Abstract
Witz and Goodwin suggest that every individual illustrates the “phenomenon/reality” of being “a single-consciousness-and-‘I’ from childhood to old age.” This includes three aspects that are experienced together in an inseparable unity: (a) the fact that a sense of I is constantly in innumerable ways part of one’s subjective experience, (b) feeling (presupposing, tacitly taking for granted, believing) one is the same continuous “consciousness-and-I” all the time from childhood on, and (c) feeling (presupposing, etc.) one is always the same person. This article argues that to these aspects should be added (d) the fact that the individual feels that in his or her interactions with others during the day he or she is to some extent subjectively understanding them.
Dedicated to Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Introduction
Problem and Summary
A fundamental question in understanding the human condition is how it is possible for an individual to communicate and understand other individuals’ feelings and have some understanding of their consciousness and state. In sociology, there was a tendency to address this in terms of some kind of “shared consciousness,” for example, collective consciousness (Durkheim), or society as a “Larger Mind” (Cooley, 1906/1959). A second major approach that has dominated mainstream psychology in the 20th century is represented by William James (1890). In the more recent literature, Grossberg (1982) distinguishes three kinds of models of communication that have implications regarding how human beings feel they understand each other. All these efforts to understand “understanding” shy away from explicitly dealing with “consciousness” in the usual meaning of the term.
The present article is the fourth in the series “Consciousness in the Study of Human Life and Experience” and the first one to focus on the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness itself, in the general sense of the term (“subjectively experienced consciousness,” “conscious awareness”) has connotations of “awareness where one is aware that there is awareness” or “awareness which includes self-awareness.” (It is used in this way in all the “Consciousness in the Study of Human Life and Experience” articles.) The difficulty with consciousness in this general sense, both as a phenomenon and as an experienced reality, is that it is something totally unlike any other object of study in the “hard sciences” or the social sciences, or anything else that is explicitly addressed in other areas—how to address it conceptually and “empirically” (by research and inquiry) is almost completely unknown. There seems general agreement that consciousness is superholistic in nature (may be also that it is “subtle”), but these are only generalities.
When one thinks of consciousness (at least in the West), one tends to think immediately of “consciousness at a given moment (a few seconds or half a minute).” 1 But already in the first article of the “Consciousness” series, Witz, Lee, and Huang (2010) suggested that in people who had deep, all-pervading commitments to a higher aspect in their life, such as leading a true Christian life or selflessly serving a higher cause such as social justice and human rights, this higher aspect could take in them the form of a “super-subtle pervasive consciousness” “bereft of any particular memories,” which reflected their inner experience and commitment distilled over the whole of their life up to that point, and which, although apparently “bereft of particulars,” pervaded them and prompted innumerable spontaneous reactions, thoughts, decisions, and so on in their everyday life. In other words, what looks like a simple short-term aspect, “consciousness at a given moment (a few seconds or half a minute),” actually embodies traces and effects of experience of a whole life time and manifests constantly in daily life.
These suggestions in Witz et al. (2010) were magnified many times in Witz and Goodwin (in press), the third article of this series. Witz and Goodwin argue that each person should be conceived as a “single-consciousness-and-‘I’” from childhood to old age. So just as a person thinks he or she has a single body from childhood to old age (which is always his or her current body although it is constantly changing), so he or she should be thought of as having “a single-consciousness-and-‘I’” from childhood to old age (or a single-consciousness-cum-“I,” that is, consciousness and “I” in a constant unity). As defined by Witz and Goodwin, the “phenomenon” of the “single-consciousness-and-‘I’,” or the single-consciousness-and-“I” as one’s constantly experienced subjective reality, has three aspects, which are experienced together in an inseparable unity: (a) the aspect “I” and the fact that a sense of “I” is part of one’s subjective experience in innumerable ways, (b) the reality of oneself feeling (presupposing, tacitly taking for granted, whatever) one is a single-continuous-consciousness-and-“I” all the time, and (c) the reality of oneself feeling (presupposing, tacitly taking for granted, whatever) one is always the same person. The “working together in a unity” or “forming an inseparable unity” of (a) to (c) suggests that the phenomenon of a single-consciousness-and-“I” from childhood on is the phenomenon of the individual constantly evolving to accommodate the constant stream of new experiences every day, and the impact of major changes he or she becomes aware of in him or herself because of experiences in a given period of time (a semester, a work week, etc.). It is this constant natural process over days, weeks, and months that then, over longer periods of time, manifests in the sample phenomena described in Sections 1 to 3 of their article. The individual is constantly adjusting his or her understanding of him or herself is constantly coming to a new state of equilibrium in him or herself and is constantly beginning to understand him or herself in new ways. At the same time, although he or she is constantly subjectively experiencing these things and sometimes consciously contemplates his or her new understanding, he or she takes for granted that he or she is in some fundamental way always the same person.
But Witz and Goodwin (2012) only focused on elaborating the conception of a single-consciousness-and-“I”; they did not address how the individual, considered as a single-consciousness-and-“I,” can live and act in society and the world. If every individual is considered a “single-consciousness-and-‘I’ from childhood on,” how is it that one individual can communicate with another and understand the other’s feelings and view of things? The purpose of the conception of a single-consciousness-and-“I” is not just to bring out the individual’s subjective being as a phenomenon of almost inconceivable magnitude in its own right. It is even more to be able to consider and understand how there can be knowledge and understanding if the reality of the subjective being of the individual is taken as epistemologically prior to all cultural and religious developments, worldviews, and ideologies, including of course science and social science. So the purpose of this article is to go further and explore how we could perhaps understand how the so far completely “solipsist” and “closed system-like” individual single-consciousness-and-“I” is able to communicate with other individuals’ single-consciousness-and-“I.” Communication with others where one feels one understands how the other sees things and one can talk to her from her point of view (from the point of view of her view of things) is almost universally assumed. G. H. Mead for example talks about “entering the attitudes of others,” and “role-taking” is an essential part of his view of the self and society (e.g., Strauss, 1956, pp. 291-294). But he approaches the subject in a very different way than we do. As another example, Wiley (1994) takes aspects of Mead’s treatment (such as “conversation of gestures”; Strauss, 1956, pp. 215-218) as representing the self engaging in an “I-me” internal dialogue and enlarges the latter to an internal conversation in which the self functions as part of an “I-you-me” “trialogue” (Wiley, 1994, pp. 41 ff., 218-222).
To develop an understanding of how the single- consciousness-and-“I” communicates, we focus on situations where two people, who may be friends or who may be an interviewee and interviewer in an interview, and where the first (the interviewee) tries to make the other (the interviewer) understand how he or she felt in a particular situation or a particular period of time in the past (including relevant attitudes and reactions he or she had at the time, his or her overall state of mind, etc.). Then in terms of Witz and Goodwin (in press) the question becomes: How can we understand the fact that the second person (the interviewer), who is herself a single-conscious-and-“I,” is able to get a sense of (or feels she is herself beginning to subjectively understand) how the first person (the interviewee) felt in the event or period in question? (This understanding should/would be a part of her as a single-consciousness-and-“I”). However, in considering this question, we take a cue from Witz and Goodwin. In developing their conception of the single-consciousness-and-“I,” these authors place themselves squarely in the context of the Participant as Ally–Essentialist Portraiture philosophy (Witz, 2006). Examination of Witz and Goodwin shows that actually they use a double approach. On one hand, they had shown how a single-consciousness-and-“I” is suggested in existing studies (portraits) that use this Ally–Portraiture Philosophy (Sections 1-3 of their article). But actually, they are in addition relying even more on their own personal subjective experience when they themselves conduct interviews, when they themselves weeks or months later analyze the transcripts they made of these interviews, and above all when they sit with their students and analyze together with them transcripts that the students made of interview in which they (the students) were the interviewer (see the discussion of the Ally–Portraiture methodology in Huang, 2010, Chapter 3). In such post hoc analysis sessions of serious sympathetic conversation segments, the student who conducted the interview and the dissertation director (or a third-party analyst) together come to understand the interviewee as a whole and how that experience is still living in the interviewee at the time of the interview.
Outline/Summary of Article
This article is in four sections. In Section 1, we consider a concrete example from the second author’s dissertation (Brown, in press), an extended excerpt from a transcript of the first follow-up interview with one of her participants. We first note how the excerpt illustrates the constant activity characteristic of the single-consciousness-and-“I” of all three—interviewee, interviewer, and post-hoc analyst—and then show that this activity also includes the interviewer and post hoc analyst coming to feel they understand what the interviewee experienced.
In Section 2, we argue that such coming to feel one is beginning to understand the other does not just go on in interviews and interview analysis sessions. It illustrates a very general phenomenon: that in serious sympathetic conversation, where one person (the interviewee) makes efforts to have the other person (the interviewer) understand her, the other typically begins to feel “I am beginning to see, or subjectively understand, how she (the interviewer) felt.” More generally, “feeling one subjectively understands the other” goes on several times every day in sympathetic interactions with family members, friends, coworkers, on social occasions, and so on. The only way to account for and understand that one constantly in daily life does feel this way and that one lives one’s life on that basis is to assume that this phenomenon is also part of the very nature, the very substance of the phenomenon/experienced-reality of the single-consciousness-and-“I.” This makes the single-consciousness-and-“I” a larger phenomenon/experienced reality in the individual than originally envisaged in the conception of the single-consciousness-and-“I” in Witz and Goodwin (2012). For now belief, feeling, and trust that the subjective understanding in sympathetic conversations is “genuine” are also part of the individual’s single- consciousness-and-“I” and become part of how the individual understands him or herself and his or her world. It becomes part of his or her single-consciousness-and-“I” and then plays a role in his or her actions.
The fact that “feeling one has some genuine understanding of other individuals” makes the single-consciousness-and-“I” a much more unusual phenomenon/reality, for now this reality is in some mysterious way to some extent connected with the single-consciousness-and-“I” of every person in the society or with every other human being. That is to say, the consciousness-and-“I” of all people (human beings) are part of a single, much larger, extraordinary, phenomenon that has a oneness or unity of its own and the question arises how to conceive of this. Section 3 suggests that perhaps the simplest way to understand this whole situation is to assume that there is a larger phenomenon/experienced reality that is “qualitatively similar” to the individual single-consciousness-and-“I” and that “contains” every individual single-consciousness-and-“I” or of which every individual single-consciousness-and-“I” is “a part.” This seems to be the direction exemplified by C. H. Cooley’s vision of society and social organization as a “Larger Mind.”
Finally, Section 4, “Outlook,” touches briefly on the question why we are not focusing on the question to what extent it is the case that when the interviewer exclaims, “I really understand how you (the interviewee) felt at that time,” she is really feeling something very similar or even the same thing as what the interviewee felt (at least what she felt in the interview). And we briefly mention some topics that might be explored in the future.
1. An Example: The Post Hoc Analyst’s Single-Consciousness-and-“I” Beginning to Subjectively Understand the Interviewee
According to national statistics, 50% of teachers in the United States that get teacher certification and start to teach in a given year will leave teaching within 5 years. Many colleges and universities have started alternative certification programs for older, “nontraditional” students (24 years old or older) who have not gone through the usual 4-year teacher education program in college so they can get certification for teaching in public schools. Mrs. Brown, who has been teaching in such a program for several years, thought that once they became teachers, these students would stay longer in teaching. To explore this she conducted a few focus groups with former students of hers who were currently in their second year of teaching in a public school. The idea was to explore why these individuals turned to teaching after doing other things in the first place, their experience in the program, and their present ideas and plans for the future. Although today about 20% of the teachers who start to teach each year are nontraditional students, there is very little known about this population. So these focus groups became the starting point of Mrs. Brown’s dissertation research, the nine participants in the four focus groups became the participants in her study, and the focus group questions became her research questions. For her dissertation, Mrs. Brown conducted one to three follow-up interviews with each participant and wrote eight individual portraits (Brown, 2012).
One of Mrs. Brown’s participants was Suzanne, born in Illinois, and at the time of the focus group 45 years old. In the focus group Suzanne had talked about her being the first girl in her family to graduate from high school and that her story was a “huge back story.” After high school she worked various jobs (including selling real estate for two-and-a-half years) and moved several times including to other states. Two years after graduating high school she became pregnant with a son, and again 14 years later, with a daughter, and raised both children as a single mom doing home day care until they became school age. In the beginning she took a few undergraduate-level courses in different institutions, but right before her daughter was born she finished her BA in business administration at the university (she enrolled in business education but the university terminated the program).
A year after the focus group, when Mrs. Brown was writing her portraits, she met with Suzanne for a first follow-up interview. She began the interview with describing how she tried to understand Suzanne’s whole story:
Excerpt 1. I was listening to the tape from your focus group. . . . You talk about how after graduating from High School you have this job and this opportunity and then that job and that opportunity. But the only thing that I can see that was constant is your kids. Whenever any opportunity was there it seemed that it was dictated by the kids. Everything seemed to revolve around them or their needs or depended on them. Will you talk about it a little bit? (transcript of follow-up interview 1, see Brown, 2012, pp. 54-55)
Suzanne responded thoughtfully, shown as Excerpt 2 below, obviously trying to make the interviewer understand her whole history better. Whenever she brought up something new the interviewer would sympathetically show her interest and Suzanne would provide more detail. At first the interviewer thought she didn’t answer her question. For ease of reference we divide the transcript into subsegments labeled (1), (2), (3), and so on.
Excerpt 2. (Suzanne, direct continuation of Excerpt 1) (1) I don’t remember if I mentioned or not that growing up the focus was not on education because my family was not academic minded. Neither one of my parents graduated from high school. My mom recently went and got her GED. . . . But growing up, being the only daughter, my objective was to graduate high school…and to get married and have kids. That was how I was raised. I never thought about going on to college. I wasn’t raised that way. (2) So after I graduated high school all of my friends were going to college, and I was like “what do I do?”
(3) I hear you say that you didn’t even think about college even with your friends talking about. . . .
(4) Right. Right. It wasn’t on my radar at all because I didn’t grow up with having that as a goal. My brother was the first in the family to graduate high school on either side. Me being the first girl to graduate high school, that was huge. (5) [But] It was [also] somewhat limiting. Even the high school counselors had me on the graduating high school track because I never brought it up to them that I wanted to do anything other than graduate high school.
(6) And they never asked you?
(7) I went to a huge high school . . . (expands: the counselors “targeted the top 10 % of our class, and I wasn’t in the top 10”; she remembers meeting with them and they only talked about what classes she needed to graduate) . . . (8) Once I graduated high school I went to find a job, and when I had my son it was a matter of how can I work around him to provide and have the food on the table and still be there for him. . . .
(9) You told me before that you weren’t married, right?
(10) Right. I was not married. The goal was to take care of him [her son] and not have someone else raise him. It was very important to me . . . (expands, adds details: “I had my mom to help out, but not to depend on so much”) . . . (11) (a) Even until now my focus is having a job where my family life can be first. (b) When I was pregnant with my daughter I didn’t want somebody else raising her. I didn’t want to be gone 50 hours a week or more and have her in a daycare. (12) (a) So what job can I have so that I can be there the majority of the time? (b) Always in the back of my mind I wanted to be a teacher, but never had the confidence in myself to do it. (13) Everything kind of came together when she [her daughter] was pretty young. (14) The thought was there that that’s what I want to do. But the confidence was being built, because by then I had graduated from the U of I . . . (Follow-up Interview 1, Transcript, pp. 1 & 2, slightly abbreviated in Brown, 2012, p. 55).
Amazing! Each segment (1), (2), (3) . . . can be taken as a more or less unified thought, feeling, and often two or three successive segments form larger unified thought, feeling, consciousness. Suzanne’s initial response is (1) and (2), which explains why after graduation she did no go on to college. At this point, she might have gone on right away to talk about taking care of her son who was born 2 years later, because the interviewer had started to talk about that she had realized that everything in Suzanne’s life (for two decades) revolved around talking care of her kids. But encouraged by the interviewer’s interest (3), she expands (1) and (2) by adding (4) and (5), and prompted by another sign of interest, (6) she expands that further in (7). Then she starts to talk about taking care of her son, (8), and when the interviewer seems still sympathetic and interested, (9), she expands on that, (10). But taking care of her son after he was born is only one example of “taking care of her kids,” and at this point Suzanne turns to the role that taking care of her kids played in her life in general, (11) (a) and (12) (a), giving immediately as another example taking care of her daughter when she was born 13 years later, (11) (b).
Actually the whole response is awesome. The initial build up (1) to (12) (a) shows how deeply Suzanne understood the interviewer and her thinking. She knows the interviewer could not see rhyme or reason in her tentative and scattered attempts to take college classes in the first several years after graduation, so she describes to her the situation in her family (which explains why college was “not on her radar,” etc.), and takes her with her into her feeling at the time—“and I was like: what do I do?” In other words, “What is this thing about college, why is everyone going, and what do I do?” Next, her moving on to “taking care of her son” and to the whole principle of “taking care of her kids” totally acknowledges the interviewer’s insight and completely justifies the decision to conduct a follow-up interview with this as the first item on the agenda. All the detailed individual “expansions” are amazingly on target. And at this point, as if she was aware that she had taken care of all the interviewer’s immediate question, Suzanne goes on and herself answers some of the larger questions the interviewer might have regarding how and why she turned to becoming an elementary school teacher. Already when her son was born many years ago (he is now 23), “the thought [to become a teacher] was there” (12) (b), but things only “kind of came together” and the thought started to become reality 13 years later when her daughter was born. And she mentions there is a larger story in that: When her son was born, she did not have enough confidence, but by the time the daughter was born 12 years later she had developed the confidence.
Clearly, even though the interviewer may not have gotten all the implications at the time she was having this conversation, they emerge in post hoc analysis, and the feeling of “now I am beginning to understand” becomes if anything even stronger. The passage illustrates virtually all the approaches to “subjectively understanding another” mentioned in the Introduction to the article. Here we only note that just as it stands, Excerpt 2 can be discussed very naturally in terms of both the interviewer’s and Suzanne’s consciousness-and-“I.”
[1] Suzanne has obviously thought about all the things the interviewer wants to understand, many times herself in the past. In (1) to (11), she voices some of the thoughts and feelings she had about her own path in life in the years between high school and graduating from the U of I, precisely the kinds of innumerable cogitations and self-insights that go into forming the current state of the single-consciousness-and-“I.” In (9) and (10), “Even until now my focus is having a job where my family life can be first . . . ,” it is as if she is becoming aware that the interviewer had expressed a truth about her (in the manner of “come to think of it, yes, I am still the same way today with my daughter”), and she happily picks up on this truth. She never much thought that “being there for one’s kids” before they became school age, to the point of doing home day care for them and other parents’ children, was so unusual. And in this recognizing and picking up on the interviewer’s insight, she gets to a whole new level of thinking and consciousness regarding herself, (13) to (15). These are also feelings and insights she had before; she is also explaining at a much more general level how it is that she ultimately came to be the teacher she is now, like Susan in Witz and Goodwin (2012), Sections 1 to 3. But while Susan there brings up the various very specific critical elements of her story (Excerpts 1-3) in response to very general questions by the interviewer (“What does Language mean to you?”), Suzanne here in Excerpt 2 works completely in the framework of the prior knowledge, the perceptions and only alluded-to understandings that the interviewer already has of her. At any rate, her response in (11) to (15) completely illustrates the combination of thinking (cogitation) and “feeling, consciousness, state” that Witz and Goodwin suggest as characteristic of the single-consciousness-and-“I” from childhood on.
[2] Now consider how the interviewer and third-party post hoc analyst get the understanding described (better: evoked) in the preceding paragraphs in postanalysis of the passage. Obviously getting this understanding likewise illustrates “the combination of thinking (cogitation) and ‘feeling, consciousness, state’” that Witz and Goodwin (2012) evoke as characteristic of the single-consciousness-and-“I.” It seems that the post hoc analyst subjectively feels her own whole consciousness-and-“I”; she feels that she is now understanding the interviewee as a whole better, as well as that she is “qualitatively” understanding how the interviewee with her particular background, attitudes, outlook, and so on felt in that situation in her past.
In an earlier article, the senior author gave a definition of what it meant to him to “understand the participant.” This definition can actually be taken as a description of the kind of understanding of the interaction segment the post hoc analyst gets: Excerpt 3. But in general to me “understanding” the participant means that I can see that if I was in the participant’s shoes, if I had her personality and motivation and if I had had her background, upbringing and formative experiences, I might very well have some of the same feelings and perceptions that she is expressing, I might have very well made some of the same wrong moves she talks about having made, etc. Really understanding the participant, whether it is in a brief conversation in the hall, in a number of conversations about current concerns in her teaching or policies in the school, or in in-depth interviews to understand her larger outlook, always involves getting a sense of her “I-state,” her consciousness that she is showing in the context in question. (Witz, 2008, p. 172, also quoted in Witz & Bae, 2011)
A critical element in this are the conditionals “If I had such and such personality, abilities, interests . . ., if I had some of the same earlier experiences as those the interview had. . . . ” If these “if I”-s were true then I (the post hoc analyst) can see how she might have felt and so on. The point here is that this understanding in the last sentence as a whole must not be taken as a conjunction of conditional facts or as a “semantically constructed” meaning that then I, the post hoc analyst, accept as a fact. It must be taken as my (the post hoc analyst’s) consciousness, state; in fact it is the state of my consciousness-and-“I” while I am contemplating the transcript. Of course “I” as analyst may contemplate such a meaning from the outside as a possibility. But I feel and tentatively accept that “this is how the interviewee felt” only if I as a single-consciousness-and-“I” feel this way. So the critical point is that the new understanding (“I can feel what the interviewee experienced”) is not a specific “quality” or “subjective feeling” that I and the interviewee experience in a similar way. (Much less is it “exactly the same” feeling). 2 Rather, the critical point is that I feel as the consciousness-and-“I” that I am and as the person I am. So this is not like the philosophers’ qualia; rather it is, in Cooley’s terms, “a life in me that is similar to that in the other” (Cooley, 1909/1956).
[3] Indeed, not only does the post hoc analyst’s new understanding that she “awakens” to (the particular impression, feeling, etc., that she awakens to) tend to have the general form described in Excerpt 3. She also remembers this impression (feeling, etc.) for days, weeks, and she works with many such understandings to actively develop the portrait of the participant in her own consciousness-and-“I” (Witz & Bae, 2011, Section 2). And often the memory of the portrait, of the new whole she evoked there, stays with her for years. So of course, yes, her insights in the post hoc analysis process are part of her own single-consciousness-and-“I.” And so also is the whole alchemy of rallying her inner resources, rallying the depths of her whole single-consciousness-and-“I” to develop the portrait while constantly and devotedly sticking scrupulously to the whole body of precious interview tapes she has.
[4] The subjective understanding of the interviewee that interviewer and post hoc interviewer feel they are obtaining in the post hoc analysis and which is part of their own single-consciousness-and-“I” is very often later confirmed by the interviewee when she reads the portrait and accepts it as really showing how she felt and that it describes how she came to be the kind of person she is.
2. How Is It That There Is Any “Subjectively Understanding the Other” at All?
“Subjectivity, Rightly Viewed, Intrinsically Involves Intersubjectivity”
We have argued that Excerpt 2 illustrates the reality of the constantly ongoing of the single-consciousness-and-“I” in the interviewee, interviewer, and post hoc analyst. It exemplifies constant, cumulative, slightly new subjective self-understanding, subjective understanding of another, and of the world (while each party remains the same person) that is characteristic of the single-consciousness-and-“I.” And we have then shown that this activity also includes the interviewer and post hoc analyst coming to feel they understand what the interviewee experienced. But now let us consider the general phenomenon (which we feel is actually a universal phenomenon), namely, that in serious sympathetic conversation, where one person (the interviewee) makes efforts to have the other person (the interviewer) understand her, the other typically does begin to consciously feel “I am beginning to see, or subjectively understand how she (the interviewee) felt” (and often the former feels that she has made herself a little better understood)—in short the phenomenon that in such situations one does indeed come to feel that one begins to subjectively understand the other better. Why do we experience that there is the feeling of coming to subjectively understand the other at all? If everyone is just completely subjectivity, if everyone is just a solipsist, completely closed single-consciousness-and-“I,” why does everyone feel or experience intersubjectivity, why does everyone feel that she does come to understand to some extent the other’s subjectivity (how the other felt in a particular context in the past)? Why is it that subjectivity intrinsically also involves intersubjectivity?
The phenomenon of “beginning to feel one subjectively understands how the other felt” does not only occur again and again in virtually every post hoc analysis in the Participant as Ally–Essentialist Portraiture approach. Something similar is going in interactions with family, friends, and coworkers, and so on, in daily life. The kind of phenomena/experiences illustrated in Section 1 go on in one’s subjective experience every day when one tries to understand what a person means with something she experienced, what she is really feeling, let us say every hour of the day. Every hour of the day I am dealing with another person, her world; I am trying to understand her behavior, how she understands things, her ideas combined as they are with feelings, her intuitions. Every such interaction amounts to experiencing a new very small (almost infinitesimal) modification, realigning, reenvisaging of things-and-me, of things-and-how-I-see-them, a global adjustment in my single-consciousness-and-“I” as whole, as a totality—I am reunderstanding every hour. So to us, Excerpt 2 and [1] to [4] suggest that feeling one is in some way understanding the other person must be regarded as part of the very nature, the very substance of the phenomenon/experienced-reality of the single-consciousness-and-“I.” In other words, the conception of the phenomenon/constantly experienced reality of the single-consciousness-and-“I” in terms of the unity of the three aspects, (1) to (3), given in the Introduction above should be changed to involve the unity of four aspects, (1) to (4), the fourth one being “(4) Feeling one can to some extent subjectively understand any other human being.”
When we make this change, it is clear that implicit in the phenomenon/reality of the individual single-consciousness-and-“I” is actually something much larger, something that has a much larger scope than originally envisaged in the conception of the single-consciousness-and-“I” in Witz and Goodwin. This larger aspect can be conceived of and further elaborated in various different ways. But regardless of how it is conceived in detail, the implication is that “feeling one is subjectively understanding the feeling of another” and that both parties in the interaction proceed more or less assuming that there is indeed a real subjective understanding, is an intrinsic feature of the very nature, the very substance of each party’s single-consciousness-and-“I.” Just as there seems to be a general tacit general understanding of the original conception of the single-consciousness-and-“I” by everyone in the society or every human being (Witz & Goodwin, 2012, p. 699), so there seems to be also a tacit general understanding that the latter also includes the aspect (4). 3
We might express this by saying that that the apparent “intersubjectivity” that is part of or in unity with the subjective being of the individual (her single-consciousness-and-“I”) is “genuine,” not necessarily in the sense that it involves some very similar or the same “feeling, subjective consciousness” but in the sense that there is belief, feeling, trust that there is genuine subjective understanding (everything proceeds as if one does to a significant extent feel what the other felt in the situation). The belief, feeling, trust that there is genuine understanding in this sense combines with the subjective understanding (the “feeling, consciousness, state”) itself to form a larger unity, and it is these larger unities that show the interviewer and post hoc analyst evolving in their own single-consciousness-and-“I” in their post hoc analysis of the interviewee’s past experience.
Many scientists assume that the greatest challenge is to explain or account for “consciousness” by physical theory and observations. We would argue that it is a greater challenge to understand the felt reality of the single-consciousness-and-“I” and the felt “genuineness” of the intersubjectivity that is part of the single-consciousness-and-“I.”
3. The Individual Single-Consciousness-and-“I” as Part of a Larger Reality That Encompasses Every Individual in the Society (“Collective, Shared Consciousness”; C. H. Cooley’s “Larger Mind”)
In the last section we argued that feeling one is to some extent subjectively understanding the other person is part of the very nature, the very substance of the phenomenon/experienced-reality of one’s single-consciousness-and-“I.” Expressed differently, the “constantly ongoing consciousness” represented by the single-consciousness-and-“I” includes equally a phenomenon/experiential reality of intersubjectivity. But this thesis was developed looking only at two-person interactions one at a time. In reality the individual is a part of the larger society and culture, and the kind of intersubjectivity seen in Excerpt 2 is seen in many different forms in the interactions of individuals in the society and culture generally, maybe even in interactions between any two human beings. In other words, the phenomenon/reality of the unity or even oneness of the single-consciousness-and-“I” of the individual is part of a larger phenomenon, an apparent capability of any two individuals or human beings to potentially understand each other subjectively.
One way to conceive of this is to say that the individual as a single-consciousness-and-“I” is part of a much larger single something—an Entity, Whole, Larger “Consciousness,” whatever. This would be a something that (a) is similar in nature to each individual single-consciousness-and-“I”; that (b) like the individual single-consciousness-and-“I” is also a single unified thing, a single oneness; and that (c) encompasses and in a sense “contains” the single-consciousness-and-“I” of all people, all human beings. If one looks at things this way, the root of the feeling that one subjectively understands another and that one acts toward him or her on that basis reflects the fact that this larger consciousness is really a population phenomenon, in the sense that everybody’s subjective being is naturally constituted so as to some extent be able to be in touch with that of every other.
This seems to be the trend of C. H. Cooley’s conception of society and social organization as a “Larger Mind” (see Witz & Bae, 2011, Sections 5 and 6). Reading some of Cooley’s descriptions it seems that it was awareness of the kinds of phenomena/subjective experience in face-to-face interactions discussed in Section 1 that inspired Cooley in his principle of sympathetic introspection, as well as in his vision of primary groups and of society as a “Larger Mind.” For Cooley, the principle of sympathetic introspection is the equivalent of what he subjectively feels is happening in the face-to-face association in the primary groups of children but now applied to researchers, interviewers, and post hoc analysts in the research situation 4 (i.e., it seems that to him, the interviewer’s in situ and post hoc understanding of the interviewee are similar to what is going on in a child in the primary groups that the child is part of). And he generalizes this basic understanding of human subjective and objective understanding to a vision of “Society as a Larger Mind.” He compares this Larger Mind to a symphony and the individuals to the individual instrument voices. The “at the population level way of thinking” elaborates this by picturing the individual taking part in this symphony by hearing, recognizing, and producing various chords, motifs, although not being subjectively aware of the symphony as a whole or subjectively aware of him or herself as a voice in the symphony, only aware of him or herself as an isolated voice. The conception of single-consciousness-and-“I” that nevertheless feels subjective understanding of another single-consciousness-and-“I” puts these three visions or understandings of Cooley into a single vision.
4. Other Issues
The direction of conceiving of the single-consciousness-and-“I” who feels he or she can to some extent subjectively understand all human beings represented by Cooley’s Larger Mind does not address directly the issue that has occupied philosophers; that is, if I feel I understand to some extent subjectively how the other person felt at a particular time, to what extent is what I subjectively experience “the same” as or “similar” to what the other person subjectively experienced, or at least the same as what she is subjectively experiencing at the time she tells me about her past experience? 5 We have avoided this question and in fact the whole approach represented by this question because it immediately raises a huge problem that needs to be discussed independently in its own right. For if one asks this question this way, one automatically assumes that there are things—something like “elements, pieces of consciousness, feeling”—that one assumes have some kind of existence on their own and that one asserts “are similar” or “are the same.” These elements or pieces would be naturally tied to particular lengths of times during which they are felt, say a few seconds or couple minutes, and to particular contexts in which they are experienced. However, the arguments in Witz and Goodwin (2012, Sections 1-3) problematize (or at least are meant to problematize) any conception of consciousness or subjective way of being that is linked to an objective time scale or to detailed objective circumstances. Just because I have for a few seconds a feeling that I understand exactly how the interviewee felt at that time in her life and just because I can evoke that feeling and bring it back to my mind later, does not necessarily mean I can talk about any “elements” or “pieces” of consciousness that are tied to an objective frame of reference (“how long it takes” to feel it, how far back in my history the ability to have this feeling goes, any necessary “objective” conditions required for this feeling to occur, etc.). For if that were the case, my conception of consciousness would be affected by the space-time framework and the physicalism that dominates much contemporary Western thought and all of science; that is, I would be regarding consciousness as being in its nature a phenomenon that is embedded in space and time, as probably produced by physical processes in space and time. But then my understanding of consciousness would not be epistemologically prior to the Western space-time-matter “construction.” The approach in Witz and Goodwin is specifically to suggest that perhaps the only real understanding of consciousness is that of the single-consciousness-and-“I” as a single oneness or a single One that does not allow “elements” or “pieces of consciousness.” 5 They argue that the single-consciousness-and-“I” represents a viable way of getting empirical understanding of consciousness because portraits developed with the Participant as Ally–Essentialist Portraiture Philosophy aim to give a partial picture of an individual’s single-consciousness-and-“I,” which is accepted as such by the participant (Witz, 2006; Witz & Bae, 2011). Societal and other larger realities should be understood by using the single-consciousness-and-“I” as starting point.
However, the type of larger conception of the extraordinary phenomenon/experienced reality at the population level represented by Cooley’s “Larger Mind” does not address how this population-level reality (this “Larger Mind”) is connected with the specific features involved in the characteristic day-to-day processes that indicate this unity or oneness of the individual single-consciousness-and-“I” (the particular processes and aspects discussed in Witz and Goodwin, in press, Sections 1-3). These kinds of aspects seem to be universal across individuals in all cultures and are thus likely connected with this larger extraordinary phenomenon (this “Larger Mind”) in question. It also does not address how these processes and aspects figure in the unfolding in the individual’s development from childhood on. Before we attempt to develop more detailed conceptions that speak to these points, however, it seems more detailed empirical examples of single-consciousness-and-“I” are needed. This would include representative examples (in the form of small portraits) of the single-consciousness-and-“I” of adults in different cultures, of adults with disabilities, and of the long-term development of higher aspects, and some larger comments on what emerges from these examples. Obviously the aim of the conception of a single-consciousness-and-“I” is to be able to talk about human beings as they are. In every culture, and regardless of education, social status, or disability, the nature of a human being is similar. The conception of the single-consciousness-and-“I” is intended to help develop a way of seeing and talking where that is in the forefront, a way that does not use the typical Western dimensions that dominate both quantitative and qualitative research.
As a concrete possibility, consider again Excerpt 1. Even though we did not analyze this, it is clear that both interviewee and interviewer participate in this conversation. We have focused on the interviewer and post hoc analyst getting some subjective understanding of Suzanne and her past experience, but there are equally attempts by Suzanne to help the interviewer understand. She may not necessarily have any definite ideas or strategies to this end, but the excerpt suggests that there may be in her some sort of tacit, subtle, inner feelings regarding the kinds of things the interviewer needs to know to begin to subjectively understand her experience and that she moves with these intuitively trying to communicate what she felt in the period of her life in question. Analogous things are going on inside the interviewer in the interview situation itself (see Ronda’s frequent sympathetic comments in Excerpt 1). Now obviously the interaction in Excerpt 1 is between two very experienced adults. Common experience in daily life then suggests further, and to some extent, existing portraits using the Ally–Portraiture approach document, that embryonic forms of such tacit inner knowing start already in early childhood and take different forms in different cultural contexts (such as “U.S. white middle class”). For example, the mother who looks and interacts face to face with her child with an eye of love sees—intuits already—a full and conscious human being when she sees her child at age one and a half to two years speak her first words and become a full interactant with the adult and siblings in the family. 6 (Here the mother is analogous to the interviewer or researcher and the child to Suzanne.) When a sympathetic adult is with a 2-, 3-, or 4-year-old child, the latter is ever intent to draw her into her activities and make her a more active participant (in pretend play, when they are reading a story book together, etc.). W. Huang (2010) in her dissertation found her fifth graders trying to make her understand how they saw their family members and the values in their families. All these kinds of knowing how to communicate with another form prominent aspects of the child’s “single-consciousness-and-‘I’” at that time and could be used to get a more accurate impression of the child’s consciousness and “I” at that age. Although many people say “children at age X are so much fun,” “are so great to be with,” there are very few efforts in qualitative research to evoke the consciousness and way of being of children at different age levels, much less to see an evolution in such ways of being.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.