Many things in life cannot be transmitted well by words, concepts, or books. Colors that we see cannot be described to a man born blind. Only a swimmer knows how swimming feels; the nonswimmer can get only the faintest idea of it with all the words and books in the world. The psychopath will never know the happiness of love. The youngster must wait until he is a parent in order to know parenthood fully and to say "I didn't realize". My toothache feels different from your toothache. And so it goes. Perhaps it is better to say that all of life must first be known experientially. There is no substitute for experience, none at all. [6-1] All the other paraphernalia of communication and of knowledge - words, labels, concepts, symbols, theories, formulas, sciences - all are useful only because people already know experientially. The basic coin in the realm of knowing is direct, intimate, experiential knowing. Everything else can be likened to banks and bankers, to accounting systems and checks and paper money, which are useless unless there is real wealth to exchange, to manipulate, to accumulate, and to order.
It is easy to carry this simple truth beyond its proper limits. For instance, while it is mostly true that the color red cannot be described to a congenitally blind man, yet this does not mean that words are useless, as some are prone to conclude. Words are fine for communicating and sharing experiences with those who have already experienced. Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Synanon, and similar groups of people who have "been there" prove both points: first, that words fail before lack of experience; and second, that they are quite good between people who have shared an experience (48, Appendix on rhapsodic communication). Daughters must wait until they themselves give birth before being able to "understand" their mothers and to be fully friendly with them. Even more, words and concepts are absolutely necessary for organizing and ordering the welter of experiences and the ultra experiential world of which they apprise us. (Northrop [59] is especially good on this point).
If we add to these considerations the whole world of the primary processes, of the unconscious and preconscious, of metaphorical communications, and of the nonverbal communications - as between two dancing partners, let us say - we get a further enrichment of the total picture, namely, that experiential knowledge is sine qua non but not all, i.e., it is necessary but not sufficient. Also we avoid thereby the trap of dichotomizing experiential knowledge from and against conceptual knowledge. My thesis is that experiential knowledge is prior to verbal-conceptual knowledge but that they are hierarchically-integrated and need each other. No human being dare specialize too much in either kind of knowing. Science with the psyche left in can be shown to be more powerful than the science which excludes experiential data.
Nor need these affirmations in any way contradict a "minimal" behaviorism, that is, a doctrine of levels in the reliability of knowledge in which public knowledge is granted to be more trustworthy and more constant for many purposes than private and subjective knowledge. Psychologists are only too aware of the shortcomings and even impossibility of a pure and sole introspectionism. We know too much of hallucinations, delusions, illusions, denials, repressions, and other defenses against knowing reality. Since you don't have my repressions or my illusions, comparing my subjective experience with your subjective experience is an easy and obvious way of filtering out the distorting power of my intrapsychic defensive forces. One might call this the easiest kind of reality-testing. It is a first step toward checking knowledge by making sure it is shared, i.e., that it is not a hallucination.
This is why I can think that (I) most psychological problems do and should begin with phenomenology rather than with objective, experimental, behavioral laboratory techniques, and also (2) that we must usually press on from phenomenological beginnings toward objective, experimental, behavioral laboratory methods. This is I think a normal and usual path - from a less reliable beginning toward a more reliable level of knowledge. To begin the scientific study of love, for instance, with physicalistic methods would be to be meticulous about something only crudely known, like exploring a continent with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass. But also to restrict oneself to phenomenological methods is to be content with a lower degree of certainty and reliability than is actually attainable.
The last few decades of clinical and experimental psychology have brought into clearer focus the logically prior need, before knowing, to be a good knower. The distorting power not only of the various psychopathologies but also of the more "normal" ungratified needs, hidden fears, characteristic defenses, i.e., of the "normal" or average personality, are far greater than mankind ever thought before this century. In my opinion we have learned from clinical and personological experience (1) that improvement of psychological health makes the person a better knower, even a better scientist, and (2) that a very good path to improved and fuller humanness or health has been via self-knowledge, insight, and honesty with oneself.
In effect what I am implying is that honest knowing of oneself is logically and psychologically prior to knowing the extrapsychic world. Experiential knowledge is prior to spectator knowledge. If you want to see the world, it is obviously sensible to be as good a seer as you can make yourself. The injunction might read, then: make yourself into a good instrument of knowledge. Cleanse yourself as you would the lenses of your microscope. Become as fearless as you can, as honest, authentic and ego-transcending as you can. Just as most people (or scientists) are not as fearless, ego-transcending, honest, unselfish, or dedicated as they could be, so most people are not as efficient cognizers as they are capable of becoming.
(I pause only to ask the question: What might all this mean for the education of scientists and for the scientific education of nonscientists? Even asking the question is enough to make us doubtful about what is called science education).
But the statement must be rounded out. We can't stop there. It is all very well to be honest, authentic, decent. But beyond honesty, what? Authenticity is not the same as knowledge, any more than a clean microscope is. It is fine to be honest, in fact it is prerequisite and sine qua non to being a good scientist. But it is also necessary to become skilled, competent, professional, knowledgeable, learned. Health is necessary but not sufficient for the would-be knower and doer.
That is to say, experiential knowledge is not enough. Self-knowledge and self-improvement are not enough. The task of knowing the world and of being competent within it still remains, and therefore also does the task of accumulating and ordering knowledge - about, that is, spectator knowledge, knowledge of the nonhuman.
I hope I make myself clear. Again I have been substituting a hierarchical integration for a dichotomous antagonism. The two kinds of knowledge are necessary to each other and under good circumstances can be and should be intimately integrated with each other .
What does the orthodox scientist mean by "knowing"? Let us remember that at the beginning of science the word "knowing" meant "knowing of the external physical world", and for the orthodox scientist it still does. It means looking at something that is not you, not human, not personal, something independent of you the perceiver. It is something to which you are a stranger, a bystander, a member of the audience. You the observer are, then, really alien to it, uncomprehending and without sympathy and identification, without any starting point of tacit knowledge that you might already have. You look through the microscope or the telescope as through a keyhole, peering, peeping, from a distance, from outside, not as one who has a right to be in the room being peeped into. Such a scientific observer is not a participant observer. His science can be likened to a spectator sport, and he to a spectator. He has no necessary involvement with what he is looking at, no loyalties, no stake in it. He can be cool, detached, emotionless, desireless, wholly other than what he is looking at. He is in the grandstand looking down upon the goings on in the arena; he himself is not in the arena. And ideally he doesn't care who wins.
He can be and should be neutral if he is looking at something utterly strange to him. It is best for the veridicality of his observations that he lay no bets, be neither for nor against, have no hopes or wishes for one outcome rather than another. It is most efficient, if he seeks a truthful report, that he move toward being nonaligned and uninvolved. Of course we know that such neutrality and noninvolvement is theoretically almost impossible. Yet movement toward such an ideal is possible, and is different from movement away from it.
It will help communication with those who have read Martin Buber if I call this I-It knowledge by contrast with the I-Thou knowledge that I shall try to describe. I-It knowledge is sometimes all you can do with things, with objects that have no human qualities to be identified with and to be understanding about. See also Sorokin (69, 287), who comes to similar conclusions from a different starting point.
I do not mean here that this alien knowledge of the alien is the best that can be managed, even for things and objects. More sensitive observers are able to incorporate more of the world into the self, i.e., they are able to identify and empathize with wider and wider and more and more inclusive circles of living and nonliving things. As a matter of fact, this may turn out to be a distinguishing mark of the highly matured personality. It is likely that some degree of such identification makes possible some corresponding degree of experiential knowledge, by becoming and being what is to be known rather than remaining totally the outside spectator Since this identification can be subsumed under "love" broadly defined, its ability to increase knowledge from within may be considered for research purposes an instance of improvement of knowledge by love. Or perhaps we might formulate a general hypothesis to read so: love for the object seems likely to enhance experiential knowledge of the object, with lack of love diminishing experiential knowledge of the object, although it may very well increase spectator knowledge of that same object.
An obvious illustration supported by common sense experience might be this. Researcher A is really fascinated with schizophrenics (or white rats or lichens). Researcher B, however, is much more interested in manic-depressive insanity (or monkeys or mushrooms). We may confidently expect that Researcher A will (a) freely choose or prefer to study schizophrenics, etc., (b) work better and longer at it, be more patient, more stubborn, more tolerant of associated chores, (c) have more hunches, intuitions, dreams, illumination about them, (d) be more likely to make more profound discoveries about schizophrenia, and (e) the schizophrenics will feel easier with him and say that he "understands" them. In all these respects he would almost certainly do better than Researcher B. But observe that this superiority is in principle far greater for acquiring experiential knowledge than it is for acquiring knowledge about something, or spectator knowledge, even though Researcher A probably could do a bit better at that, too.
So far as spectator knowledge of the alien is concerned, any competent scientist or research assistant may confidently be expected to accumulate knowledge about anything in a normal, routine way, e.g., external statistics. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what happens a great deal today in an age of "projects", grants, teams, and organizations. Many scientists can be hired to do one disconnected, passionless job after another, just as a good salesman prides himself on being able to sell anything, whether he likes it or not, or as a horse pulls whatever wagon he happens to get hitched to.
This is one way of describing the Cartesian split between the knower and the known that the existentialists, for instance, speak of today. We might also call it the "distancing" or perhaps even the alienation of the knower from his known. It must be clear from what has gone before that I can conceive of other kinds of relationships between knower and known or between perceiver and percept. I-Thou knowledge, knowledge by experiencing, knowledge from within, love knowledge, Being-Cognition, fusion knowledge, identification knowledge - all these have been or will be mentioned. Not only do these other forms of knowing exist, but also they are actually better, more efficacious, more productive of reliable and valid knowledge if we are trying to acquire knowledge of a particular person or even persons in general. If we wish to learn more about persons, then this is the way we'd better go about it.
Fullest and richest experiencing of the kind described by the Zen Buddhists, the general semanticists, and the phenomenologists includes at least the following aspects (my own primary source of data here are studies of peak experiences):
1. The good experiencer gets "utterly lost in the present", to use Sylvia Ashton-Warner's beautiful phrase. He loses his past and his future for the time being and lives totally in the here-now experience. He is "all there", immersed, concentrated, fascinated.
2. Self-consciousness is lost for the moment.
3. The experiencing is timeless, placeless, societyless, historyless.
4. In the fullest experiencing a kind of melting together of the person experiencing with that which is experienced occurs. This is difficult to put into words but I shall try below.
5. The experiencer becomes more "innocent", more receptive without questioning, as children are. In the purest extreme the person is naked in the situation, guileless, without expectations or worries of any kind, without "shoulds" or "oughts", without filtering the experience through any a priori ideas of what the experience should be, or of what is normal, correct, proper, right. The innocent child receives whatever happens without astonishment, shock, indignation, or denial and without any impulse to "improve" it. The full experience inundates the "helpless", will-less, amazed, and unselfishly interested experiencer.
6. One especially important aspect of full experiencing is the abeyance of importance-unimportance. Ideally the experience is not structured into relatively important or unimportant aspects, central or peripheral, essential or expendable.
7. In the good instance fear disappears (along with all other personal or selfish considerations). The person is then nondefensive. The experience rushes in upon him without hindrance.
8. Striving, willing, straining tend to disappear. Experience happens without being made to happen.
9. Criticism, editing, checking of credentials or passports, skepticism, selecting and rejecting, evaluating - all tend to diminish or, in the ideal, to disappear for the time being, to be postponed.
10. This is the same as accepting, receiving, being passively seduced or raped by the experience, trusting it, letting it happen, being without will, noninterfering, surrendering (82).
11. All of this adds up to laying aside all the characteristics of our most prideful rationality, our words, our analysis, our ability to dissect, to classify, to define, to be logical. All of these processes are postponed. To the extent that they intrude, to that extent is the experience less "full". Experiencing of this sort is much closer to Freud's primary process than to his secondary processes. It is in this sense nonrational - although it is by no means antirational. [6-3]
One trouble with classical science applied to psychology is that all it knows how to do well is to study people as objects, when what we need is to be able to study them also as subjects.
To be a passive spectator of ourselves and our own subjective processes is to be like a spectator at a movie. Something is happening to us; we are not making it happen. We do not have the feeling of willing it to happen. We simply observe.
The feeling of being an active subject (or agent) is quite different. We are involved, we try, we strive, we make efforts and we get tired, we can succeed or fail, we can feel strong or weak, when, for instance, we try to recall, to understand, to solve a problem, to call up an image deliberately. These are the experiences of willing, of being responsible, of being a prime mover, of being able, of being in command of oneself, self-determined rather than other-determined, caused, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, unable, bossed, commanded, or manipulated (43, 100). Apparently, some people are not aware of having such experiences or have them only weakly, although I am sure it would be possible to teach an average person to be conscious of such experiencing.
Difficult or not, it has to be done. Otherwise we shall be unable to understand the concepts variously called individuation, the real self, self-actualization, and identity. Furthermore we shall never be able to make any headway with the phenomena of willing, spontaneity, fully functioning, responsibility, self-esteem, and confidence. Ultimately, this stress on man as active subject makes possible the image of man as an initiator, a creator, a center of action, as one who does things rather than one who is done to.
The various behaviorisms all seem to generate inexorably such a passive image of a helpless man, one who (or should I say "which "?) has little to say about his (its?) own fate, who doesn't decide anything. Perhaps it is this ultimate philosophical consequence that makes all such psychologies totally unacceptable to so many because they neglect what is so richly and undeniably experienced. And it does no good to cite here the ways in which common sense perceptions are contradicted by scientific knowledge, e.g., the sun circling the earth. It is not a real parallel. My crucially important experience of being an active subject is - depending on the comprehensiveness of the objectivism - either denied altogether or is melted down into stimuli and responses, or is simply pushed aside as "unscientific", i.e., beyond respectable scientific treatment. An accurate parallel would be either to deny the existence of the sun, to insist that it was really something else, or else to deny that it could be studied.
All these errors would be avoided if the people who espouse positivism and behaviorism were not so often too sweeping, too doctrinaire, too monistic, too excluding. I have no doubt that objective, measurable, recordable, repeatable movements or responses are often more reliable, more trustworthy forms of knowledge than are subjective observations. Neither am I in any doubt about the frequent desirability, as a strategy, of moving in this direction nor about anyone's right to prefer it. Today we must study anxiety, depression, or happiness mostly as private experiences and verbal reports. But this is because we can't do any better today. On the day when we discover an externally and publicly observable and measurable correlate of anxiety or of happiness, something like a thermometer or a barometer, on that day a new era in psychology will have begun. Since I think this is not only desirable but possible, I have pressed in this direction. This amounts to seeing data as arranged in a hierarchy of greater and lesser reliability, a hierarchy of knowledge that parallels an equally necessary idea of "stages or levels of development of science". [6-4]
Such an approach is quite compatible with a problem-centered orientation and with an experiential psychology, a self-psychology, etc. It is, so to speak, an open-door policy rather than an excluding policy in science, a tolerant pluralism rather than a "true faith". Any question can be asked, any problem raised. Once it is raised, you go on from there to do the best you can to get the answer to that particular question, the solution to that particular problem, without permitting yourself to be hampered by any conceptual or methodological pieties that might forbid you to use all your wits, all your capacities in the enterprise. One could almost say at such a moment that there are no rules, at least none that is binding a priori. Methods must be created as necessary, and so also must any heuristic framework of definition and concept that may be useful or necessary. The only requirement is to do the best you can with the problem at the time and under the circumstances. [6-5] Certainly I would not care to give instructions about how to tackle all future problems, and certainly I wouldn't give much respect to the doctrinaire scientist who assumes in effect that what was good enough for his daddy is good enough for him.
Nor do I wish to imply that a scientist may not choose the limited objectives and aspirations of classical science if he wishes. Some people dislike skating on thin ice. And why should they not do as they please? It would be a blow to science if all scientists preferred the same problem, the same method, the same philosophy, just as it would be a deathblow to the orchestra if everyone preferred to play the oboe. Clearly science is a collaboration, a division of labor, and no single man is responsible for the whole of it, nor could he be. No, this is not the issue. Rather it is the tendency to get pious and metaphysical about these personal preferences and to exalt them into rules for everyone else. It is the insistence on generating sweeping and excluding philosophies of knowledge, of truth, and therefore of human nature that makes trouble. This is hard to make clear, as I discovered long ago when I tried to argue with a woman who lived exclusively on Brazil nuts and cabbage. It was all useless because she concluded only that I was "prejudiced" against nuts and cabbage. Or, to the same point, we can share the bafflement of the man whose mother gave him two ties for his birthday. He put one on to please her, only to be asked, "Why do you hate the other tie?"
Inductive knowledge can never bring certainty. It can only generate higher subjective and objective probabilities. But in a real sense experiential knowledge can be certain and perhaps even is the only certainty, as so many philosophers have thought (passing over, for the moment, the question of mathematical certainty). In any case, it is real and, at times, certain for the psychotherapist.
Of course, such statements are debatable, resting as heavily as they do on particular definitions of particular words. It is not necessary to enter upon these debates here. And yet it should be possible to convey some of the operational meanings to which such statements refer, since they are indubitable to most clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and personologists. If these meanings can be communicated, this should contribute to greater understanding between scientists of the personal and of the impersonal.
The mode of operation of Synanon, Alcoholics Anonymous, "street-corner workers", and other similar groups can supply us with excellent examples. These subcultures work on the principle that only a (cured) drug addict or alcoholic can fully understand, communicate with, help, and cure another drug addict or alcoholic. Only the one who knows is accepted at all by addicts. Addicts permit themselves to be known only by addicts. Furthermore only addicts passionately want to cure addicts. [6-6] Nobody else loves them enough and understands them enough. As they themselves say, "Only somebody who has been through the same mill really knows ". One major consequence of having shared the experience and of knowing it from within is the great sureness and skill that permits one of the ultimate tests of knowledge, namely, the ability to inflict helpful pain without fear, without guilt, without conflict or ambivalence. I have pointed out elsewhere (46) that the perception of oughtness and requiredness is an intrinsic consequence of clearly perceived realness and sureness of knowledge, and that decisiveness and sure action, relentless and tough if need be, is a kind of Socratic consequence of "ought-perception". (Socrates taught that ultimately evil behavior can come only from ignorance. Here I am suggesting that good behavior needs as a precondition good knowledge and is perhaps a necessary consequence of good knowledge). That is, from sureness of knowledge - and from the fact that some kinds of sureness of knowledge can come only from experiencing - comes effective, successful, efficient, decisive, stern, strong, unambivalent action.
It is precisely this kind of action - and perhaps only this kind of action - that can help addicts because their way of life so often rests on "conning" others, on false tears and promises, on seducing and ingratiating, on wearing a false front, on fooling people with it and therefore feeling contempt for them. Only other addicts, who know, cannot be fooled. I have seen them in the process of contemptuously, brutally, obscenely ripping away this false front, the hitherto accepted lies and promises, the successful defenses, the phony mask that formerly worked so well. I have seen the experienced ones laughing at the tears, touching and poignant to the inexperienced spectator but soon exposed as fake, maudlin, guileful. To date this is the only way that works. This seeming harshness is pragmatically "called for". It is therefore ultimately compassionate rather than sadistic. It is far more truly loving than the lack of sternness which is falsely labeled affection, which creates the addict, and which "supports his habit" rather than letting him become strong enough to go away. In this subsociety the contempt for social workers, psychiatrists, and other "experts" is thick and heavy. There is a total mistrust and hatred and sometimes fear of "mere" book knowledge, of people with degrees, of people who are certified as knowing but who in fact know nothing. This itself is probably a potent dynamic factor in helping to maintain this "world". In this realm spectator knowledge is unmistakably different from and opposed to experiential knowledge, and it is clearly far less effective. And because this difference makes a difference, it is thereby proved to be real.
If I may milk still another moral from this experience, I would like to call attention to the lunatic fact that as nearly as I can make out, the Synanon type of treatment cures many of its addicts, while our whole apparatus of hospitals, physicians, police, prisons, psychiatrists, and social workers cures practically none. But this ineffective and perhaps worse than useless apparatus has the complete support of the whole society, of all the professions, and eats up huge amounts of money. The effective method, as nearly as I, a lay observer, can make out, gets practically no money at all, no official support, and indeed it is officially neglected or opposed by all the professions, by the government, by the foundations. Former drug addicts normally do not have degrees and professional training for obvious reasons, and therefore they do not have "standing" and "status" in the conventional world. Thus they cannot get jobs, money, or backing in spite of the clear fact that they are the only effective therapists available. [6-7]
In the conventional world actual success seems to be no substitute for "normal professional or scientific training", however ineffective this may be. Six credits of "How to Cure" can carry more weight than actual curing, as in some places two years of teaching in the Peace Corps does not satisfy the requirement for courses in how to teach. I could list dozens of examples of this confusion between the sign and the reality signified, the map and the territory, the medal and the hero, the college degree and the educated person. The literature of General Semantics is full of them. Think how easy it is to get a grade of A in a course on marriage and how difficult it is to achieve a good marriage, as Trainer has pointed out.
In the realm of science there are also plenty of situations of this sort in which experiential knowledge counts for much or is even sine qua non, fields in which mere spectator knowledge is helpful only when it is added to experiential knowledge rather than substituted for it.
What we approach in the Synanon story is the ultimate absurdity of bureaucratic science, in which some portions of the truth may have to be defined as "unscientific", in which truth is really true only when gathered by properly certified and uniformed "truth collectors" and according to traditionally sanctified methods or ceremonies. [6-8]
We can view this set of problems from still another angle, which I can illustrate with the Maslow Art Test, something my wife and I made up to test for holistic perception and intuition by testing the ability to detect the style of an artist (55, 57). One of our discoveries was that "knowledge of art", as in art majors, professional artists, etc., sometimes helped and some times hurt performance in this test. The better way to perceive "style" is not to analyze or dissect it but to be receptive, global, intuitive. For instance, so far there is some evidence to indicate that a quick reaction is apt to be more successful (57) than long, careful, meticulous study.
This prerequisite for holistic perception of qualities of wholeness I shall call "experiential na?vet?", and I define it as a willingness and an ability to experience immediately without certain other ways of "knowing". It means setting aside all our tendencies to rubricize, to know instead of to perceive, to dissect into elements, to split apart. After all, a quality of wholeness is something which pervades the whole and is lost by dissecting.
So those individuals who "know" art only in the analytic, atomistic, taxonomic, or historical sense are less able to perceive and enjoy. And the possibility must be admitted that education of a merely analytic sort may actually diminish originally present intuitiveness. (A better example might be conventional mathematics "education", which is far more successful in teaching children to be blind to the beauties and wonders of mathematics). In every field of knowledge, there exist some "blind knowers" of this sort - botanists who are blind to the beauty of flowers, child psychologists who make children flee in terror, librarians who hate their books to be taken out, literary critics who condescend to poets, the dried-out teacher who ruins his subject for his students, etc. There are the Ph.D.'s who are "licensed fools" and the joyless non-scholars who publish only to avoid perishing, the ones of whom one girl whispered to another at a party, "He's no fun; he doesn't know anything but facts". Some artists, some poets, some "hysterical" people who rely heavily on feeling, emotion, intuition, and impulsiveness, some religious people, the more mystical people are apt to stop right there. They may then repudiate knowledge, education, science, and intellect as destroyers of instinctive feeling, of innate intuition, of natural piety, of innocent perspicuity. I think this strain of anti-intellectual suspicion runs far deeper than we realize, even in intellectuals themselves. For instance, I think it is one of the sources of the deeper misunderstandings between women and men in our culture. And recent history has shown how it can erupt into terrible political philosophies.
Orthodox, analytic, mechanistic science has no really good way of defending itself against these charges because there is a fair amount of truth and justice in them. A more inclusive conception of science can, however, meet and answer these accusations, i.e., a science that includes the idiographic, the experiential, the Taoistic, the comprehensive, the holistic, the personal, the transcendent, the final, etc.
Our art test can serve us as an instance. Assuming that more careful research will confirm our strong first impressions, then it seems also to be true that there are other people whose perspicuity, intuitiveness, and ability to perceive style are improved and enriched by education and by knowledge. Somehow they are able to bring nomothetic, abstract, lawful, verbal knowledge to bear upon their experiencing of the individual instance. Their knowledge helps them to perceive and makes their perceiving richer, more complex, and more enjoyable. In the extreme instance it can enhance even the transcendent aspects of reality, the sacred, the mysterious, the miraculous, the awe-inspiring, the final. Even saintliness, that was supposed by many to come only with na?vet? and innocence, we are now finding may come rather with sophistication and knowledge, at least with the kind of more inclusive knowledge that I am talking about. (This observation or hypothesis or guess is an extrapolation from my studies of self-actualizing people and of the effects of psychotherapy rather than from the art test).
It is just these people, the sages, in whom wisdom, goodness, perspicuity, and learning become a unity, who manage somehow to retain this "experiential na?vet?", this "creative attitude" (45) , this ability to see freshly as a child sees, without a priori expectations or demands, without knowing in advance what they will see. I have tried to understand how and why this happens (45, 47), but the ability to transform abstract knowledge into richer experiencing is still a mystery and is therefore most obviously a rich question for research. The broader research questions are: when does knowledge conceal and when does it reveal?
What can the word "proof" mean in the experiential realm? How can I prove to someone that I am experiencing vividly, that, for example, I am profoundly moved? And how can this be "validated" in the usual external sense of this term? Of course it is valid to me if I am authentically and vividly experiencing it. But how to prove this to someone else? Is there some shared external thing that we can both point to simultaneously? How describe it, communicate it, measure it, verbalize it?
There are special difficulties here. Many people have called experience ineffable, incommunicable, unverbalizable, impossible for scientists to work with. But often these difficulties are consequences more of the world of abstraction than of the world of experience. Communications of a kind and of a degree are possible, but they are of a kind different from that which exists between chemists (see 48, app. F on "rhapsodic communication", 43, app). . Abstract, verbal, unambiguous communication may be less effective for some purposes than metaphorical, poetic, esthetic, primary process techniques.