Implicit intricacy
Implicit intricacy is the way in which Eugene Gendlin sought, in part, to describe why and how there is a difference between our experiencing and the theories, concepts and language we use to describe or explain that experiencing. He maintains that we always experience more than we can say.
He said:
The life process is self-organizing, but much more intricately than we can conceptualize. A great undivided multiplicity is always at work. The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not create; it elaborates. Then we live creatively much further with and after culture. To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. Culture is crude and inhuman in comparison with what we find directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. … Direct access to this intricacy enables us to think-from much more than the usual concepts and assumptions.
Gendlin, E.T. (2003). Beyond postmodernism: From concepts through experiencing. In Roger Frie (Ed.), Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism,p. 115, Routledge.
Importantly, as he explains in this short video, this view suggests that life and our everyday experiencing of people and situations is always implicitly more: “… implicitly more intricate, implicitly more complex, implicitly more interesting.”
An important implication of this view relates particularly to how we approach the process of working out what to do when what we are experiencing, say a situation at work, that is still happening. It helps to make it easier to grasp why, when we apply theoretical concepts to things “before the fact” or we use an ideal or best practice approach without staying open to adaptation they frequently don’t turn out the way we anticipated.