Feeling Higher Aspects in One’s Life and Being Involved With Them “With One’s (Whole) Self or ‘I’”

Abstract

In the “Consciousness in the Study of Human Life and Experience” articles, longer passages in interviews where the participant sincerely tries to make a sympathetic investigator understand her are considered as showing part of the participant’s current consciousness in her life (part of her “consciousness-and-‘I’”). The present article argues that a critical element in such passages is that the participant is involved in trying to make herself understood “with her (whole) ‘I,’” “her whole self.” This represents a particular kind of (spontaneous, nonverbal, “inner”) engagement of the single consciousness-and-“I.” The article argues using an example that “being involved with one’s self, one’s ‘I’” in the higher aspects that one is pursuing in one’s life is a fundamental type of phenomenon/experienced reality which is sui generis, and represents in the unfolding of the person a factor in its own right.

Keywords

consciousness “I”self consciousness-and-“I”inter-subjectivity

Introduction and Summary

The present article is situated in the series of “Consciousness in the Study of Human Life and Experience” articles (“Consc. I-VI” for short). This series grew out of my students’ and my own experience since circa 1993 with portraits of individuals using the “Participant as Ally—Essentialist Portraiture” approach (Witz, Goodwin, Hart, & Thomas, 2001). Having the “participant as ‘Ally’” means that the investigator and participant share a common understanding to the effect that the research is for the sake of truth and the larger good of society, that the participant’s experience is important at a human level and should be heard in the larger society, and that the aim is to portray that experience as a larger whole that would illuminate the particular research question. In addition, although negative or “deficit” aspects are alluded to, the primary focus is on positive aspects (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, Chapter 1), and the investigator assures complete respect and confidentiality (Witz, 2008).

“Portraiture” in general is an approach in Qualitative Research and Inquiry that uses the portrait-painting analogy of Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997), that is, the investigator presents her understanding of the participant and her feelings, attitudes, past experience, and so on by evoking specific impressions as part of a single whole impression, somewhat similar to the way a portrait painter communicates what she sees in a person in a painted portrait of the person. “Essentialist” Portraiture typically starts with trying to identify paragraph-sized or longer passages in the transcript where the participant is trying to explain why she is the way she is and what she is trying do. In the context of the participant as ally philosophy, such passages are of two broad types, the participant is reliving specific (good or bad, inspiring or formative or traumatic, etc.) experiences, or she is trying to rise to a larger view of herself and her life, talking relatively freely and bringing in whatever personal and other aspects—memories, circumstances, external factors—she feels are relevant to understand her and her experience. Such passages have an almost limitless depth. By carrying a particular passage around in her mind for days or weeks, the investigator becomes aware of more and more aspects (nuances of feelings, attitudes, presuppositions, certain tone, an unfolding or structuring within the passage, etc. etc.) from the participant’s total personal history up to the time of the interviews (Consc. II). Important passages are quoted verbatim for contemplation, so to speak, often with indications of “how something was being said.” Nuances in one passage can be heard to be present in modified or more differentiated form in other passages. So by fixing on a set of passages and listening for a unity or larger direction in the set, the investigator-portraitist can develop a larger impression or portrait of the participant in terms of what kind of a person she is, her attitudes, modes of intelligence, “ways of being inside,” her self perceptions, values, ideals, and so on (Witz, 2006; Witz & Bae, 2011). The significant passages used represent the main “hard data” given in the portrait, and the overall impression of the participant which the portrait gives will be recognized as a, to some extent, valid but of course extremely incomplete picture of her by others and by the participant herself.

A Person’s Entire Subjective Being as an Object of Study

While the first two consciousness articles were mostly descriptive summaries of our experience with PA-Essentialist Portraiture over the last 1½ decades, Consc. III, “A Single Consciousness-and-‘I’ From Childhood to Old Age,” Witz and Goodwin (2012) suggested two completely new larger perspectives and fields of investigation and inquiry.

To begin with, the article drew attention to certain phenomena/realities of subjective experience that are directly connected with the “unity of the individual” as a conscious being and self. For example, how is it that I remember a certain experience and time in my life and I feel this is “exactly the way I experienced it then,” and that that is still me today (20 years later), even though I have changed a lot? How is it that I developed such and such a self-understanding and I remember moments—better: times—when the latter first dawned, and that I still feel that that self understanding is to some extent still valid, even though now my whole situation has changed considerably? (These often subtle “memories” and “nuances” now cannot be regarded as simply “reactivation of consciousness” that occurred then.) Hence, Consc. III argued that (a) the unity and coherence of the subjective world and being of the individual that I and my students were seeing in virtually all of our work in PA-Essentialist Portraiture was sufficient to justify looking at the subjective being of the individual (her Sein) “at the time of the interviews” (in that period of days or weeks or months) as an “almost indivisible” whole, a single object, forming a new object of study in Qualitative Research and Inquiry, namely, the participant as a single “consciousness-and-‘I,’” as “consciousness fused with ‘I’” in that period. Furthermore, (b) as the individual’s “consciousness-and-‘I’” unfolded from childhood on, it formed a vastly larger, also completely unified whole, also a new object of study or inquiry in Qualitative Research and Inquiry, a “single consciousness-and-‘I’ from childhood to old age.” (c) In this context, the “longer significant passages” of the Participant as Ally Portraiture philosophy occupy a privileged position in that they enable the investigator to give an impression of both of the participant’s consciousness-and-“I” at the time of the interviews and her “single consciousness-and-‘I’” as it unfolded from childhood on. For they represent both the participant’s consciousness at moment-to-moment levels and contain nuances that give clues of how the participant experienced and consciously dealt with things in real life over years and decades—in other words, they contain nuances of her “larger consciousness as a person,” her overall “self” and “I,” her “whole [subjective] being.” (No assumptions are made about what else gives information on the participant’s consciousness and “I.”) In particular, (d) the kind of PA-Essentialist portraits we were writing represented holistic, overall, but of course extremely partial pictures of such a “single consciousness-and-‘I,’” or of the participant as a “single consciousness-and-‘I,’” very much like a good portrait painting represents an insight into the person in the painting—it represents an insight how that person “is inside.”

To see the individual as a completely coherent, unified, and at the same time “every second unique” consciousness or subjective being (German Sein) contrasts completely with the usual conception of an individual in academic discourse in terms of the categories of the culture which the individual and the investigator are in, for example, “the individual has such and such a personality, intelligence, skills, attitudes, moral-ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical etc. values and convictions,” and “she had such and such a family background and such and such things happened in her life.” It also puts some of the basic phenomena and issues brought up in PA-Essentialist Portraiture practice in a larger perspective. For example, in the “longer significant passages,” there is some kind of “inner harmony” between a person’s conscious being at shorter time levels (seconds, hours, days) and her life at longer time-levels (months, years). (Before Consc. III, we used to regard this phenomenon as being part of “the unity of the individual of the individual as a whole.”¹) It is this “inner harmony in one’s conscious being” that enables the portrait to be written (that enables the portrait to bring out certain aspects of the participant, what kind of person she is, her higher principles, and so on, like a painted portrait can). And the same inner harmony enables the portrait to “fore-shadow” to some extent what the participant will be like in the future, like a painted portrait does (see Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Consc. VI, Witz, 2015, section 1). The fact that in a well written portrait the reader also comes to feel she is subjectively understanding the participant² suggests that she implicitly understands this inner harmony in a natural manner. So this “short-term–long-term harmony reality” is a critical element involved in inter-subjectivity.

The single consciousness-and-“I” as an arena for Qualitative Inquiry into consciousness (“EXPERIENCE ITSELF”), free from (Western) ontological and epistemological assumptions

But besides seeing the individual’s subjective being as a single total unified entity, which in effect represents a completely new kind of object of study in Qualitative Research and Inquiry, the Consciousness articles also have another aim (also first articulated in Consc. III). This is to try to develop a way of inquiring into the nature of ordinary everyday human consciousness in any culture in a way that is free from presuppositions regarding the epistemological and ontological status of consciousness. Although almost everyone knows what “being conscious” is, the nature of consciousness itself, or what consciousness itself “is”—its ontological and epistemological status, in the Western sense of these terms—is completely contested. Science and much Western thought consider ordinary consciousness (conscious experience) during the day to be an epiphenomenon of matter, and consciousness to be epistemologically subordinate to matter and physical objects (e.g., Gray, 2004, Introduction; Velmans, 2009). But some major Eastern traditions consider it ontologically as primary.³

Consc. III in effect implies that ordinary “descriptive” “phenomenological” study of consciousness and theorizing about consciousness such as is found in recent Philosophy of Mind is not suitable, because in these areas, consciousness is approached with traditional or modern Western ontological presuppositions.⁴ Velmans informally introduces the subject of consciousness with “Normally we point to some thing that we observe or experience. The term ‘consciousness’ refers to EXPERIENCE ITSELF” (distinguishing it from mental-perceptual particulars or content, Velmans, 2009, capitals mine). He has in mind brief observations or experiences like seeing and recognizing a particular object, the usual way of formulating the problem in Philosophy of Mind. The consciousness articles, however, insist that the scope of EXPERIENCE includes also “life experience,” “experience involved in higher aspects” (Consc. I), and so on. To rephrase Velmans,

Normally we point to something we see, something we feel, think, something that is our inspiration, deep-seated conviction, something connected with the latter in our past, we point to what we see as certain conditions in society, in the world. Consciousness refers to EXPERIENCE involved in these things ITSELF. (emphasis added)

Consc. III to V assert that the most fundamental fact about an individual human being is that she knows, feels, and/or takes for granted that he or she exists—“I exist,” and that she takes for granted that she is always the same person who remembers her experience (consciousness) and self-understanding at various times in the past—“I exist.” This seems true in every culture and depends only on the person’s being conscious, it does not depend on conceptions of or deep-seated convictions regarding things like “mind,” “thinking,” “memory,” “myth,” use of “symbols,” or space, time, and matter, which vary tremendously with the culture and society. The consciousness articles from Consc. III on address modern Western ontological-epistemological presuppositions, by suggesting the investigator should have an awareness and understanding that both herself and the participant each represent a “single consciousness-and-‘I’.” For then, with intensive efforts to overcome difficulties due to language and culture, or to disability or genius, it is still possible, in sympathetic face-to-face contact and “being an Ally” relationship, to get an idea of the other’s consciousness (EXPERIENCE ITSELF) in life in any culture.

Indeed, now the longer significant passages still show the participant’s moment-to-moment consciousness as well as nuances reflecting the whole of her history, life. However, this “whole history, life” is not necessarily anymore conceived of or understood as “in reality being underlain” by a set of objective processes and events in space and time which are (not necessarily accurately) “remembered” (cf. “seeing the past in the present,” Consc. II). And now such a passage still represents a sample from the constant sea of innumerable “I-feelings” and “self feelings” which seems to form “a veritable substratum of processes” that is “constantly going on” in oneself but which one is often “barely aware of” (Consc. V, section 3; Witz & Lee, 2013). However, now the manner in which from this “sea of ‘I’-feelings and self feelings” there emerges “having any direction in life”, or there emerges the individual having any particular moral character and metaphysical conviction, is not anymore considered “explained” by “psychological processes,” formative experiences, and so on but left open. Of course this problematizes the whole larger understanding of “development as a human being.”

“Involvement with one’s (whole) ‘I,’ (whole) self”

Against this background, the present article focuses on a phenomenon/aspect-of-experience which throws a new light on the nature of a person’s subjective being and has huge implications for the nature of human consciousness during the day and in life. This is the phenomenon/aspect-of-experience represented by “being involved with one’s (whole) self” or “with one’s whole ‘I.’” In thinking and talking about a person’s life, one constantly uses phrases like “she was/is involved in this, she pursued and still pursues this, with her whole self, with her whole ‘I’” (and similarly when talking about one’s own life). A teacher may devote herself to teaching her classes and caring for her students everyday, a scientist may pursue her research, an artist may devote herself to her work for decades “with her whole self” or her “whole ‘I.’” Every novel, every biography, every portrait talks in these terms, and the reader understands in a hundred, in a thousand different contexts what is meant. Qualitative research and inquiry uses these phrases extensively, but only descriptively, like the novel does. Mainstream Psychology approaches the phenomenon/aspect-of-experience of involvement with one’s “I” and self with concepts like “personal motivation, interest,” “focus on,” “concentration”—this does not come close to penetrating the astronomical magnitude of the subjective phenomena in question. The present article argues that higher aspects in one’s life are often engaged in throughout the day “with one’s (whole) ‘I,’ one’s (whole) self,” and that such engagement represents a phenomenon/subjectively experienced reality in its own right (Sections 1-3). This has profound consequences for understanding human consciousness (Section 4).

A simplified example

To illustrate and prepare the reader for some of the issues connected with “engagement with one’s whole self, ‘I’” which we will be addressing, we give a simplified example. “Higher aspects” in a person were defined in Witz, Lee, and Huang (2010) (= Consc. I) as “moral-ethical, metaphysical, social and spiritual (including religious) higher principles, values, and ideals” (p. 397), which start in childhood or adolescence and evolve and often deepen over years and decades. In the examples given (and in the original portraits from which the examples were drawn), they could be described as more or less enduring, serious moral-ethical and metaphysical (including aesthetic) involvements in the person’s life, both at the level of action and externally visible commitment, and at the level of subjective life, experience. Now the example! In Witz et al. (2010), Caroline, a High School Science teacher, is quoted:

Excerpt 1A My faith [as a Christian] gives me a genuine caring for all these kids—as people, they are more important to me than they are as science students . . . If they are not doing well . . . I’ve got two heads down . . . “Brandon, you have a black eye!” And I am not really sure how it happened . . . So, I let him rest. (Witz et al., 2010, excerpt [1A], there quoted from Lee, 2006)

In saying this, Caroline can be said to be in some way “involved with her self” or involved with her “I.” This is indicated, for example, by her direct, no-frills manner of immediately giving an example, and by the very nature of the example which she gives: It instantly vividly illustrates how she cares for “her kids” in a concrete situation. But there are in the passage nuances and overtones that suggest she may also be “involved with her self or with her ‘I’” when she is teaching in class in real life, and even outside of class. This would come under the heading of what we called the “harmony” between the way the participant speaks or, rather, her consciousness, at moment-to-moment time levels on one hand and the way the participant is (i.e., her consciousness) in real life on the other (at a level of weeks, years, decades; see above). Of course in Excerpt 1A, there are only suggestions to this effect. But these suggestions become more elaborated in terms of what form the caring she talks about takes in her life (what “larger form” the way she talks in Excerpt 1A takes in her, in her subjective being and in her behavior in her life, cf. above). In the next interview, when the interviewer reminds her of what she had said in Excerpt 1A, she responds in part:

Excerpt 1B God is to me like breathing. . . it’s my job as a Christian to reflect my faith and to reflect my God to everybody else. That’s my job. Okay? I do it while I’m being a teacher. [Being] a teacher is not my primary responsibility. My primary responsibility is to live the way I’ve been instructed to live. Do what I am supposed to do. That’s my first job. (From excerpt [1B] in Witz et al., 2010, quoted from Lee, 2006)

This makes more definite how Caroline experiences the caring that she talks about in Excerpt 1A in “real life.” For Excerpt 1B illustrates that for her, this caring is part of her leading a Christian life: In much of her daily living she feels and has the consciousness that “it’s my job as a Christian to reflect my faith and to reflect my God to everybody else.” She is suggesting there is some consciousness of this being her job, some involvement with her self and with her “I,” also when she is teaching (“I do it while I’m being a teacher,” [Witz et al., 2010, quoted from Lee, 2006]; and presumably in other contexts like family, social life, and so on also).⁵ One can already feel a little of this kind of involvement with her self and “I” from the way she talked with some involvement of her self and “I” in Excerpt 1A. But Excerpt 1B makes it much more definite.

So the way Caroline is involved with her self and “I” when she is talking in Excerpt 1A gives one impressions of how she is inside, subjectively as a person, which are then further clarified, confirmed, developed in Excerpt 1B. In Excerpt 1A, she may have only felt the caring she has for her kids when she is teaching, not much more (of course his is not certain). But expressing herself as she is in Excerpt 1B implies more “involvement with her self and ‘I’” in real life. For merely saying to the interviewer “I do it while I’m being a teacher” means she is feeling what she is asserting and she is standing up for it, this is what she always does—in fact “I do it while I am teaching” is part of how “God is to me like breathing.”

Finally the “I”-involvement which the participant shows in talking about one higher aspect in her life is usually combined (or rather “in unity with”) with “I”-involvement in other things—other higher aspects, desires and aversions, social pressures and expectations, relationships with particular individuals, etc. etc.⁷ In fact in almost every longer passage highlighted in an Essentialist portrait, the participant will be involved with her “I” or self in several things. In Excerpt 1A, for example, Caroline is at the same time quite conscious that it is her duty as a science teacher hired by the school to teach Science; the two “I”-involvements are as consciousness in an almost “structural” unity, with “caring for them as persons” as higher aspect and more important.

Outline of the article

The article argues, using a more detailed example than Excerpts 1A and 1B, that being involved with one’s “I” or self in higher aspects in one’s life represents a qualitatively distinct phenomenon/subjectively experienced reality in its own right and discusses some of the role which this kind of phenomenon plays in the consciousness-and-“I” of a person. The example in question is the same passage from Brown’s (2012) portrait of Suzanne in her dissertation that was used in Witz and Brown (2013, Excerpt 2). There Suzanne, age 45, describes how in her life (much of it as a single mother) her children always came first but there was nevertheless a slow evolution in herself to finally becoming a teacher (which happened only a couple of years ago). She was involved in both of these with her “I” at the same time and this involvement represents a unity of two higher aspects in her since she graduated from High School (Sections 1 and 2). Next, Section 3 generalizes the example. First, involvement with one’s whole self or “I” of the kind in Excerpt 2 is ubiquitous in the longer passages used in Essentialist Portraiture practice and seems to be a fundamental ingredient in giving the reader of the portrait the feeling she is understanding the participant. In fact it seems that when the interviewer (or post hoc analyst or reader) becomes aware of the participant’s “I”-involvement in the passage, she herself becomes more involved trying to understand the participant. From there, Section 3 argues that such “I”-involvement is relatively common in serious conversations and other situations in daily life.

Section 4 steps back and looks at Sections 1 to 3 from several more general points of view. The main point is that the “I”-involvement in higher (moral- ethical including social and metaphysical) aspects described in Sections 1 to 3 acts as a spontaneous inner driving element to inner evolution in the participant to greater moral unity and a more unified consciousness, at the level of the participant “as a whole” so to speak, “from childhood to old age.”

“I”-Involvement in Suzanne: “Being There” for Her Own Children Always Comes First in Her Life

In actual research and qualitative work, “being involved with one’s (whole) self” or “with one’s (whole) ‘I’” takes innumerable forms, always different in each individual case. It is often a joy to become aware of them in the key passages and feel them because of the more direct understanding and appreciation they give of the participant. To get an idea of the amazing immensity and vast depth of the involvement with one’s “I” that one often finds, we consider again the passage used in Consc. IV (Witz & Brown, 2013). Recall that Dr. Brown was teaching in a program in which “non-traditional students” who may have had already other careers could get certification and baccalaureate degrees to become teachers in elementary or middle school. For her dissertation, she interviewed nine former students whom she had had in her methods classes 3 or 4 years earlier and who were now in their second year teaching at a public school, regarding what brought them to go into teaching. Suzanne, who was age 45 at the time of the interview, came from a family where her brother was the first in the family to graduate from high school. Already in the focus group, it became apparent that her story had

two prominent aspects that took me [Dr. Brown] some time to understand. One is, to her, to live right, and this means that the welfare of her kids is the overruling value. . . The other aspect was a constant inner engagement with education, a questioning of what education was, what was taught in school and why, what college involved, and why one should go to college. (Brown, 2012, pp. 53-54). (These aspects became the two main “strands” explored in Suzanne’s portrait.)

In the first follow-up interview, Suzanne tries to have Dr. Brown (=Ronda) understand both of these.

Excerpt 2. R (=Ronda): 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?

S (=Suzanne): (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?”

R: (3) I hear you say that you didn’t even think about college even with your friends talking about . . .

S: (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.

R. (6) And they never asked you?

S: (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 . . .

R: (9) You told me before that you weren’t married, right?

S: (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 day care. (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 and 2, slightly abbreviated in Brown, 2012, p. 55)

A certain pervasive “Tone” running through the whole excerpt: in always making her kids come first, “I have been living constantly true to myself, completely constant in upholding the values I absorbed in my family”

Reading only this transcript, the reader may think that Dr. Brown is following a very conventional “objectivist approach”—she only asks questions, she does not share of her own experience, life, values, and apart from the (possibly routine) interjections she seems to be “positioning the participant as an object” and “using the interview as a tool to get an objective picture.” This would be totally misreading what is actually going on. By participating, the participants were already “Allies” (see above, “Introduction” section) in the focus groups when they shared their stories with Ronda and each other. Excerpt 2 is from the first follow-up interview (one-to-one) where the aim was to go more deeply into a participant’s experience. Suzanne knew and could tell the Investigator had worked a lot on her data but could not see rhyme or reason for the lengthy list of going from one job to another and taking a college course here and a few courses there. She completely understood Ronda’s problem and her response is an amazing effort to address it as fully as she could. (In Witz and Brown, 2013, the same passage used to show the extra-ordinary rapport and communication between Ronda and her, and that is likely that there is mutual subjective understanding.)

In the whole scale of her response, Suzanne is looking at herself and her life. She is letting Ronda share her vision, Ronda is so to speak standing beside her looking with her at her life and actions⁶ and thus seeing/experiencing her life the way she (Suzanne) sees it. To this end, Suzanne almost casts herself as a third person which she and Ronda are looking at, always leaving it to Ronda to come to her own conclusions. This gives the whole an objective tone, as if she and Ronda were just seeing what happened. (All this is made possible by the Participant-as-Ally relationship.) At the same time, there is throughout the whole excerpt a pervasive tone, and there are constant connotations, of her always acting responsibly given the situation and her values:

These were the values, principles that I have been living and which am still living in my life, I was in such and such situations and experienced such and such conditions, and I acted in such and such a way.

Consider (1). The first half describes the constant outlook, values, the constant “focus” everyone in the environment in which she grew up had. But beginning with “my objective was . . .,” the tone becomes a constant, steady “I.” She was simply continuing the outlook in the family, there was no change in her before and after, and this vision is with her whole “I”: “That was how I was raised. I never thought about going on to college. I wasn’t raised that way.” The brief “My mom recently went and got her GED” only emphasizes the point. Things have changed, this is how she is now, but then it was different. And it was the same way later on with getting married and having kids. So while she is completely in charge of her life, she is simply continuing the values, the way of being in her family: “my objective was . . . to get married and have kids.” Then (2) alludes to a first becoming aware that there must be something to this business of going College. After graduation from high school, most of her friends went to College. Watching this, there came from deep inside herself a small question “Now what do I do?” This is the first indication she is directly addressing Ronda’s real question, with equally focused “‘I’-involvement” (see the next section).

After several related small interactions and elaborations, the tone in the second half of (1) resumes in (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.”

Once she graduated high school, she had to become self-supporting. She was/had to deal with the necessities of life; while she is speaking, there are still echoes of her being involved in this with her “I” as she was then. But the completely natural and unquestioning way in which she brings in “providing for” her son and “being there for him” shows that this dealing with the necessities of life is at the same time part of the higher aspect of having her kids come first that automatically stands above the changing fortunes of life. In fact, even “Once I graduated high school I went to find a job” has some of the same completely natural unquestioning air as when she talks about her behavior and way of being inside in (1), namely, she is with complete steadiness simply continuing her feeling, way of being when she was living as part of her family—with the connotation that this is something any responsible person would do. It also an unquestioned higher value, it is also how she was brought up and is something that automatically honors in her behavior in her life.

In fact, “come to think of it” so to speak, this is still her way of being today, now that she is 40 some years old—the same “Tone” as in (1) and (8) continues in (10) and in (11) (a) and (b). Not being married only brought her unquestioning commitment and way of being since childhood more to the fore. “Even until now my focus is having a job where my family life can be first. When I was pregnant with my daughter [13 years after her son was born] I didn’t want somebody else raising her . . .” and so on. Having a job and providing for and being there for the kids is still her “focus,” just as it was in her family and when she graduated high school, just as it was when her son was born soon later. And it is till so today when her daughter is 6 or 7, and when she finally has become a schoolteacher and has made “the thought that was always there” a reality. This directly continues the “Tone” in (10) and (8).

And finally this amazing “I have been/am completely steady in my from-my-family values” Tone, this direct involvement with her “I” that one “hears” so clearly in (1), (8), (10) and (11) is also “subliminally present” in the in-between times (3)-(7) and (9)-(10). For these bring only further supporting elaborations or expansions prompted by Ronda’s sympathetic and understanding comments, they only “amplify” and provide details what she feels in connection with this Tone. She was not married and yet “the goal was . . . not to have someone else raise him,” “not to work fifty hours a week” and so on. And this was equally true with the daughter, that’s why she did all the home day care. And she alludes to some of the aspects that are typically involved in this: “I had my mom to help out, but not to depend on.”

The Tone, and the “being involved in this (‘having the kids come first’) with her whole self, her whole ‘I’” which is indicated by it, have an involuntary, spontaneous, non-manipulative character

We have argued that throughout Suzanne’s response in Excerpt 2, there is an amazing “Tone,” something like “by always putting my kids first I have constantly remained true to myself, completely constant steady in upholding the values I absorbed in my family.” A conventional approach might be to regard this as a “rhetorical strategy to persuade the reader,” a strategy in the sense of discourse analysis, or a feature illustrating the “co-construction of the conversation” by both parties in the sense of ethno-methodology. No doubt Suzanne listened carefully to Ronda elaborating what she could and could not understand given what she (Suzanne’s) was projecting in the focus group (where Suzanne was talking to all three, Ronda and the two other focus group members). And there may have well been a fleeting thought of a “strategy” of how she should respond to Ronda (e.g., there may have been a conscious “first to talk about her family and her family values, and in this way explain her path to teaching”). But such explanations would only be general ideas, they would not touch the amazing depth of feeling and of feeling with her whole “I” while she is talking indicated by this Tone. This “Tone” indicates special inner experience in its own right—what we have been calling “being involved with her own self or ‘I.’” It is a special expression and result of her involvement in all this with her “I” and self, her single consciousness-and-“I,” throughout these years and still now. In its basically involuntary-innocent, spontaneous, non-manipulative nature, it somehow reflects, and “carries in itself,” the whole of the person that she is. In the way she is talking, she is going over, feeling and reaffirming in her mind and at the same time expressing, how this simply always constant, unquestioning dedication to her kids and subordinating everything else to taking care of them has actually been the biggest, largest, perhaps most important aspect in her life.

So by the “Tone” that pervades it, Excerpt 2 gives a deep sense of both Suzanne’s current consciousness-and-“I” and her whole “single consciousness-and-‘I.’” It evokes all the unvarying dedication to her children’s welfare, and alludes to all the love, attachments, joys, and disappointments, and all the happy decisions and mis-steps that are typically part of the practical reality of bringing up children as a single mother. And it illustrates how this was her ideal, her inspiration. Living this way represented a level fulfillment for the sake of which she sacrificed, postponed, and so on.

Again the whole understanding just indicated is based on the fact Suzanne knew Ronda well (Ronda was her teacher in several classes each), and she participated in this research with the consciousness of the “Participant as Ally” philosophy, which Ronda was practicing.

Suzanne’s “I”-Involvement in Explaining Her Path to Becoming a Teacher

But Susanne’s inner involvement with her whole self or “I” in Excerpt 2 described so far is not the whole story. In the excerpt, her main aim is to fully explain to Ronda from her own self what Ronda really wants to know, namely, where her motivation to become a teacher came from and how it was that she did become a teacher. Ronda’s question echoes how Suzanne summarized her path to becoming a teacher in the focus group:

Excerpt 3. S: I did temp jobs for the last, I don’t know, 25 years or so just so I could stay at home with my kids. Just temp jobs as needed, but primarily a stay at home mom. The home day care business kind of supplemented that. When my kids were both small I was a single parent both times. (Focus group transcript, p. 4)

So Excerpt 2 starts with Ronda describing how she could not see any rhyme or reason in the at first halfhearted attempts Suzanne made at College, taking some College-level courses in one place, some courses a few years later elsewhere, then getting associate degrees in Community College, a BA in business, and only then enrolling in the teacher certification program where Ronda had her in her classes. And the whole “Tone” and the self and “I”-involvement in Suzanne’s response discussed in the last section is part of an even larger self-involvement and “I”-involvement, an even larger effort of looking-into-herself-and-portraying-what-she-sees, that is, portraying how it was that the thought of becoming a teacher arose in her and how in fact she became a teacher.

To appreciate more fully how Suzanne gets to the heart of Ronda’s question, we have to see how she described her own condition when she graduated from high school in earlier in the focus group.

“I had no idea what to do”

The focus group was conducted perhaps 1½ years before the follow-up interview which starts with Excerpt 2 (Suzanne was one of the last participants Dr. Brown analyzed). In the focus group, one of the three participants, E (=Erin in Brown, 2012), was talking about her difficulties when she was in school.

I’m ADD, to be honest with you, never been tested, but I never was focused. I was always off in my own little world, and they always said, “well you’re a smart kid. You can do it.” Well, I couldn’t, you know.

And E immediately connects this with the teaching she was doing now (at the time of the focus group, when she was in her second year teaching in Middle School like Suzanne):

[Because of that, i.e., because of the ADD] It’s easier to relate to the kids [now] because when they’re not getting it, I can see why they are not quite getting it. I can relate to that. That helps, I think.

At this moment, without any ado, Suzanne comes in.

Excerpt 4. (S, directly after E) (1) In Jr. High, I remember just being lost. I didn’t know what was going on half of the time, (2) but my family was not educated. Nobody graduated from high school. (3) So I grew up thinking, man, if I graduate from high school that is the best thing ever. (4) Then I graduated from high school, and I was the first female in my family. (5) But it took a while to get up and running in the whole College thing. That was my delay there. (6) I had no idea what to do. (Focus group transcript, p. 2, quoted in Brown, 2012, p. 54)

Obviously, here (in Excerpt 4), there is also “I”-involvement. Stimulated by E’s “disclosures,” Suzanne talks about her own situation in Junior High and when she graduated High School, and she is obviously deeply involved in her memories (although she is also aware of her audience, the other two members of the focus group and Ronda), (1). Most important, in her mind, this “being lost” was simply due to her family environment: “My family was not educated,” (2). She does not blame the teacher in Junior High for her being lost, she simply could not understand what all this teaching was about or for, and this was due to her family not being educated, and the family cannot be blamed for that. Then her feelings when she graduated, (3)-(4) (which are expanded in Excerpt 2), and finally her conclusion, (5)-(6): “But it took a while to get up and running in the whole college thing. That was my delay there. I had no idea what to do.” In other words, when she graduated, she did not understand “the whole College thing”—she did not know what it was about—“I had no idea what to do.” In Excerpt 2, 1½ years later, she continues this whole way of being reflectively immersed in looking back at her life. She has the same kind of feelings but goes a step or two further.

. . . 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?”

The powerful “Tone” helps bring out, and makes Ronda and the reader understand, that the whole inner drive to becoming a teacher was at first only a wondering what that whole business of her experience in Middle School and with going to College was about (note she implicitly connects the two). A small voice inside her asked: “what is this whole business of education about that I experienced about—both when I was lost in class in Middle School, and the business of going to College which apparently everybody else knows about except me?” And then she gives a summary statement pregnant with meaning, Excerpt 2 (12)-(14).

The main point here is that Excerpt 2 (2) and (12)-(14) come also from her whole self, her whole way of being, she “feels them” with as much self-involvement and “I”-involvement as the amazing Tone in which she describes her unvarying adherence to the principles of herself raising and being there for her kids. Being a teacher was both a job she could have “so that I can be there the majority of the time,” (12) (a), and it was something that she “always in the back of my mind . . . wanted to be,” (12) (b). The thought of maybe becoming a teacher may have first come to her a few years after High School. But it took her many years to develop get the confidence to do it, (12) (c). “(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 . . .”

In Follow-Up Interview 1, with Ronda’s sympathetic questioning, she “re-creates” with her whole “I” her slowly growing understanding of how she went from “now what I do” to actually becoming a teacher

Excerpt 2 is only the start of the first follow-up interview, and it is not surprising that in the next several pages of the transcript much of what is already implicit as nuances or connotations in Excerpt 2 is unfolded further. As an example, consider

Excerpt 5 After High School I worked a year, and then [one semester] I took some courses [full time; she had moved to a different city in her home state.] I lived off campus, which was a mistake . . . (R: Did you think about what you were going to major in?) (S) No. It was go and get started, and there was no thought process. I ended up dropping all of the classes before the semester ended. (Follow-Up Interview 1, pp. 2 and 3, quoted in Brown, 2012, pp. 57-56)

This resonates strongly to Excerpt 2 (2) and Excerpt 4 (6). She takes a stab at “the College thing,” but without any real idea of why she is doing it and what for: “It was ‘go and get started,’ and there was no thought process.” As another example, she talks about the turning point a few years later where she got “the confidence” (Excerpt 2 (14)). At that time she had moved to California to live near her brother.

Excerpt 6 S: (1) I remember . . . sitting in the park [talking with her brother]. (2) I really, from growing up, [I] just felt defeated, and (3) like there was no opportunity for me to do anything, and then (4) being a single mom just brings you down even more. (5) He just looked at me and said “you can do whatever you want to do.” (6) That was it. I was like, “you know, you are right. I can.” (7) That set me on my path to College and striving to do better. (Follow-Up Interview 1, p. 3, quoted in Brown, 2012, p. 59)

There was a feeling of “wanting to do better” than merely graduating from high school and not worrying about “having been lost” in junior high, and this had to be combined with a feeling of wanting to find out what College was about; all this and perhaps also the idea of becoming a teacher became part of a “path to College.”

So actually Suzanne speaks in Excerpt 2 with a deep involvement of her whole self and “I” both in “taking care of the kids” and in finding her way to higher education. These involvements form a larger unity,⁷ and correspond to a good portion of the higher aspects she has been pursuing in her adult life. Her self or “I” as a single consciousness-and-“I” and her direct involvement in life are not different.

Discussion: Involvement With One’s (Whole) “I” in Essentialist Portraiture and in Daily Life

“‘I’-involvement” in Essentialist portraiture

The example(s) of Suzanne completely naturally spontaneously “being involved with her whole ‘I’ or whole self” trying to make the interviewer understand larger aspects of herself and her life are typical of what one sees in a majority of portraits written using the Participant as Ally—Essentialist Portraiture Approach. The responses of Yolanda to Karen Mbayah’s inquiries and of Maggie to Dr. Bae’s questions in Witz and Bae (2011) (=Consc. II), virtually all the passages quoted in Consc. I, and the responses of Suzanne in Lee (2006) quoted in Consc. V (different from the Suzanne in Brown, 2012)—all show realities of “I”-involvement associated with higher aspects in the participants’ life which could be elaborated in depth like Excerpt 2 above (each completely different from the others). The same holds for the six in-depth portraits in Witz (2007), for all four of the portraits in Lee (2006), and so on.

The subjective understanding that a reader gets of a participant in the key long excerpts in an Essentialist portrait is often helped by the reader becoming aware that the participant while she is speaking is involved with her whole self, her whole “I”

Looking back on these studies, there emerges a somewhat unexpected phenomenon that at least the present author was not explicitly aware of before. It seems that much of the subjective understanding of the participant arises from (maybe only semiconsciously) becoming aware of how the participant in the longer passages speaks with some deeper involvement with her “I” or self. And it seems that often when she does become aware of that, the post hoc analyst or reader spontaneously subjectively responds to that with her own self, with her own “I.” This may be illustrated with Excerpt 2. We already said that while she is talking, Suzanne in her mind has Ronda standing beside her and see things in her life the way she (Suzanne) herself sees them. While they are both thus looking, Suzanne is speaking from her heart, with her own whole “I,” her whole self so to speak, with complete sincerity in regard to her feelings, and so on, almost as if she was absorbed in purely dealing with her own feelings. (Of course she is also completely aware of Ronda as her audience.) It seems that when Ronda or a post hoc analyst or a reader becomes somewhat aware of this, she will also tend to start to see things more the way Suzanne sees them (or she will allow herself to subjectively see and understand them that way). When one sees how Suzanne so clearly delineates how she always, true to herself, had her kids come first but how in spite of being a single mom she listened to the voice inside her and found her way to education and become a teacher, one feels prompted to identify with her, to “put oneself in her shoes” and to begin to empathize with her. In Essentialist Portraiture, this is in fact standard practice: One tries to “understand the other at the level of ‘I’” (Witz & Bae, 2011, pp. 438-439), one says to oneself

if I was in the participant’s shoes, if I had her personality and motivation and if I had had her back-ground, upbringing and formative experiences, I might very well have some of the same feelings and perceptions that she is expressing, . . . (Witz & Bae, 2011, p. 438) etc.

It is almost as if investigator and reader become engaged with their own selves, their own “I.”

“Being involved with one’s whole ‘I’ or self” as a ubiquitous phenomenon in daily life

We have suggested that in Essentialist portraiture, for the participant to be involved with her self or “I” in trying to make the interviewer understand her correlates with her being similarly involved with her self and “I” “in real life” in the higher aspects in life, and that all this plays a powerful role in the subjective understanding that arises in the interaction. But obviously this kind of thing does not only happen in interviews in research or inquiry using the Essentialist Portraiture approach. When two friends talk about their life, or when one person more deeply tries to explain herself to a sympathetic other, there are often similar effects involved. Whenever one person, corresponding to the interviewee, wants the other, corresponding to the interviewer, to understand her as she is and as she [currently] understands her life and sees the world, she will likely speak with unified inner “I”-involvement. And when the other person, the “interviewer,” truly wants to understand the “interviewee”—with her own whole “I”—she seems to at least to some extent become aware of the other’s “involvement with her whole ‘I.’” Perhaps she will then naturally use similar techniques as the interviewer-post hoc analyst in Essentialist projects—listening primarily what the other brings up on her own from within herself, seeing the past in the present, seeing her from the point of view of “I”—and thus come to understand the other.

Larger Perspective and Significance

The picture of being daily involved with one’s whole “I” in thinking about and in living the complex of higher aspects in one’s life evoked in the previous sections suggests something like “spontaneously, semiconsciously groping for greater inner oneness in the whole sea of one’s consciousness or being” at the time, implying an intrinsic connection between “consciousness” and “I.” It is this kind of inner involvement that often constitutes the soil for developing inner oneness⁸ and a “more unified consciousness.” In the excerpts in Brown (2012) where Suzanne talks about how it was that she became a teacher, one can sense or imagine her thinking, feeling, ruminating “involved with her self or “I” at times when she is alone or when there are particularly challenging situations (e.g., when she drops all the courses she is taking in Junior College, Excerpt 5 above, or what to do now when she feels “he is right, I can,” Excerpt 6). At such times, the path is not clear, but there is nevertheless ruminating, reflecting, abiding with one’s “I” “in the sea of one’s consciousness,” spontaneously (out of within oneself) trying go to a larger more encompassing way of being, to being a fuller, more encompassing person, that would combine all the higher impulses in her, in her consciousness.

An obviously speculative and deliberately idealized example

This opens up vast possibilities which we here only illustrate by an example. A child who grows up in a “good” family (not in too great poverty, etc.) “instinctively” (i.e., naturally and spontaneously) trusts the goodness and love of her parents and the fact that she (the child) is always being taken care of in her family environment. As the child grows older, say from age 9 to 12 to 15 years and older, these inner ways of being gradually mature into becoming a person in her own right. Modern psychology deals with this mostly in terms of emotions and attachment arising from external conditions (people and events). Consc. VI, Witz (2015), argues that the single consciousness-and-“I” starts already at younger ages and will no doubt have analogues of “I”-involvement at that time. This suggests that the child’s trust in the parents and taking for granted that she is being taken of in her life—the child’s whole consciousness-and-“I” at the younger ages—leads to becoming an independent person with her own inspiration, higher values, interests, and so on with “I”-involvement serving as a main (and may be the primary) inner vehicle. In other words, the vision in the Consciousness articles of the person as a single consciousness-and-“I” from childhood to old age (see the Introduction) suggests that “I”-involvement may well be the natural driving ingredient in C. H. Cooleys’s (1909/1956) dictum that “the primary group is the mother of all social ideals.”

At the same time, the conception of “I”-involvement as a distinct phenomenon sui generis in the single consciousness-and-“I” makes it possible to tell this story without the usual Western tendency to regard physical objects (the parents or other individuals) and their behavior as the primary causal factor. For, for the child to mature into an independent person in her own right with her own outlook and values, the critical element may not be not be the parent (a physical object) and the parent’s behavior, or other outside conditions or factors. The critical element in the child becoming an independent person who pursues her own direction of higher aspects in her life may express at these ages in “I”-involvement that has its source in her “I” or self (we might say, her heart) and is fed by that, not in/by the behavior of the actual people and objects around her. How else could Soo-Jin, age 10, in Witz and Chang (submitted), have gotten “spreading happiness in the world” as a serious inner preoccupation? It seems to have come from within her and she became involved in it with her “I.”

Footnotes

Author’s Note

Dedicated to Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Klaus G. Witz received his PhD in mathematics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1963. His interests and publications are in the areas of cognition, philosophy of science, philosophy of education, religion and spirituality, portraiture in qualitative research and inquiry, and the self. He is the author of Spiritual Aspirations Connected With Mathematics: The Experience of American University Students (2007).

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