Elena Holmgren

Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in the so-called group flow state both in positive psychology and in the phenomenology of collective agency. Group flow is a form of collective agency in which agents experience a sense of intensified efficacy coupled with diminished individual ownership of action and heightened shared ownership thereof. This state reveals an under-theorized dimension of the sense of agency: an experience in which the source of one’s agency is a sense of oneness rather than individual autonomy. However, its first-person character remains poorly understood. I begin by revealing the lack of conceptual rigour and precision in key current psychological accounts of group flow. I then argue that phenomenology has the descriptive tools needed to generate a more precise description of the experiential character of group flow. Finally, drawing on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology, I give a novel phenomenological account of the intentional structures that jointly constitute group flow. This account explains how individual agents’ sense of efficacy in action can be transformed by their sense of oneness with others.

This chapter reconstructs and critically assesses Raymond Tallis’ critique of scientific naturalist accounts of consciousness, which for all their diversity share a basic commitment to explaining consciousness by reifying it. My aim is to bolster Tallis’ critique of naturalism by drawing on the descriptive and theoretical resources of Husserlian phenomenology. I reconstruct Tallis’ argument that consciousness, as the condition of possibility for explicitness, cannot be explained with reference to empirical objects and their causal relations. I show that this Tallisian argument structurally parallels Husserlian arguments for the explanatory primacy of consciousness understood as the condition for the intelligibility of objects. I then show that despite Tallis’ advance over naturalist accounts, he maintains a residual, problematic objectivism insofar as he, too, ultimately looks to the mode of being of objects when identifying the principles for the individuation of conscious subjects. I argue that this residual objectivism leads Tallis into circularity. I conclude that to resolve this circularity and bolster his anti-naturalist position, which sees consciousness as not only epistemically foundational but also ontologically irreducible in a way that is inconsistent with scientific naturalism, Tallis would benefit from more explicitly engaging with transcendental phenomenology.