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 understanding of 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, and sustainable as a way of being in the field? This article argues that a significant blind spot within contemporary presencing scholarship concerns the role of the Presencing Self. Theory U–based approaches have substantially clarified how the field becomes accessible and knowable. Drawing on recent developments in Dynamic Presencing (Gunnlaugson, 2020–2026), this article turns attention toward the practitioner through whom presencing is lived and sustained. In particular, it examines the phenomenological and interior conditions through which presencing moves from a temporary experience of field awareness toward an enduring mode of participation. Central to this account is the gradual shift from an Everyday Self-Sense to a Presencing Self-Sense. This emerging self-sense becomes the practitioner’s lived center of participation, enabling a more continuous inhabitation of presencing across changing contexts and relationships. Without this development, presencing risks remaining episodic—something accessed under particular conditions rather than lived as an increasingly stable orientation to self, others, and field. To illuminate this developmental trajectory, the article introduces three interrelated contributions. The Presencing Conduit clarifies how presencing becomes grounded and embodied through the practitioner. The Five Field-Stages of Presencing map its progressive unfolding from individual participation toward the emerging we-field. The Fourfold Ontological Grammar of Presencing Participation situates this development within five foundational domains: the Ground of Presence, the Inner Presencing Body, the Presencing Self, the Field and Order of Time. Together, these contributions reclaim the Presencing Self as a central dimension of presencing scholarship. In doing so, the article extends the conversation beyond field-based knowing toward a developmental account of how presencing becomes inhabitable and enduring as a lived way of being in the field.