One does not need to have the possibility of a full specification of x to warrant the scientific investigation of x. Likewise, one does not need the possibility of fully specifying Dasein in terms of natural science to warrant a scientific investigation of Dasein.

One of the best zingers to come out of the ‘Heidegger & The Cognitive Sciences’ workshop. This is from Andy Blitzer (Georgetown), slightly abridged.

This is a brief post to say that the Heidegger and Cognitive Sciences Workshop, held here at the University of Edinburgh, was a grand success. Thanks to all the speakers, and to all who attended. I’m sure I will be posting some of my remarks (adding another never-ending sequence of posts) in the future.

If you missed out on this wonderful one-day event, there is envious information about it here.

But maybe you, mysterious internet folk, can help.

In this first instalment, I want to talk a little bit about concepts.

I think there is truth about McDowell’s arguments that our experience is, more or less, entirely conceptual. I also think that the analyses of the phenomenologists (at least as reconstructed in modern philosophical argot) seem to agree with his remarks. We can think of Husserl’s lifeworld as the horizon of all horizons, or the thrownness of Dasein (which I will be looking at later, I imagine), but at the moment I’m pondering on an essay by Sean Kelly, who in other places seems to want to argue the opposite of McDowell. The deeply contextual information available in seeing different ‘shades’ of colour on a surface – caused by shadows and differences in illumination – as the same colour, might seem to point towards some kind of non-conceptual experience. Or does it?

Kelly’s solution to this riddle is to draw upon Merleau-Ponty. Why the different shades of a surface all look like the same colour, is due to a kind of tension. This tension points towards an ideal illumination where the colour would simply appear as the colour it is. And this ideal illumination, this situation where the colour appears as the colour it is, is what our experience is of. Or more specifically, we experience the felt (whatever felt means in this context) deviation from that ideal. This is to say, we experience some orienting structure or space, within which our experience fits in. Sounds more or less conceptual to me.

Of course, our concepts will overlap. Something that is not only coloured, but reflective (say, like my glossy red mug) has several overlapping tensions, and depending on what I am attenuating to, or what the situation requires of me, I will be oriented to one or another idealized target, to which my experiences point. Our experiences at any moment are due to bundles of conceptual resources being drawn into play, and the tension within the concepts themselves.

This means that the concepts that are passively drawn into experience are subject for revision if the inferences and expectancies of which they are constituted fail to obtain, that is, if the ideal target to which our experiences point is erroneous. If we move our eyes across a surface, and find that the colour does not change in the way we expect, we may have to revise the idea that the surface is a monolithic colour, or perhaps come to more drastic conclusions. We can see this in more mundane circumstances: often when I’m walking around at night (sometimes more intoxicated than others), I mistake objects at a distance. In particular, I often mistake seated or stationary people for immobile objects – only to be surprised when they start moving around. This is an example of reappraising the conceptual bundle that is brought to bear on our experiences, but substituting a conceptual apparatus that better makes sense of the situation.

The question now becomes, is the reason behind that conceptual shift some kind of non-conceptual experience? Well, at no point in the story is there anything like non-conceptual experience, only something that seems to be poorly accounted for with a certain orientation or expectancy (our experience points towards the wrong ideal target), which then is better accounted for by a conceptual shuffle. Whether or not this shuffle happens consciously or not doesn’t seem to matter. The shuffle is simply drawn out by the tension, the vagaries of the situation itself.

Now, what I’m interested in here is affordance theory. But affordance theory is not a complete theory. There. I’ve said it. Sure, you can get excited, and give it an exalted role in the overthrow of the metaphor of our glassy essence. But it just ain’t the whole kit and caboodle.

If there’s one thing affordance theory can do, it can illuminate the ways in which things do contain possibilities for us. There is something relational about our interactions with things, something that just can’t be captured by Cartesian language, and affordance theory is well poised to explain it. Whether it’s explained in terms of dynamical systems equations, or odd vibrations, it doesn’t really matter – the essential point is that the world contains possibilities for action that are deeply sensitive to the players and the parts, to the context of the situation.

But what affordance theory doesn’t seem to explain is the why. Why do we act on certain affordances rather than other – why we choose this single (for the sake of argument) possibility out of the nearly infinite number I could do at any given moment? It would be fool-hardy to say that we are disposed to act in a certain way, based on past experiences, etc., for that would be to reduce us to mere automata, blindly reacting to the stimulus that is most appropriate, or most reliable for meeting our needs at any given time. But if we say that somehow we pick and choose which affordance to respond to, consciously and explicitly, well, it seems that we’re back in Descartes’ doldrums.

What creeps in with Merleau-Ponty’s motor-intentionality, and in Heidegger’s account of comportment, even undifferentiated comportment, is emotion. With motor-intentionality and maximal grip, we have a felt tension, something that just doesn’t sit right – a little niggling bother, or a spark of spontaneity, that gives us inspiration to move to see things in a certain way, or to get up and dance when we just didn’t feel like dancing before. In Heidegger, we are supported in all our activities by a structure of emotion, that highlights those activities that are appropriate to the situation, and how we are feeling at the moment.

This is where affordances turn into solicitations. It is when emotions enter the picture that we have an account of why it is that we act or move or sing or buy that really expensive chorizo sausage because it was twenty percent off but still was really expensive and out of my price range. Really, it comes down to the platitude: “shucks. I felt like it.”

So as much as there is undeniably a relational property that holds between us and the things in which we interact with on a daily basis, there must be an interiority that can make sense of that relational property – that can feel that relational property. And that’s why, just sitting there on its own, affordance theory just isn’t the full story. It needs a little heart.

Has dance, like other forms of art, gathered up and opened us up to new ways of thinking and experiencing?  Did Ninjinsky’s choreography draw out those primal emotions stoked by Stravinsky at the premiere of Le sacre du printemps?  Did Elvis’ shaking hips shake common conception about male sexuality?  What about b-boys, breakdancers, and other modern dancers and dances – what do they show or tell us?

Dance is, I’m convinced, a large and interesting problematic I’ve barely just begun to consider.

In a bit of personal reflection, I can narrow down the rekindling of my interest in dance to this video from Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite.  I was shocked the first time I saw it.  I’d never seen anything like it before.  I’ve since been drawn to Crystal’s works, their narrative structure, their organicism, and their Butoh inflections.  They have definitely made me pay more attention to how I move and think about movement.

The statements of physics are correct.  By means of them, science represents something real, by which it is objectively controlled.  But – is this reality the jug? No.  Science always encounters only what its kind of representation has admitted beforehand as an object possible for science. … Science makes the jug-thing into a nonentity in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real.

More to come later…

If the absolute were to be conceived as life, then it must include finitude and difference within itself for the simple reason that organic development consists in self-differentiation.  Life is a process by which an inchoate unity becomes more determinate, complex and organized; it is the movement from unity to difference, and from difference to unity within difference. (94)

For better or worse, I’m following my usual strategy of reading a few secondary sources before diving in to the source material.  One of the better things about this strategy is that interpreters since Hegel have had time to collate and discuss his work, yielding a much more understandable presentation of his views. On the other hand, many of these modern philosophers present Hegel in our modern language of philosophy and discuss him in view of modern issues.  While this makes Hegel much more tractable, it leads me at least to see connections and juxtapositions between Hegel and modern philosophy that the man couldn’t have even anticipated, let alone commented on.

That being said, I am flabbergasted that I have not seen Hegel raised in connection with Enactivism, particularly to Varela and Maturana’s autopoiesis – a quick Google search doesn’t really yield anything, nor does a search in Phil-Papers.  But the connections leap off the page and smack me in the mouth with every turn.

Just consider this extended quote from Evan Thompson’s ‘Mind in Life’:

“[Autopoiesis] is a condition of possibility for the dynamic emergence of interiority (Varela 1991, 1997a).  As just remarked, however, this emergence of an inside is also the specification of an outside.  Thus the dynamic emergence of interiority can be more fully described as the dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.  Nevertheless, there seems to be an asymmetry here, for it is the internal self-production process that controls or regulates the system’s interaction with the outside environment (Varela 1991)” (Thompson 2007 p. 79)

This is Hegel’s organicism!  Keeping in mind that Hegel could not have foreseen an application of his organicism to the origins of life, writing as he did before Darwin and Pasteur, I think we can construct an Enactivist-style Hegelian account.

Something irreducible to mechanism, life is the becoming of a unity-in-difference.  Life is not a unity with the world, for unity would mean life is reducible to mechanism.  But at the same time life isn’t wholly apart from the world, as a radically free subject like Kant would hold.   Life is precisely the becoming of a unity-in-difference, constantly attempting to engage in unity with the environment through a self-constituted domain of difference (between ‘me’ and ‘that’, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ – Fichte’s ‘I’ and ‘not-I’).

In Enactivist argot: the chemical and mechanistic movement of particles goes through a qualitative shift when it changes from the flux and flow of naturalistic causality to a bounded autopoietic structure.  With the arrival of autopoiesis, the minimal physical substrate of life, we have a distinct membrane that marks a difference between a subject and the world.  But this difference is marked by a constitution not only of an ‘inner’ realm, but an ‘outer’ realm.  It marks a unity-in-difference.  Life is part of the world, constantly attempting to get a solid hold on its environment, but only through a dynamic realm of subjective interaction created out of a mechanistic unity.

This isn’t a quarter of what could be said about the connections between Hegel and Enactivism.  I think the pragmatic application of meditation to experience present in ‘The Embodied Mind’ (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991) is an easy import into a Hegelian framework. Similarly, I believe that Hegel would have much to say about the concept of life itself, much of it amenable to such an embodied and embedded account.  But I think I’ve risked enough anachronistic speculation for one day.  Same time tomorrow night Pinky?