“Seeing Theworld with Fresh Eyes”

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 RELIGION and the ARTS brill.com/rart

“Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes” Understanding Aesthetic Experience via Gurdjieff’s Phenomenology of Human Being

David Seamon Kansas State University

Abstract

In this article, I draw on Gurdjieff’s philosophy to initiate a phenomenology of aesthetic experience, which I define as any intense emotional engagement that one feels in encountering or creating an artistic work, whether a painting, poem, song, dance, sculpture, or something else. To consider how aesthetic experience might be understood in a Gurdjieffian framework, I begin with an overview of phenomenology,emphasizing the phenomenological concepts of lifeworld and natural attitude, about which Gurdjieff said much, though not using phenomenological language. I then discuss Gur- djieff’s “psychology of human beings” as it might be interpreted phenomenologically, emphasizing three major claims: first, that, human beings are “asleep”; second, that they are “machines”; and, third, that they are “three-centered beings.” I draw on the last claim—human “three-centeredness”—to highlight how aesthetic experiences might be interpreted via Gurdjieff’s philosophy. Drawing on accounts from British philosopher and Gurdjieff associate J. G. Bennett, I end by considering how a Gurdjieffian perspective understands the role of the artistic work in contributing to aesthetic experience.

Keywords

G. I. Gurdjieff – P. D. Ouspensky – J. G. Bennett – phenomenology – aesthetic experience – art – phenomenology of aesthetics – phenomenology of art

The important thing Is to pull yourself up by your own hair To turn yourself inside out And see the whole world with fresh eyes. peter weiss 27 ∵

I begin this article with these lines from German playwright Peter Weiss’s 1963 Marat/Sade because they encapsulate a central aim of my personal and profes- sional life: to locate practical and conceptual knowledge whereby I understand myself and the world in deeper, more comprehensive ways.1 Academically, I have sought to actualize this aim via phenomenology, which can be defined most simply as the examination and description of everyday human experience and meaning, particularly their unnoticed, taken-for-granted aspects.2 In my personal life, I have been involved for over forty years with G. I. Gurdjieff’s philosophy, having studied with several individuals who worked directly with him, including J. G. Bennett, Elizabeth Bennett, Pierre Elliot,Vivien Elliot, Anna

1 Theater and film director Peter Brook quoted these lines in his introduction to Geoffrey Skelton’s English version of Marat/Sade (v); Brook directed both its 1964 London stage version and the 1967 film version. For much of his life, Brook has been involved with Gurdjieffian practice and directed the 1979 film, Meetings with Remarkable Men, based on Gurdjieff’s posthumous 1963 semi-autobiography of the same title. On the importance of Gurdjieff in Brook’s life, see Brook, “Secret Dimension” and Shifting Point. In suggesting how Gurdjieff’s ideas help to “pull one’s self up by the hair” and “see the whole world with fresh eyes,” Brook emphasized the need to intensify the lived quality of one’s experience: “A change in quality does not occur by accident; a change in quality of being is the result of an exact process … [A knowledge of how to change quality] can lead us out of the icy world of mechanics and behaviorism into a universe where everything finds its place, once it is illuminated by the clarity of understanding. This understanding is not theory; it is vision, and vision is alive. It shows us the unending and inevitable movements toward and away from quality. There is a joy in quality found and a suffering in quality betrayed, and these two experiences become the motors that constantly renew our search.” (“Hidden Dimension” 35–36). 2 Introductions to phenomenology include Finlay; Moran, Introduction; Seamon “Lived Bod- ies”; and van Manen.

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Durco, Paul Anderson, and Naomi Anderson.3Without hesitation, I can declare that my experience with the Gurdjieff Work, as it is usually called, has opened my eyes to the lived nature of who I am and to the world in which I find myself. It has helped me to become a better, more understanding and accomplished person. Like anyone else, I still have foibles, blinders, and weaknesses, but I also know that I am more aware, more able, and more resilient because of my involvement with Gurdjieffian principles and practices. In this article, I contend that Gurdjieff’s philosophy can be understood as an implicit phenomenology of human being. First, Gurdjieff provided conceptual and practical means to better see and understand the hugely diverse range of human experiences and modes of consciousness. Second, he offered an experientially-grounded framework for identifying an underlying order and structure to this hugely diverse range of consciousness and engagement. As I explain more fully below, there are major differences between Gurdjieff’s philosophy and phenomenology, particularly the fact that, for Gurdjieff, a thorough understanding of human experience is useful only because it can help individuals effect personal betterment and self-transformation. As Gurdjieff’s associate P. D. Ouspensky explained, the focus is on the individual “not from the point of view of what he [or she] seems to be, but from the point of view

3 J. G. Bennett (1897–1974) was a British philosopher, mathematician, and author of the influ- ential four-volume The Dramatic Universe, published between 1956 and 1966. Bennett worked with P. D. Ouspensky for many years in London; and with Gurdjieff in France in 1923 and in the months before Gurdjieff’s death in Paris in 1949. He founded the International Academy for Continuous Education (Sherborne, Gloucestershire), which from 1971 to 1976 introduced students to Gurdjieffian and related spiritual approaches; I attended the Academy during the 1972–1973 course year. Bennett’s second wife, Elizabeth Bennett (1918–1991), worked in Paris with Gurdjieff in the months before his death and played a significant role in directing the Academy’s day-to-day operations; see her memoirs, My Life, J.G. Bennett and G.I. Gurdji- eff. Pierre Elliot (1914–2005) and his wife Vivian Elliot worked with Gurdjieff in the months before his death, and were instructors at Bennett’s Academy, including their teaching Gurd- jieff’s sacred dances known as “the Movements” (P. Elliot, “Levels” and “Reflections”; V. Elliot, “First Meeting,” “In Memoriam,” and “Paris, May, 1949”). Anna Durco (1924–2004) met Gurdji- eff as a child and, under his direction, studied the Movements, which she taught at Bennett’s Academy during the first- and second-year courses (J. G. Bennett, Making 20–21, 96, 104–105). For accounts of Bennett’s Academy experiment, see Appelgren; J. G. Bennett, Witness, chapter 28; Pittman, chapters 3–4; Roth; and Seamon, “Encountering.” Paul Anderson (1897–1983) and his wife Naomi Anderson worked with Gurdjieff in France and later established Gurd- jieff groups in New York City and Worcester, Massachusetts, where I studied with them in the early 1970s (P. Anderson). The Andersons were close associates of Bennett, and several of their students, including myself, attended his Academy courses.

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:24:26PM via free access “seeing the world with fresh eyes” 153 of what he [or she] may become; that is, from the point of view of his [or her] possible evolution”(Psychology 6). In this article, I draw on a Gurdjieffian perspective to initiate a phenomenology of aesthetic experience, which I define as any intense emotional engagement that one feels in encountering or creating an artistic work, whether the medium is painting, music, dance, poetry, architecture, or something else. To consider how aesthetic experience might be understood via a Gurdjieffian framework, I begin with an overview of phenomenology, emphasizing the phenomenological concepts of lifeworld and natural attitude, about which Gur- djieff said much, though not using phenomenological language. I then discuss Gurdjieff’s “psychology of human beings” as it might be understood phenomenologically, emphasizing three major claims: first, that, human beings are “asleep”; second, that they are “machines”; and, third, that they are “three- centered beings.” I draw on the last claim—human “three-centeredness”—to highlight how aesthetic experiences might be interpreted via Gurdjieff’s understanding.4 When invited by editor Carole Cusack to write this article, I had deep-seated doubts because there is the difficult but legitimate question of whether an “insider” to the Work (or, for that matter, to any spiritual tradition) can present an objective account and interpretation.5 As academic commentators have

4 Gurdjieff’s three major writings are: All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson (1950), Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963), and Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am” (1975). Accurate introductions to Gurdjieff’s ideas and practices include: J. B. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Mak- ing a NewWorld; Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on theTeachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (five volumes); and P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, and The Fourth Way. Biographies of Gurdjieff include: J. G. Bennett, Making; and James Moore, Gurdjieff. Useful commentaries on Gurdjieff include: Roszak 136– 151; Shirley; Speeth; Webb; and Wilson 263–270. A helpful guide to writings about Gurdjieff is available at: www.gurdjieff-bibliography.com/ (accessed August 18, 2016). 5 In the early 1980s, I wrote an article entitled “Gurdjieff’s Presentation of Emotions: Toward a Phenomenology of Affective Experience” for a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on emotional experience. At the time, academic work considering Gurdjieff’s philosophy was controversial and questionable. My article was rejected but later published in 1990 in The Humanistic Psychologist, mostly because of the empathetic understanding of the journal’s editor, who realized there is much more to “psychology” that the conventional Western version. As this special issue of Religion and the Arts indicates, the academic world, especially in the last decade, has become much more open to “alternative” points of view, including Gurdjieff’s, and one hopes this support and interest continues, since, as I hope to demonstrate, Gurdjieff’s ideas and methods offer tremendous psychological, philosophical, and spiritual value.

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:24:26PM via free access 154 seamon emphasized, the majority of explications and evaluations of Gurdjieff’s philosophy and legacy are written by associates and other individuals supportive of his work. Because these authors are “insiders” of various sorts, their accounts have sometimes been criticized by more objective commentators as subjective, partial, and biased against identifying any incorrect, unsettling, or seemingly unbelievable aspects of the Gurdjieff Work. As one intimately familiar with the Gurdjieffian system, I read these supposedly objective accounts and sometimes find myself incredulous at the misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and dis- tortions that these impartial studies assume directly or unknowingly.6 Here, I take the phenomenological position that first-person encounter with a phenomenon—in this case, the Gurdjieff Work—is one acceptable way to examine and gauge that phenomenon. Because I have had continuing direct exposure to Gurdjieff’s ideas, claims, and psychological methods, I hope to provide an even-handed portrait of Gurdjieffian philosophy and to offer an accurate rendition of how it understands aesthetic engagement and encounter. Ulti- mately, my account is to be compared and contrasted with other accounts, both by outsiders and insiders. The eventual result might be a multi-dimensioned understanding that facilitates an accurate, thorough rendition of the Gurdji- effian tradition, accounting for both strengths and weaknesses, both potential missteps and potential benefits. i Phenomenology and Gurdjieffian Philosophy

How we are to understand, identify, and categorize human experience, action, and consciousness is a central concern in phenomenological study. Phenome- nologists argue that, as we are as typical human beings living typical everyday

6 At this point, the “outsider” writings about the Gurdjieff Work are of two types. On one hand, there is conventional academic research largely associated with “religious studies,” e.g., Challenger; Cusack, “Guest Editor’s Introduction” and “Intentional Communities”; Cusack and Sutliffe; Monserud; Petsche, “Gurdjieff’s Genealogy” and “Gurdjieff and de Hartman’s Music”; Sutliffe; Tamdgidi; Thomson; Thompson; and Wellbeloved. On the other hand, there are “outsider” critiques questioning the philosophical, psychological, and spiritual legitimacy of Gurdjieff’s ideas and practices (e.g., Perry; Storr; and Webb). Unfortunately, these critical commentaries often misunderstand or misrepresent Gurdjieff—for example, religious- studies scholar Whitall N. Perry, who, with little substantive justification, reduced Gurdjieff to a “tinkerer of souls” with no legitimate links to any authentic spiritual tradition (83, 53, 63). The challenge for all “outsider “commentators is empathetically understanding the Gurdjieff Work from the “inside,” a task that is hugely difficult but possible, as illustrated by the critical but thoughtful discussions of Monserud, Thompson, Thomson, and Roszak.

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:24:26PM via free access “seeing the world with fresh eyes” 155 lives, we forget that those lives might be otherwise—a state of affairs identified as the natural attitude, called that because we are ordinarily unaware of the natural givenness of the world in which we find ourselves. Phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl explained how “everyday life is natural life, life in the natural attitude. This is a life lived in obscurity, the unexamined life, life lived according to everyday habituality …” (Moran, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenol- ogy” 28). In turn, this situation of unnoticed taken-for-grantedness was called by Husserl the lifeworld—the typical structure of lived givenness ordinarily out of sight and only coming into consciousness when, in some out-of-the-ordinary fashion, the lifeworld’s everydayness is called into question—for example, my town is badly damaged by tornado and I suddenly realize how much about that place I took for granted and never questioned. Most of the time, however, we are caught up in the natural attitude and do not realize that our everyday world could be otherwise. We assume that the world in which we find ourselves is the only world—a taken-for-granted medium in which our lives unfold, much of the time with little or no conscious attention or directedness.7 Although Gurdjieff never referred to phenomenology directly, one finds many parallels, since one of his system’s key psychological contributions is a precise delineation of the lived nature of human life and human experience (Thomson 59–60). In phenomenological research, a primary aim is to find conceptual and practical means to shift from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude, whereby one sees the topic of interest—the phenomenon—in a more through, accurate way unobscured by the natural attitude and lifeworld. One attempts to set aside one’s taken-for-granted understandings, attitudes, and prejudices and to return to “the things themselves” (as Husserl encapsulated the process). How this is to be done practically varies with the phenomenon, and one can speak of such procedural methods as careful first-person descriptions, in-depth interviews with individuals who have encountered the phenomenon, or thoughtful interpretations of texts (e.g., examining fictional or documentary accounts of the particular experience or situation and looking for underlying commonalities and patterns).8 In the Gurdjieff Work, the major practical means for exploring and understanding human experience is self-observation, whereby the individual aims to probe and recognize more fully the lived nature of his or her everyday experi-

7 Phenomenologist Dermot Moran’s writings offer some of the clearest and most comprehensive explications of lifeworld and natural attitude; also helpful are Finlay and van Manen. 8 On phenomenological methods, see Finlay and van Manen.

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:24:26PM via free access 156 seamon ences and situations (Ouspensky, In Search 105–118). The effort is to encounter moments of “clear seeing” whereby we realize aspects of our human situation of which before we were unaware or only vaguely familiar. Importantly, self- observation is not practiced in hit-and-miss fashion. One does not try to see everything about a particular moment of experience but, rather, is guided by a particular theme—for example, what is it to notice something in the world? Or what are moments like experientially when we become negative emotionally in relation to a particular thing, person or event? The major aim of self- observation is to see one’s situation as a camera would—in other words, to take a “photograph” of the particular experience without judging or evaluating it but to record it as accurately as possible and holding that account via memory or perhaps writing it down in an observation notebook. The broader assumption is that, as we become more proficient in practicing self-observation, we learn more about ourselves and eventually gain a more comprehensive and precise picture of who and what we are as human beings. In practicing self-observation, there is always the possibility of inaccurate or cursory reports. On one hand, we may observe the experience or situation superficially or, on the other hand, embellish it via preconceptions or fanciful imagination, thereby misrepresenting and misunderstanding what we see (Thomson 63–68). The Gurdjieffian system provides a number of practical procedures to reduce the possibility of inaccurate or inappropriate self- observation. First, participants are usually part of a study group that meets regularly. The group leader chooses a weekly theme for which participants gather self-observations during the week ahead. At the next meeting, participants share their observations, and both leader and other participants comment on the validity and broader significance of the particular observation. In this way, accuracy of accounts is facilitated via intersubjective corroboration: testing the accuracy of one person’s account via others’ accounts and via feed- back from the group leader and other group members.9

9 At his International Academy for Continuous Education (see note 3), J. G. Bennett would introduce a weekly theme on Monday morning and then have students report observations on that theme the following Friday evening. Weekly themes that Bennett had students work with included, among others, “food,” “noticing,” “listening,” “freedom from like and dislike,” and “our relation with material objects”; edited transcripts of these theme meetings are provided in Bennett, First Liberation. In the introduction to that book, Bennett wrote: “The technique of “theme” consists in this: in persistently and with great determination occupying one’s mind with a specific clear notion so that one can penetrate into it in depth … There are subsidiary benefits of this thematic technique. For one thing, you have something positive to put in the place of idle associations that ordinarily occupy our minds. You have something

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Because, however, phenomenology and the Gurdjieff Work have greatly contrasting aims, there are several significant differences between the two approaches (Thomson 59–60). Gurdjieffian self-observation has a normative aspect in that participants examine their experience with the assumption that such study will eventually provide evidence and possibilities for self- understanding and self-improvement. Though phenomenologists also aim to develop accurate accounts of human experience, these accounts have no primary role in helping the phenomenologist to become a better human being (as is the major aim of self-observation). A second significant difference is that, in the Gurdjieffian system, self-observation is the primary means of experiential validation, and participants are told that they must not believe or trust the validity of any claim made without, first, testing and proving that claim in their own personal experience. For example, have I thoroughly seen in my own life experience that I am a “sleeping machine” or that I am a “three-centered being”? Phenomenologists may also draw on first-person experience to locate and explicate a particular phenomenon, but, unlike the emphasis on self-observation in the Gurdjieff Work, these researchers also make use of other descriptive sources such as in-depth interviews or descriptions of the phenomenon as culled from imaginative literature. Such non-first-person evidence is entirely acceptable and usable in phenomenological research, since the aim is accurate description and interpretation of the phenomenon, whatever the interpretive source. In contrast, the Gurdjieffian emphasis on self-development necessarily requires the first-person accounts of self-observation, since the essential aim is that participants see and understand themselves. A third important difference is that phenomenologists are mostly interested in human experience and life as they are, whereas, in the Gurdjieffian perspective, an understanding of human typicality is only a heuristic means to

to which you can turn your attention when you find you are disturbed or irritated. But these are, as I say, subsidiary benefits. The main purpose is to go through the verbal and conceptual level of understanding to a direct perception of the real world to which it belongs. I use the words “real world” because we can look at it in this way: there is a gradient between states of subjective illusion where one is connected with no reality except the immediate transient experience, passing through various states of awakening to contact with or full realization of the meaning of life and one’s own real being. These gradations do correspond to different worlds, Ordinarily, people speak about “this world” and the “other world.” But in reality there are more than two worlds, each one so different, one from another, that knowing all we can know about one world does not prepare us for the experience of the next world” (First Liberation 3–4).

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:24:26PM via free access 158 seamon move toward the much more important aim of personal transformation. The Gurdjieffian assumption is that, if one partakes in sincere, regular efforts at self-observation, he or she will become familiar with various features of typical human being that are normally unnoticed. The Gurdjieffian philosophy con- tends that these features need to be seen and worked with in various ways, assuming one wishes to become a better person.10 Here, I overview three of these features: first, people as “machines”; second, people as “asleep”; and, third, people as “three-centered.” I describe these three features and consider what they mean for understanding aesthetic experience. ii Human Beings as Sleeping Machines

In the phenomenological literature, a central focus is the considerable degree to which the human lifeworld is habitual.11 French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, identified the existential foundation of the lifeworld’s habituality as the lived body—a body that simultaneously acts in, experiences, and is aware of a world that always already responds with immediate, pre-reflective presence, pattern, and contextual support (Seamon, “Lived Bod- ies”). On the one hand, the lived body is the grounding for human perception, which Merleau-Ponty understood as the immediate, taken-for-granted givenness of the world always already present one instance before we can catch its presencing. On the other hand, he recognized that the lived body also incorporates an active, motor dimension that he called body-subject—tacit, unself- conscious corporeal awareness expressed via action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. One also finds the habituality of the lifeworld emphasized in the writings of Husserl, who, like Merleau-Ponty, demonstrated that everyday life regularly involves an inertial dimension incorporating habitual routines, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and the like. As phenomenologist and Husserlian scholar Dermot Moran explained:

10 Cultural historian Theodore Roszak (139, 147) wrote that Gurdjieff’s main aim “was to revolutionize the personality by direct, therapeutic intervention … [W]e have in his work the firstWestern effort to ground psychotherapy in the evolutionary image.With Gurdjieff, the purpose of therapy was not to excavate the causes of neurosis but to open the latent, higher centers of the mind, to evolve the personality forward. He was among the first of our time to bring therapeutic work to the essentially well person as means of further growth.” 11 See Moran, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology” and “Ego as Substrate”; Seamon, Geogra- phy of Lifeworld.

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Husserl’s phenomenology of habitual life discovers habit as present at all levels of human behavior from the lower unconscious instincts and drives (that have their own peculiar individuality or idiosyncrasy) to bodily motility right up to the level of autonomous rational life in culture. Thus he speaks not just of bodily habits or traits of character but of peculiar and abiding “habits of thought” … The life of habit … is not just a matter of intellectual attitude or conviction. It can also be a matter of perceptual tendencies, desires, feelings, emotions, even peculiar moods. Husserl recognizes the complex character of our “feelings,” as well as our intertwined emotional and affective “states,” acts of empathy, sympathy, love, fellow feeling, and so on, as well as acts of willing (important for our ethical lives). “Ego as Substrate” 28–29

Though using a different descriptive language, Gurdjieff also emphasized the habitual inertia of human life, whether referring to routine actions, entrenched emotions, or rote thinking. To probe the transformational implications of this inertial habituality, Gurdjieff drew on two themes: first, that, most of the time, human beings are “machines,” by which he meant that a large portion of one’s daily life unfolds habitually, and one does not act with intention but instead mechanically reacts to things, people, and events; and second, that most of the time, human beings are “asleep,” by which he meant that they are not fully present to the moment at hand. Gurdjieff’s associate Maurice Nicoll explained that, though people assume they actively shape their lives, those lives are mostly an unself-conscious pattern of passive responses to what the particular moment or situation demands. He wrote:

A very little sincere self-observation will show us that we are truly functions of life. We are driven by life and circumstances and have nothing or very little that is strong enough to resist being driven in this way. You must realize that each [human being] is, of course driven by life in a different way from other [human beings]. But all ordinary [human beings] … are driven from outside, even though they believe that they are not. In this sense, they are man-machines. And this is because nothing internal in them has been developed to such an extent that they obey this internal thing and so resist the kaleidoscope of changing life. Nothing in them is strong enough to resist life—that is strong enough to resist the reactions they ordinarily have to life. They certainly may notice they do not react to life as others do, and then they imagine they can resist life. This is mere illusion. Everyone reacts differently, in his or her own way.Where one per-

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son reacts, another may not. But it is all the same. It is all mechanical and life controls them through their particular special mechanical and habitual reactions to it. Psychological Commentaries 1. 220

Gurdjieff argued that, closely related to the mechanical nature of people-as- they-are, is a typical obliviousness to the present moment—in other words, “people are asleep.” Partly because so much of human life is habitual, people need not be deeply engaged with or conscious of the reality of human life. Gurdjieff spoke of two levels of ordinary human consciousness: first, nighttime sleep, which involves no sense of conscious presence or only the fantastical presence evoked by dreams; and, second, ordinary everyday consciousness in which experience is mostly mechanical and one has little self-conscious awareness of the present moment or of self as an actual, real self in that present moment. A major aim of the Gurdjieff Work is to see thoroughly, via self-observation, that one “slides” through a typical day with limited presence and awareness. With this understanding in hand, one can use Work principles and methods to become more fully present and “real”—in short, to work for a shift in consciousness from “mechanical sleep” to “self-present wakefulness.” In answering a student question as to whether there are “certain ideas that will always awaken one,” Ouspensky described the “awakening” process as a series of realizations that one sees in one’s own life:

[Y]ou must find things that help more often, certain realizations. There is a great difference between realization and words. Once you have realized something, you know that it is true. Then you must not forget it. The chief question must be how to awake. Realize that you are asleep, that everybody is asleep. Then realize that the only way out is to awaken. It is necessary to concentrate on one fact—sleep and the possibility of awakening. If you think about it and feel it, then the chance appears. Until you come to this realization, there is no chance, really.12

12 FourthWay 303–304. As Ouspensky’s comment indicates, the meaning of “realization” cannot be known intellectually but must be understood directly through intense experience. One striking example is Elizabeth Bennett’s sudden realization, during a 1949 group meeting in London, that human beings are “sleeping machines”:

We sat in a circle, about twenty of us, and reported to the group leader on the week’s work. She in her turn made comments on our reports. I listened eagerly to what the others had to say; to me it was all wonderful, the observations penetrating and acute, the

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Though academic phenomenology currently offers no direct equivalent to Gur- djieff’s “sleeping machines” or their “awakening,” I have pointed out that phenomenology’s recognition of the lifeworld’s habitual aspects can be interpreted as a partial parallel to Gurdjieff’s emphasis on the dreamlike, mechanical reg- ularity of human life. I next argue that, in his depiction of people as three- centered beings, Gurdjieff goes far in answering Moran’s call for a comprehensive phenomenology of the complex ways in which habituality plays a pivotal role in human life:

[T]here is a pressing need for philosophers of mind and action to describe carefully and to distinguish between various kinds of habitual and routine behavior: between instinctive and reflex reaction, natural corporeal ten-

comments pertinent and helpful. Then, in an instant, everything changed. The speaker at that moment was a successful writer, an intelligent, informed man who described vividly his interior adventures of the past week … All at once, before my eyes, he changed. He was a thing, a puppet, his hands jerked meaninglessly to emphasize his words, his mouth was a dark, empty cavern, a trap opening and shutting, his usually melodious voice was the mechanical yapping of a wounded doll. It was horrible, terrifying. What had happened? How were the others reacting? I looked around the circle and felt my hair creep. Everyone in the group was a mechanical thing, bowing, smiling, nodding, speaking with flat, ventriloquist’s voices … I looked again at the leader of the group, a handsome blonde woman with spectacles. She was looking at the speaker with a smile on her lips, nodding her head in agreement with what he said, nodding again and again like a Chinese doll whose balance needs only a touch to set it going … I stood up on trembling legs, muttered something and went out. I do not know if anyone missed me. I do not know how I managed the short journey [home] to Kingston. By the time I reached Coombe Springs [J.G. Bennett’s residence where she was living at the time], I was hysterical. I stumbled upstairs to Mr. [Bennett’s] study and, between bursts of crying, I told him what I had seen. “You are more fortunate than you realize. You might have waited much longer to see the mechanicalness. You could go through your life without seeing it.” “But there—at a group meeting where we were all talking about waking up …” “And you? While you tell me this, are you awake?” “Yes—no. I was then.” “Then you were in the horrible position of being the one awake in a group of sleepers. I mean it when I tell you that you are fortunate. You will never feel the same about sleep again. But you must know that you are also a dreamer.” My Life 78–79

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dency or mannerism, learned and incorporated skill, expert practice and so on. Habits may be, on the one hand, individual, corporeal, perceptual, and personal, or, on the other hand, social, cultural, collective, historical and traditional. Habits can be good (e.g., daily exercise) or bad (e.g., smok- ing); there is a historical evolution of habits (e.g., eating habits), and there is a great fixity and resistance to change so that habits may be said to be intensely conservative. “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology” 55

Significantly, Gurdjieff was interested in human mechanicality only because he claimed that it must be seen and worked with if one wishes to become more present and have more opportunities to “see the world with fresh eyes.” To understand how human mechanicality relates to deeper, more “real” modes of awareness and consciousness, one can turn to Gurdjieff’s explication of human “three-centeredness.” In claiming that people are three-centered, Gur- djieff meant that human experience incorporates three broad modes of experience—bodily, emotional, and intellectual. He associated each of these experiential modes with a specific corporeal region or “center.” Thus, the intellectual center is associated with the head; the emotional center, with the breast, particularly the solar plexus; and the bodily center, with the four limbs and the base of the spine. Recognizing that the bodily center incorporates both instinctive and learned processes and actions, Gurdjieff described the bodily center as two separate realms of experience—the instinctive center and the moving center. The for- mer includes all automatic, “instinctive” workings of the body (e.g., breathing, digesting, or responding to illness), and the latter includes all learned bodily behaviors that originally require directed attention but, through repetition and practice, become “second nature” (e.g., catching a ball, driving a car, convers- ing in repetitive situations). Gurdjieff emphasized that these instinctive and moving aspects of the bodily center must be studied separately and, in this sense, human beings can be described as both “three-centered” (thinking, feeling, bodily) and “four-centered” (thinking, feeling, moving, instinctive). Table 1 summarizes the experiential range of each of the four centers. In clarifying more precisely what each center involves experientially, Gurdji- eff emphasized the degreeof attention present in the particular thought, feeling, or bodily action. He spoke of no attention, which grounds automatic, habitual behaviors and situations (e.g., swallowing, walking, or tying a shoe); attracted attention, which relates to experiences and encounters whereby one is drawn to and immersed in something in the world (e.g., playing a beloved sport, watching a favorite movie, or faithfully working through a newspaper crossword each

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Center Experiential aspects

Intellectual center The spectrum of cerebral awareness and consciousness, including thinking, figuring out, deciding, comparing, planning, imagining, fantasizing, and daydreaming.

Emotional center Feelings both positive and negative and varying in emotional intensity; ranges from momentary distress and irritation to deeper emotions like sadness, anger, jealousy, pleasure, joy, and love.

Moving center Learned bodily actions and behaviors that have become habitual—e.g., waving, throwing a ball, operating a machine, or playing a sport.

Instinctive center Bodily functions and processes that one is born with; so-called ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ functions like digestion, respiration, bodily healing, sensations, and sensuous impressions. day); and directed attention, which involves situations in which one makes an intentional effort to hold his or her awareness to the task at hand (e.g., mastering a new dance step, learning to throw a pot, or working to understand this article). Experientially, this range of attention means that each of the four centers incorporates situations of no attention, attracted attention, or directed attention as described in the four-by-three matrix of Table 2. As indicated by the table’s vertical headings, Gurdjieff used the phrase “moving part” for no attention, since these processes and actions are instinctive or habitual and therefore “just happen.” Likewise, he used the phrase “emotional part” for attracted attention, since the allure of the thing to which one is attracted involves feelings and emotional connectedness. In the same way, he used the phrase “intellectual part” for directed attention, since conscious cerebral effort is required to keep the attention focused and active. As Table 2 indicates, one can speak of the moving part of the intellectual center, the emotional part of the moving center, the intellectual part of the instinctive center, the emotional part of the

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table 2 Parts of centers, according to Gurdjieff

Instinctive Moving Emotional Intellectual center center center center

Intellectual Maintenance of Mechanical Artistic Intellectual part bodily wellbeing; inventiveness; creativity, vision, creativity, vision, (directed ground for spatial and creation. understanding, attention) physical health visualization; and discovery. & healing. ‘sense of direction’; ‘good with one’s hands.’

Emotional Awareness Pleasure Aesthetic, Wish to know part and response of bodily spiritual, and and the pleasure (attracted to pleasant & competence; ethical feelings; of knowing; attention) unpleasant love of also associated hope for sensations movement, with negative understanding (e.g., edible or including emotions like what one does rancid, safe or dance, craft, hate, envy, not understand dangerous, too and athletic jealousy, but senses hot or too cold performance. hopelessness etc. he/she can etc.). understand.

Moving Foundational Learned bodily Habitual Automatic part bodily processes behaviors, emotional thoughts and (no (e.g., blood flow, including habits reactions (e.g., associations; attention) breathing, body and routines; sense of comical cognitive temperature, described by or momentary processing of automatic Merleau-Ponty’s irritation; perceptions working of body ‘body-subject.’ lower ‘animal’ (called the organs etc.). emotions like ‘formatory cruelty and apparatus’ by uncontrollable Gurdjieff). anger).

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 150–175 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:24:26PM via free access “seeing the world with fresh eyes” 165 emotional center, and so forth. Each of these designations points to particular modes of human experience different from all others. In this sense, Gurdjieff’s understanding of human being via the four centers is noteworthy phenomenologically because its structure offers an organized way to locate and describe the extraordinary variety of human consciousness, experience, knowing, and action.13 iv Sketches of Human Situations Interpreted via the Four Centers and Their Parts

Gurdjieff claimed that, as one becomes progressively practiced in self-observation, he or she sees more clearly and fully how particular day-to-day experiences relate to the four centers and their three parts. Before I indicate how this understanding relates to aesthetic experience, I provide three examples of how the twelvefold matrix of Table 2 might be useful for clarifying specific situations experientially: (1) everyday bodily routines; (2) learning a new software program; and (3) playing a musical instrument. These sketches are indicative and partial; much more about each situation could be discovered through per- sistent, focused self-observation.

Carrying Out Day-to-Day Bodily Routines Everyday routines are typically habitual, involving the moving part of the moving center and usually requiring little or no directed attention. On occasion, other parts of centers become involved—for example, I chose a particular route for my daily walk because the emotional part of my emotional center is drawn to the handsome landscaping along a particular street; or the moving part of my intellectual center becomes involved because I must mentally reroute my daily walk due to street construction’s closing a stretch of sidewalk I usually traverse.

13 For further discussion of the centers and their parts, see Nicoll 1. 68–83, 2. 392–398; Ouspensky, A Psychology 58–62, 76–91, 96–114; Fourth Way 56–68. Besides the four centers highlighted in this article, Gurdjieff also spoke of people as “seven-centered beings,” a designation that includes, besides the four centers already described, the sex center and two higher centers—the higher emotional center and the higher intellectual center (see Nicoll 4. 1438–1449, 5. 1691–1693; Ouspensky, In Search 147, 194–198). These centers are less central to typical aesthetic experience and are not discussed here.

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Learning a New Software Program In beginning her effort to master the program, the learner gives directed attention to the software’s instruction guide, drawing on directed intellectual attention to gain a sense of commands and procedures. She practices with the program, drawing on directed attention to help fingers and hands master keyboard and mouse commands; with repetition, the moving part of the moving center becomes proficient in all movements, and finger and hand actions proceed automatically. Over time with additional practice, the moving part of the moving center comes to know the program intimately, and the learner becomes a proficient user. At this stage, the program becomes a ready-to-use part of the user’s lifeworld; she can turn her directed attention to writing, designing, or some other task.

Playing a Musical Instrument We assume that, via directed attention training the moving center, the musician has mastered the basic rudiments of playing the instrument, including proper fingering and technique. Via directed attention training the intellectual and moving centers, he has mastered musical notation and sight reading, which have become smoothly integrated with playing actions. After much practice, he becomes so comfortable with his instrument that it is an integral part of who he is. His playing becomes “second nature,” solidly grounded in the moving parts of moving and intellectual centers. As the musician proceeds beyond proficiency toward excellence, he is able to bring directed intellectual attention to the musical performance itself and, via the emotional parts of emotional and moving centers, introduce a deeper quality of feeling to his playing. In time, via attracted emotional attention, he may be drawn to one style of music rather than another and to particular musical pieces via which he feels a deeper emotional connection. Ultimately, with much musical experience, he may be able to engage intensively with the emotional part of the emotional center to create powerful musical experiences that in turn resonate with the emotional part of listeners’ emotional centers.14

14 As well as involving the activation and mastery of various parts of centers, any kind of training involves a progression of specific developmental stages that Gurdjieff described in terms of an ancient symbol known as the enneagram (Ouspensky, In Search 285–295). In his Dramatic Universe (2. 108–114), Bennett used the enneagram to examine the “realization of beauty in sound” by considering the learning and training process whereby a young woman with a gifted voice becomes a great singer: Through commitment, practice, and an able teacher, she comes to know “Joy in her art, Serenity in her conscience as artist, and Fulfilment in the purpose of her life” (113). Bennett points to how a progressive

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I present these three examples to offer a preliminary indication of how the matrix of Table 2 helps to locate and describe different aspects of particular experiences and modes of awareness. In real-life situations and in different ways for each of us, the parts of the four centers work smoothly together or dis- junctively in conflict.15 Eventually, the aim in self-observation is to become so alert to the four centers and their twelve parts that one can see, in the moment, the complete “inner terrain” of a particular experience. As was emphasized ear- lier, the Gurdjieffian perspective emphasizes that one is not to accept any Work ideas on faith, including this twelve-part matrix. One must test the matrix via self-observation and really see in one’s own experience that it provides an accurate delineation of who and what one is as a human being. Becoming familiar with centers and their parts helps individuals to see what sides of themselves dominate and what sides are less activated and might be strengthened. One aim is to become more balanced in terms of the centers and their parts.16

intensification of the emotional part of the emotional center plays a crucial role in the movement from potential to realization. 15 For example, when asked why one types routine work more quickly than less familiar, more complicated work, Ouspensky explained that “complicated work needs two centres. But even in copying, intellectual work enters. Moving centre cannot be trusted much; it controls imagination and dreams. So when it works, intellectual centre watches. If one works wholly with moving centre, one is half asleep. All co-operation of centres is a certain degree of awakenness. What does falling asleep mean? Disconnection of centres” (Fourth Way 65). 16 In this article, I can indicate only a few of the many ways conceptually that Gurdji- eff extended our understanding of human being and human experience. Beyond four- centeredness, Gurdjieff argued that humanness incorporates three broader, intermeshed dimensions that all must be understood and better integrated—what he called function, being, and will. The centers and their parts relate to function—in other words, the experiential processes grounded in the three centers and comprising bodily, emotional, and intellectual experiences and actions. In turn, being refers to the degree of one’s “inner togetherness” and the “amount one can bear”—in other words, the kinds and intensity of experience and life that one can take hold of and deal with. Gurdjieff emphasized that “the level of one’s being attracts his or her life” (Nicoll 1. 1); thus, one works to strengthen being so that his or her life will encounter favorable events and situations not available otherwise. Finally, there is will—the relative power of the person to decide and act so that he or she is an “intentional agent” in the world rather than a passive, reactive “machine.” On these three aspects of human being, see J. G. Bennett, Deeper Man 18–40; Nicoll 1. 144–153, 4. 1440–1442; Ouspensky, Fourth Way 302–330. Gurdjieffian associate Jane Heap summa- rized the effort to integrate function, being, and will by saying that “You do the Work to keep your past from becoming your future” (M. Anderson 121).

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Having introduced the centers and their parts, I next ask what they might mean for understanding aesthetic experience. In studying Table 2, one notes that three parts of two centers relate most directly to aesthetic experience. First, one can point to the experience of being moved emotionally by the artistic work, which is associated with the emotional part of the emotional center, whereby we are drawn to the work through some degree of attracted attention. Second, one can highlight the directed attention enlisted by the creative artist as he or she produces the artistic work, a situation associated with the intellectualpartof the emotional center and playing a central role in the artist’s envisioning, shaping, and finalizing the work. A third aspect of aesthetic experience is related to the emotional part of the moving center, associated with the love of movement and exemplified by an inspired dance performance or the pleasure of watching that performance. One also notes in Table 2 that aesthetic experience can be related to two parts of the intellectual center, though this mode of aesthetic engagement is associated more with intellectual rather than artistic endeavor. First, there is the emotional part of the intellectual center, linked with the wish to know, the satisfaction of working to know, and the pleasure of knowing, e.g., the scientist who envisions the possibility of creating a new vaccine, or the phenomenologist who wishes to understand aesthetic experience more fully. In turn, the actual creation of the intellectual work is associated with the intellectual part of the intellectual center, the inner place of intellectual insight and discovery via which the scientist actualizes the new vaccine or I work to appropriately envision and write this article. In summary (see Table 3), a Gurdjieffian perspective indicates that aesthetic experience is most directly related to two parts of the emotional center, one part of the moving center, and two parts of the intellectual center. Importantly, this understanding speaks only to the inner places from which experience springs to engage the aesthetic object or effort. Phenomenologists claim that all experience is intentional—in other words, consciousness and awareness do not exist unto themselves but are always directed outward toward some intended object, person, or situation in the world. In the case of aesthetic experience, one must consider the intentional arc between the artistic work and experiencers’ experiences of that work. In Gurdjieff’s language, intentionality is partially rephrased as impressions— the perceptual structures intertwining inner experience and things in the world experienced (Nicoll vol. 2 652–658). As can readily be observed in everyday awareness, impressions vary in quality and potency, sometimes dull and lim-

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Part of center Aesthetic aspects

Intellectual part of Creative vision, aesthetic sensibility, and artistic emotional center creation, whatever the art form.

Emotional part of Appreciation and love of the natural world and art; emotional center grounding of positive emotions such as pleasure, appreciation, joy, beauty, wonder, and love.

Emotional part of Pleasure and love of movement, whether via craft, art moving center forms, bodily skills, or athletic performance.

Intellectual part of Intellectual creativity, vision, understanding, invention, intellectual center and creation, whether written, mathematical, designed, or in some other cerebral form.

Emotional part of The wish to know, the effort to know, and the pleasure intellectual center of knowing. ited, at other times vivid and overwhelming. For Gurdjieff, the relative experiential impact of impressions is directly related to parts of centers. Because they require attention, the emotional and intellectual parts activate and receive impressions of stronger and higher quality, while the moving parts, requiring no attention, activate and receive impressions that are taken for granted, stale, and quickly forgotten. Gurdjieff argued that our awareness of the world is often commonplace and lackluster because impressions fall on the moving parts of centers rather than on the emotional and intellectual parts. The result is a bluntness and vapidity that mark another dimension of people as “sleeping machines.”17

17 Gurdjieff understood impressions as one of human beings’ three kinds of food, the other two being the air we breathe and the food we eat (Ouspensky, In Search 181; Nicoll 3. 1175– 1176). Ouspensky associate Rodney Collin illustrated the role of impressions in explaining how the same real-world situation can be understood so differently at different moments: “We can regard impressions as all that which enters from the outside world through the five senses. Only these impressions may just reach us without affecting us internally in any way, or they may enter us very deeply, their innermost meaning may be seen, and they

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In the discussion so far, I have sought to demonstrate how Gurdjieff’s understanding of the four centers and their parts might clarify the lived nature of aesthetic experience. In an integrated way, the centers and their parts identify the wide range of aesthetic encounter and help one to understand why an artistic work that moves him or her at one moment may lack emotional resonance at other moments. Because so much of lifeworld experience unfolds in the habitual oblivion of sleeping machines, our impressions of the world often lack vigor and presence. Understanding the centers helps one to see that deeper, more intense aesthetic experiences require activation of the centers’ higher parts, whereby engagement with the artistic work is more intense and real.18 Clearly, there are several other aspects of aesthetic experience that I have not discussed here, including the question of how the artistic work contributes to the relative intensity of a particular aesthetic experience. To provide a preliminary answer to that question, I turn to an interpretation presented by Gurdji- effian associate J. G. Bennett, best known for his four-volume masterwork, The Dramatic Universe, in which Gurdjieff’s philosophy played an integral part.19

may become transformed into intense emotion. For instance, one walks on the street and receives an impression of a beggar—one day it will be just a vague face which one takes as part of the scenery and which has no more significance for one than an old piece of newspaper. Another day one may actually see the man, see all he has been through, see what he is, see all that he can expect to become. Such a perception may suddenly connect with many pictures, memories and experiences, and give a flash of new understanding. It need not be a beggar. The same thing can happen through the simplest scene or object. The impression may be the same that one receives every day, but one day it is digested, that is, transformed into [deeper meaning].” (Collin 2–3). 18 In fact, the four centers and their three parts can be refined further in that each part is said to comprise three more parts—moving, emotional, and intellectual. Thus, one can observe experiences and situations relating to the intellectual part of the moving part of the intellectual center (the inner place, for example, from which most of the attention in learning the finger and mouse commands for software programs would arise); or the emotional part of the emotional part of the emotional center (the inner place, for example, from which the emotional force felt in playing a musical instrument with great feeling would arise); or the mechanical part of the emotional part of the emotional center (the inner place, for example, from which musicians in a dance band can play, “in automatic pilot,” standard songs requested repeatedly). For sure, an understanding of the “parts of parts of centers” offers further insights into a phenomenology of aesthetic experience, but that explication is beyond the scope of the present article. For further discussion of parts of parts of centers, see Nicoll 1. 68–87, 3. 1041–1046. 19 See note 3. In his exhaustive study of Bennett’s relationship with Gurdjieff, William James

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For Bennett, the relative power of the artistic work is “the intensity of its inner togetherness” that can “lead us far beyond the limits of the here and now” (“Art” 257). The most potent artistic work, he argued, “participates in the unity that is the togetherness of all reality.” One of his examples is van Gogh’s 1888 painting of the drawbridge in Arles, France (The Langlois Bridge), which depicts a one- horse cart passing over the iron-and-wood structure as a group of women wash clothes on the canal bank below.20 For Bennett, this painting evokes “a moment of eternity”:

The man in the cart still looks down at the washwomen in the summer of 1888. In a minute, he will have passed out of sight, but in the picture he is eternally united with the washerwomen, bridge, and swirling water flowing past. In the painting, all bridges are present … It is only for a few moments that the man in the cart and the washerwomen cross their lines of time. Space, time, and eternity are united in a wholeness that is pure experience. The moment only exists for the artist for one summer’s afternoon but, because of the intensity of its inner togetherness, it leads us far beyond the limits of here and now … Art is rightly called the discovery of the eternal in the temporal. “Art” 257

A second example illustrating Bennett’s understanding of the artistic work is found in volume 2 of the Dramatic Universe, where he interpreted the artistic work’s potential power in terms of emergence, a “significant sameness” that is timeless, yet through encounters in real-world time becomes progressively more concrete and engaging. He described how, beginning with a visit in childhood, he felt a deepening connection to Michelangelo’s Lamentation on the Dead Christ (1547–1553), today displayed in Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Bennett wrote:

[I first saw this Pieta] when a young child and revisited [it] several times at long intervals over a span of nearly sixty years. In the whole experi-

Thompson wrote that “Bennett’s teachings can be seen as authentically continuous with Gurdjieff” (1). Thompson concluded that Bennett “was one of the very few people capable of looking ‘beyond the man to his message’—that he understood what the teaching was really about” (Thompson 585). 20 Bennett’s discussion of van Gogh’s painting is included in a chapter entitled “Art” that was part of an early draft of The Dramatic Universe but not included in the four-volume published version (256–257).

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ence, a timeless quality emerges that was there from the first, and yet has deepened and been transformed into a fuller understanding of the [experience] that drew Michelangelo towards religious contemplation in his later years. It contributed to the formation in [my] early youth of the conviction that there is an invisible reality that cannot be held within the limits of time and space … As these lines are being written in a remote Welsh village, the present moment with its memories is one with innumerable impressions of Flo- rence, recollections of the cadence of Italian poetry, and of a vivid present feeling for the direct religious insights vouchsafed to the greatest artists as their life on earth nears its close. And yet it is not any nor all of these things. The emergent quality was there for the child almost too young for speech; it was renewed for the fifteen-year-old schoolboy who revisited Florence in 1912; it has become part of the understanding of the man—it is neither the same nor is it different from what it first was … The emergent quality of the artistic experience was strongly felt by Michelangelo himself. It has been recognized by all who have tried to understand the significance of art in the life of man, though lack of an adequate metaphysic has usually prevented its formulation … Dramatic Universe 2. 41–42

Bennett’s two examples of the role of time and timelessness in aesthetic experience intimate that a Gurdjieffian understanding of this phenomenon is much more sophisticated and multivalent than what I have offered here. As a phenomenologist, I have begun with the human dimension of aesthetic experience, pointing to how an understanding of “sleeping machines” and “four- centeredness” helps one understand why his or her engagement with an artistic work is sometimes overwhelming and inspiring and at other times humdrum and without force. One important need, according to Gurdjieff, is to find practical ways to activate and use the higher parts of the centers, thereby facilitating experiences and encounters that are more vivid emotionally and intellectually. In turn, Bennett’s insightful explications of van Gogh’s painting and Michelan- gelo’s Pieta point to the crucial role of the artistic work in aesthetic experience. Bennett’s accounts suggest that the relative aesthetic and emotional power of an artistic work is linked to an ‘inner togetherness’ that spotlights the timeless in this real world’s moments of time. In short, much more could be said about a Gurdjieffian understanding of aesthetic experience and the remarkable power of the artistic work. I hope this article offers an inkling of what is possible.

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