G. Michael Blahnik

Experientialism: Integrating Mind & Body, Spirit & Matter, the Many & the One G. Michael Blahnik

Experientialism: Integrating Mind & Body, Spirit & Matter, the Many & the One is a concise introduction to a new philosophy that continues and transforms the tradition established by phenomenologists and hermeneuticists like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, and Habermas without much of the philosophical abstraction that tends to characterize these areas of philosophy. Experientialism, as a philosophy, maintains that reality is equal to experience when "experience" is defined as a necessary combination of cognition, affect, behavior, sensation, environment and the "I". In this ontology, traditional mental phenomena (cognition, affect and the "I") and traditional physical phenomena (behavior, sensation and environment) are synthesized into an integrated whole. This entails that reality consists of a necessary connection between the environment and the self, i.e. the self cannot be disconnected from the environment ontologically, only intellectually. This renders our beliefs as relative and the structure of experience as objective, but objective in a new way. The book situates experientialism within the history of philosophy (part 1), explicates the experientialist philosophy itself (part 2), and includes a brief critique of materialism (part 3). It draws upon ego psychology and the developmental psychology of Stern in order to shed more light on the experientialist philosophy and connect it to current work in psychology. It argues for the transformation of the way we understand reality, reason, free will & determinism, the self, and the conflict between objective and relative thinking. It seeks to integrate the one and the many through its definition and use of experience.