively anticipate how the dining room will appear based on my observations of the profiles of that particular house that contain the living room, but also, as retained in habits of perception, I also draw upon my understanding of what houses are like from my past experiences living in and visiting other houses.

Due to the temporal structure of consciousness, objects at any given moment are emptily intended—that is, we anticipate how they will appear within the next profile (Byrne, 2021). As I walk from the living room to the dining room of the house, I anticipate what the dining room will look and feel like. If the living room is tidy and well-decorated, I may anticipate that the dining room will also be well-kept and stylish in a similar way—that is, my empty intention will be fulfilled. If I were to walk into the dining room and find it unkept and decorated in a style that clashes with the living room, my empty intention will be unfulfilled. In this sense, perception of objects for Husserl is intrinsically teleological—that is, future-oriented—in that perception aims to fulfill its empty intentions through a regulative idea of the object based on habits of perception. Because perception has this teleological structure through time-consciousness, all perception also has an implicit understanding of normativity (Doyon, 2018). Normativity is posited as the regulative idea of the object as it would be given in all of its possible profiles under optimal conditions (Hugo, 2017). However, as we experience objects in everyday life, our anticipations are frustrated and often unfulfilled, which ideally, would motivate the person to adjust the regulative ideas that animate their perception of meanings in the world. In this way, the normative dimension of perception is a motivation for coherence within the nexus of significance that constitutes the lived world we inhabit. In short, the regulative idea is given in our anticipation of meaning as we encounter things and others in the world, and this regulative idea is always oriented in the direction of the optimal givenness of the world—although the finite person never fully achieves this coherence, since the regulative idea is always in a process of revision.

Merleau-Ponty places a particular emphasis on the phenomenology of embodiment. As a result, he adopts Husserl’s notion of optimal givenness, but he points out that this optimal givenness is also present in motor-intentionality within the activity of the lived body as it interacts with the world. In the context of motor-intentionality, optimal givenness is characterized in terms of maximal grip (Talero, 2005). For example, if I am looking to buy a new car and give it a test drive, I will be interested in how the seat, dashboard instruments, gear shift, peddles, and windshield mesh with my lived body, thereby empowering me to comfortably and safely operate the vehicle. In this context, a good car will entail a car that gives me an experience of maximum grip on the mechanics of the car in relation to the activity of driving. If I am reading a book, I will hold the book at just the right distance from my face to maximize the clarity and richness of the text, for ease and comprehension of the text. The point here is that optimal givenness and maximum grip illustrate how normativity is a quality of even basic, pre-predicative, or implicit experience, as in the case of perception of objects or engagement with instruments through motor-intentionality.

But what of interpersonal relations? I offer that we can draw upon the work of Max Scheler (a formative influence, for example, on Victor Frankl’s logotherapy; see de la Cadena & Castañon, 2020) to extend a phenomenological approach to normativity into the interpersonal sphere. Briefly, I think Scheler appropriately identifies agapic love as a regulative idea operative within ethical relations among people (Vacek, 1982). Here, agapic love is defined as an orientation to the care of others which has cultivated the capacity to be open to the being of the other person, in such a way that radical acceptance allows the other person to more fully develop into their fullest potential. Clearly, there are strong parallels between this conception of agapic love and Carl Roger’s notion of unconditional positive regard as one of the necessary and sufficient conditions for healing relationships (Robbins, 2016). In any case, agapic love may serve as a regulative idea that, through the building-up of perceptual habits (passive genesis), empty intentions toward others can be teleologically oriented in a way that seeks fulfillment of the other’s highest potentials for being. In this sense, agapic love can operate as a normative criterion for ethical relations with others. As I have suggested elsewhere (Robbins, 2016), such a hermeneutics of love seems to be essential for a humanistic ethic and therefore orients humanistic theory and practice in the direction of recognizing the intrinsic dignity of each person. This agapic loving regard for others, if fully lived out authentically, could, in principle, become operative at the most basic and implicit levels of perception and motor-intentionality, understood in terms of optimal givenness and maximum grip. If so, then loving relations at the level of the implicitly operative lived body should find their expression and articulation within the biological dimension—and thereby may be a fruitful area for neurophenomenological investigation.

The phenomenological approach addresses a number of concerns expressed in Maslow’s (1969) call for a humanistic biology. First, a phenomenological engagement with biology, being as it is nonreductive and integrates first-person and third-person perspectives, overcomes the fact-value dichotomy that results from dualistic, Cartesian approaches to the mind/body problem (themselves rooted in subject–object dualism; see Robbins et al., 2018; Robbins & Friedman, 2017). At the most basic levels of perception and motor-intentionality, consciousness is teleologically oriented toward a normative aim of optimal givenness and/or maximum grip—and in the case of interpersonal relations, toward mutual recognition of dignity through agapic loving regard. Second, the integration of ethics, epistemology, and ontology, as concerned with loving relations as a regulative idea, fulfills Maslow’s (1969) prescription for a kind of love knowledge which bypasses the ontological gap between objectivist epistemology and ethics. Finally, since agapic regard is a regulative idea that is always open to revision, based on ongoing experience and interaction with things, the world, and others, this approach resists a rigid or dogmatic imposition of a theoretical system onto the complexity and ambiguity of worldly concerns.

The epistemological openness of this phenomenological approach has the added benefit of overcoming the potential dangerous implications of Maslow’s (1969) aim to study the so-called “superior” members of the human species, which has an uncomfortable eugenic ring to it. Maslow, unfortunately, did flirt with eugenic ideas in his personal journals (Maslow et al., 1982) and was greatly influenced by Kurt Goldstein, who was a proponent of eugenics (Stahnisch, 2020). Understood in light of optimal givenness and maximum grip, normativity would operate as a regulative idea that takes account of the contextual significance of each person’s life-world experience, within the sociocultural context of their perceptual habits. It would therefore avoid the circular logic of Maslow’s project to identify superior members of the species to identify qualities of superior individuals. Within the phenomenological approach, the normative should not be understood as the imposition of a normative ideal upon any given person, but always necessarily expresses itself through the uniqueness and dignity of each person’s struggles to find meaning in every moment of their lives. No person can be said to be superior or inferior to any other; rather, each is called in their own particular way, within their dignified irreplaceability, to answer to their own existence and to the claims of love that draw them forward through life’s ongoing struggles.