‘Fourth Person’ | Collective Sensing
featured image | by Priscilla Du Preez
Abstract
In the context of polycrisis and systemic collapse, the primary challenge we face is a widely shared sense of collective depression—a lack of agency in regard to the bigger picture. What does it take to serve evolutionary transformation in the face of this collapse? In our view, it takes a form of knowing which extends beyond the current constructs of first-, second-, and third-person knowing around which much of our current learning, knowledge, and leadership systems are organized. In this paper, we suggest fourth-person knowing as a distinct epistemology at the intersection of the other three, and we draw on our action research to illuminate five phenomena that point to and distinguish fourth-person knowing: (1) knowing that comes through me but is not of me; (2) knowing that shows up in my individual experience as a decentering of perception; (3) a heightened sense of potential, of possibilities that previously were experienced as unattainable now appear to be in reach; (4) sensing your own agency in helping the ‘universe’ (the larger field) to evolve; and (5) significant long-term impact in terms of practical results. It is our hope that by articulating fourth-person knowing, we can provide an epistemic basis upon which research and inquiry methodologies can be built, complementing first-, second-, and third-person forms of inquiry, methodologies based on deep sensing and presencing that support individuals and collectives to recognize, connect with, and manifest what is theirs to do in the wider context of this moment and the incipient patterns of emergence and movement making.
Keywords
fourth-person knowing, Theory U, social field, trans-subjectivity, self-transcending knowledge, presencing, awareness-based systems change
READ THE PAPER IN ITS ENTIRETY HERE
Reprinted from the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, Volume 4 Issue 1
Scharmer, O., & Pomeroy, E. (2024). Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 4(1), 19–48. https://doi.org/10.47061/jasc.v4i1.7909
Introduction
The number one problem facing humanity today is not climate change, inequality, or war. It is not the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI). Rather, it is our sense that we are powerless to change any of it. The old ways of knowing and acting in our world are no longer sufficient. Our systems are collapsing. If we are going to serve societal transformation in the face of this collapse, as we believe is fully possible, we need to draw on a new form of knowing—knowing for transformative action.
Our existing categories of knowing—first-person (subjective), second-person (intersubjective), and third-person (outside-objective)—upon which our systems of learning, knowledge creation, and leadership are based, are important but not sufficient to activate the deep shift and energy that are called for now. We need a quality of knowing that allows us to connect with and appreciate more deeply the dignity and interiority of the worlds that surround us and that we co-shape and co-enact moment to moment. It is the collective interior of the worlds co-arising in us in general, and the more subtle and emerging qualities of social systems in particular, that have remained in an epistemological blind spot if seen from the viewpoint of positivist approaches to science. And yet, deep in our own experience, many citizens, change makers, and leaders know that to meaningfully address the profound polycrisis of our time, we need to tap into a deeper source of knowing. That source of knowing already exists and in many ways underlies the actions of thousands, if not millions, of innovators and networked communities around the world. This deep collective awareness is a gateway to emerging future possibilities that depend on our presence and agency to manifest. We believe it is this very personal and yet collective-interior way of sensing and knowing that is at the core of our planetary moment and movement making and that we refer to and introduce here as fourth-person knowing.
In this paper, we unpack the fourth-person perspective, first making the case that it is a knowledge type sui generis, epistemologically distinct from the other three forms, and then drawing on our action research to illuminate its source, form, and nature. Fourth-person knowing can be thought of as an expression and extension of self-transcending knowledge, or “tacit knowledge prior to its embodiment in day-to-day practices,” which emphasizes “the ability to sense and presence the emerging opportunities, to see the coming-into-being of the new.” The extension here is to bring self-transcending knowing into the frame of person-perspective epistemologies (first-, second-, and third-person knowing), exploring the epistemic space where the boundary between these forms of knowing blurs, and where there is both overlap and differentiation between knower and known. One of our intentions in bringing self-transcending knowing into the fourth-person frame is to provide an epistemological basis upon which research and inquiry methodologies can be built in parallel to first-, second-, and third-person forms of inquiry—methodologies based on sensing and presencing.
The concept of presencing, and the Theory U approach that underpins it, is based on the assumption that human beings have the capacity for deep sensing. It is a capacity for sensing not only what is, through perspective-taking and tuning in to different perspectives, but also for sensing what isn’t yet, what is about to emerge. Sensing is really about embodied knowing. It is aesthetic, drawing on the Greek aisthesis: the knowing of all our senses. Presencing combines sensing with actualizing the emerging future.
Presencing is essentially an antidote to positivism, which separates mind and world. The core assumption underlying fourth-person knowing is that mind and world are not separate, but rather are intertwined in a co-shaping relationship. As such, presencing sits firmly in the blind spot of generative artificial intelligence (AI). AI excels at processing, ordering, and extrapolating from masses of existing data, and this is the place from which it projects the future. But AI cannot source from this deeper level of sensing, which we maintain is where the new comes into being. Presencing is therefore the source of knowing needed to address the deeper dimensions of the challenges we face. The more the capacity for deep sensing and presencing is developed and cultivated, the more easily skilled change makers, leaders, and other developmental professionals will be able to tune in to latent developmental possibilities that are neither empirically evident (yet) nor merely a subjective fiction in the eye of the beholder. They can be evidenced through a new category of cognitive practices that, in this article, we call fourth-person knowing.
A Blind Spot in Western Cognition
The fourth-person perspective addresses a type of knowing that is largely missing in today’s institutions of science, education, and societal decision-making. It is missing because it addresses a blind spot in Western cognitive epistemologies. Neurophenomenologist Francisco Varela described experience as being “at the very center of many traditions, but it has been obscured in the Western tradition, particularly in science…it is as if there’s a big blind spot.”
Varela developed a synthesis of the three approaches that he saw as addressing this blind spot—psychological introspection, phenomenology, and meditation—to draw out and formalize what was methodologically consistent across them. His intention was to build and support a science “which includes first-person, subjective experience as an explicit and active component.” Varela and his colleagues identified a framework and method for inquiring into first-person experience, what they called the core process of becoming aware, made up of the three gestures of suspension, redirection, and letting go. They maintained that these gestures can be, and need to be, cultivated through practice in order to build the capacity to access first-person experience such that it moves beyond impressionistic descriptions to “phenomenal descriptions that are rich and subtly interconnected enough in comparison to third-person accounts.”
The Theory U framework is grounded in the three gestures of becoming aware outlined by Varela and colleagues, but it extends their application from individual cognition to social systems. The resulting Matrix of Social Evolution is based on two axes: the shifts of awareness and consciousness that Varela described (suspension, redirection, letting go) on the vertical axis, and the different levels of social systems (micro, meso, macro, mundo) on the horizontal axis. As people or social entities go down the left side of the U (i.e., down the vertical axis of the Matrix of Social Evolution) in their process of cognition, the boundaries between first-, second-, and third-person knowing as discrete experiences begin to fade. The source of cognition shifts to a realm of interaction that blends subjective, objective, and intersubjective knowing, which we refer to as self-transcending, or trans-subjective, knowing. Trans-subjective knowing is the knowing of the collective interior. While it shows up in our subjective experience, it is not purely subjective knowing; nor is it purely objective or intersubjective. Rather, trans-subjective knowing incorporates and blurs the boundaries between all these perspectives to connect with a distinct form of knowing that is experienced as coming through us but is not of us.
Essential to the exploration of the collective interior is the concept of the social field. The social field can be thought of as the interiority of a social system. It is the web of relationships and interactions that give a social space or system its unique quality. The social field has a manifest dimension that includes visible results of the system and relational patterns, and it also has a source dimension from which the manifest qualities of the relational space arise. Elsewhere we have defined social fields as “the entirety of the social system with an emphasis on the source conditions that give rise to patterns of thinking, conversing and organizing, which in turn produce practical results.” We emphasize the source dimension as it has been largely overlooked in the consideration of social systems; in other words, it is the blind spot of Western cognition. As we move through the layers of interiority of the social system, through paradigms of thought, through the felt sense or quality of the space, we get to the source dimension where the layers above originate. Whereas the upper dimensions have a past/present quality—for example, carrying collective memory or having an in-the-moment felt quality or atmosphere—the source dimension has a future orientation, connecting with or even pulling toward that which is coming into being. This gives the source dimension of the social field a quality of being situated in a particular setting yet also connected to a more universal and cosmological set of forces. It is the knowing that arises at the source level of the collective interior that we consider to be fourth-person knowing.
Just as we can refine our capacity to discern, observe, and describe first-person experience in the way Varela describes, so can we build our capacity to access fourth-person knowing, the knowing of the field, through similar processes applied to the collective. Thus, the work of Varela and colleagues provides a foundation and point of departure. The key differentiator between our work and this foundation is that while Varela’s core unit of analysis was individual inner experience, our primary focus is the collective inner experience.
Fourth-Person Knowing: The Missing Perspective
Fourth-person knowing has a particular quality of being neither my knowing nor yours, neither solely outside nor inside me, but rather something beginning to articulate from a different source that operates beyond these distinctions. Returning to Varela and the redirection of attention described earlier, when the act of redirection from object to source is applied to collective inner experience, what is that source? We identify it as the presence of the social field. Because the social field becomes known to us through our interactions, we have an intimate relationship with it, but the field also takes on its own autonomous beingness.
The beingness of the field is reflected in various forms of non-Western, holistic, and integrated cosmologies and epistemologies such as Daoism and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Maori scholars Johnson, Allport, and Boulton (2024) state, “Our worldview includes not only the interconnected ecological, social, psychological, or economic, but also the philosophical and spiritual, and the connection between the Atua (deities) and humanity.” The interconnection that gives rise to fourth-person knowing has been surfaced by Melanie Goodchild, Anishinaabe from Ketegunseebee First Nation, in her work on Relational Systems Thinking. In her dialogue with Haudonosaunee Elders, the source of knowing embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems surfaced repeatedly. Elder Dan Longboat shared, “The authority for our knowledge as Indigenous peoples has come from a place of spirit, not out of the minds of men and women.” That knowledge is communicated through an intimate relationship with the land, as Elder Rick Hill explains, “Knowledge is innately tied to the land, it’s right there, it’s waiting for us to pay attention to it, to guide us, through dreams, through visions, through practice, and maybe that’s our greatest strength, is getting people reconnected to the source of knowledge.”
Juxtaposing Western research paradigms with Indigenous paradigms, Goodchild cites Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson, who points out that while Western paradigms emphasize individuals as the source of knowledge, in an Indigenous paradigm “knowledge is seen as ‘belonging to the cosmos’ and we humans are only the ‘interpreters’ of that knowledge.” Thus, the source of knowledge extends beyond the human, to land and all life, and to the cosmos. It is this perspective we find reflects the concept of fourth-person knowing that we are attempting to articulate here. At its source level, the knowing of the social field is an expression of that which is unique and yet universal, or cosmological, and which, through our presence, attention, and intimate relationship with it, can manifest through us.
Fourth-person knowing shows up in our individual experience, but it is not of our making. Nor is it of a specific interaction or intersubjective experience—it is not something that exists only between us. Rather, it is something within, between, and beyond us simultaneously. It is reflective of Rosa’s concept of resonance at its deeper levels: that we can establish a connection to the call of the world through both our inner and outer action in an encounter that “transforms both sides, subject and the world experienced” (Rosa, 2018, p. 42).
Through our research process, we arrived at five phenomena we believe point to fourth-person knowing and distinguish it from existing epistemological forms, as follows:
- Fourth-person knowing is experienced as something that is looking at me but isn’t me, a beingness that is not me and yet does not manifest in my/our absence.
- Fourth-person knowing shows up in our individual experience as a distinct mode of decentering of perception, including a shift in the way we experience space, time, self, light, sensation, and warmth.
- Fourth-person knowing comes with a heightened sense of possibility, in which a future potential that was previously experienced as out of reach moves inside the horizon of what feels doable and possible.
- Fourth-person knowing tends to manifest with an enhanced co-presence of the whole and the individual, making possible the freedom to align individual and collective attention, intention, and agency.
- Fourth-person knowing tends to activate longer-term generative social fields that give rise to sustained and significant practical results.
It is our hope that by articulating and centering fourth-person knowing we can provide an epistemic basis for individuals and collectives to recognize, connect with, and manifest what is theirs to do—their “unique imprint”—within the wider pattern and movement arising in our current moment.
READ THE PAPER IN ITS ENTIRETY HERE
Reprinted from the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, Volume 4 Issue 1
Scharmer, O., & Pomeroy, E. (2024). Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 4(1), 19–48. https://doi.org/10.47061/jasc.v4i1.7909
