Ch. III (pt. 1) - Getting Existential with "An Object"

So far in the book we have organisms that are occurring as (and in) their environment, who are implying their functional cycles and occurring (sometimes) into them. In this model, there is as yet no differentiation from within the organism between itself, and—well—anything.

For a living organism, how does anything become some thing? How might things come to be differentiated in the first place as a thing? According to Gendlin, differentiation happens in a much more (implicitly) meaningful way than our current models suggest.

In this episode, we tackle everything in Chapter 3 up to the first subsection, after which Gendlin starts discussing some motivations of the model (tune in for part 2 coming soon).

So grab you books and come learn with us! We're glad you're here!

00:00 - Introduction

01:19 - p. 14, paras. 1–3, "Our concept of implying has already moved to a second meaning..."

07:13 - p. 14, para. 4, "If the creature does not instantly die..."

15:33 - p. 14, paras. 5–6, "...perhaps a new way forms to do something that changes the implying somewhat..."

18:10 - p. 14, paras. 7–8, "Now we are speaking not just of the whole body-identical 'environment'..."

21:31 - p. 15, para. 1, "The part of en#2 that separates itself by being absent plays a special role..." (we start getting existential here)

28:47 - Objects and oneness, God, purpose...

37:26 - p. 15, para. 2, "...all of that process which was stopped by the absence will occur..."

39:28 - p. 15, para. 3, "...the process that resumes is much more complex than one could guess..."

40:27 - p. 15, paras. 4–5, "The animal recognizes the object."

44:47 - A "too early" definition of Focusing

50:41 - p. 15, para. 6, "In a resumption, the body does not encounter..."

52:32 - p. 15, para. 7, "So what we call an object is part of en#2, and part of the functional cycle..."

56:36 - p. 16, para. 1, "Since the next occurring does not immediately change it..."

01:00:05 - The text is creating itself in its own absences

01:02:28 - p. 16, para. 2, "When people say that 'objects are a function of the organism'..."

01:19:13 - p. 16, para. 3–4, "In our third meaning of the concept of implying..."

01:23:07 - p. 16, para. 5, "Later, we will develop terms for how a body can have objects that can be there for it..."

01:31:29 - p. 16, para. 6, "By allowing our terms to function logically this way, we arrive at puzzling results..."

01:39:14 - p.17, paras. 1–3, "When the object returns, the stopped process resumes and moves on..."

01:41:49 - p. 17, para. 4, "The object implies the resumed process to the body..."