A Blind Spot of Fourth-Person Knowing

Reclaiming the Role of the Presencing Self in the Field

Abstract

Recent developments in presencing scholarship, particularly fourth-person knowing (Scharmer & Pomeroy, 2024, 2026), have deepened the conversation around how individuals and groups access, sense, and know from the field. Yet this field-centric orientation leaves a fundamental question comparatively underexplored: What enables presencing to become embodied, inhabitable, sustainable, and lived as a way of being in the field? This article argues that a blind spot within contemporary presencing scholarship concerns the role of the Presencing Self. While Theory U–based approaches have clarified how the field becomes accessible and knowable, drawing on recent developments in Dynamic Presencing (Gunnlaugson, 2020-2026), this article argues that comparatively less attention has been given to the embodied, phenomenological, relational, ontological, and developmental dimensions of the presencing self through which presencing gradually becomes embodied, inhabited, and sustained as a living mode of participation. This article also explores how the gradual shift from an Everyday Self-Sense to a Presencing Self-Sense enables presencing to become embodied, inhabitable, and sustainable as a lived way of being in the field. This emerging self-sense functions as the practitioner's lived center of participation and is essential for transforming presencing from a temporary experience of field awareness into an embodied and enduring way of being in the field. Without the emergence of a Presencing Self-Sense, presencing risks remaining episodic, situational, and difficult to sustain as an ongoing mode of participation. To illuminate this developmental trajectory, the article introduces three interrelated contributions. The first is the Presencing Conduit, which clarifies how participation in presencing becomes grounded, embodied, and lived through the practitioner. The second is the Five Field-Stages of Presencing, which map the progressive unfolding of presencing with oneself, with others, and within the emerging we-field. The third is the Fourfold Ontological Grammar of Presencing Participation, which articulates four foundational domains through which presencing becomes lived: the Ground of Presence, the Inner Presencing Body, the Presencing Self, and the Field. Together, these contributions reclaim the role of the Presencing Self within presencing scholarship and clarify the conditions through which presencing becomes embodied, inhabitable, and sustainable as a way of being in the field. In doing so, the article extends the conversation beyond questions of field-based knowing toward a deeper understanding of how presencing becomes a lived and enduring mode of participation.