ALTERNATIVAS DE CAMBIO Y MEJORA EN LOS PROCESOS

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In the previous section, we have seen how in-the-world subjects, who help to form the basis for Heideggerian cognitive science, engage with everyday entities as being for something, or, in Gibsonian (1979) terms, as affording certain possibilities for action. A key feature of this structural aspect of everyday existence is the “complementarity of the animal and the environment” (ibid., p. 127). In this section, I will look at the notion of complementarity a little more closely, as it provides an opportunity for considering our in-the-world nature in more detail and thus sheds further light on the motivation for shunning a Cartesian picture of cognition.

As noted already, it is essential to Heidegger’s (1927/1962) phenomenological account of human existence that we are always ‘in-the-world’ and frequently engaging with worldly entities and other people not as withdrawn objects, but as ‘transparent’ equipment which contributes to our meaningful mode of existence.[5] _{On this view, we are not faced with (nor}

are we) physically delineated objects and subjects, but instead inhabit a phenomenal world in which, for the most part, we unreflectively act in such a way that “we pour ourselves out into [external objects] and assimilate them as parts of our existence” (Polanyi, 1964, p. 54). Thus, when hammering, we move into a “primordial” relationship with the hammer in which it is encountered “unveiledly” as a transparent entity (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 98). The hammer is not an isolated entity with context-independent properties, but a constituent of an ongoing activity. This specific kind of ‘in-the-worldness’, which is characterised by the existential transparency that has been described, also encapsulates our being absorbed in an activity. Developing Heidegger, Wheeler describes such absorption as follows:

[W]hile engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and

thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent.[...] The carpenter

becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects[. ...] [T]he awareness that is present[...] is non-subject-object in form. (Wheeler, 2011a)

This passage nicely reinforces the idea of being ‘in the zone’ and acting in an effortless manner that lacks explicit thought, deliberation or reflection. It also illustrates how our being absorbed in an activity is typical of our skilled and unreflective action: one loses self- referential awareness and the notion of a subject-object dichotomy. In such instances, the ongoing flow of experience is all that matters, and this is key to understanding how we fluently and consistently respond to affordances without needing to constantly re-analyse the world. Because we are always already in-the-world that matters to us, we can existentially

[5] _{Such ‘transparent’ engagement with the world typifies Heidegger’s (1927/1962) phenomenological category of the “ready-to-hand”.} However, we can also engage with the “present-at-hand” and “unready-to-hand”, as well as simultaneously inhabiting multiple other phenomenological categories that will bear relevance to these modes of worldly engagement.

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“accept” worldly entities by engaging with them in a transparent, non-subject-object manner (Polanyi, 1964, p. 59). This engagement with the world means that the orthodox theoretical picture of an isolated subject needing to analyse the objective world is simply the wrong way to consider the issue; with regards to those occasions in which one is absorbed in an activity, one is (with the potential for some mindful input) merely a subsystemic component in an unfolding worldly event. When viewed this way, it becomes easier to understand how environmental entities can so frequently and consistently bring forth appropriate responses from a subject. Due to the “complementarity” (p. 127) of subject and environment that Gibson (1979) mentions, we can now see that the expert’s bodily movements, their mindful adjustments, and worldly affordances are all dynamic processual constituents of an overarching mind-body-world system. As I touched upon in section 2, this perspective obviates the presence of a dualistic mind/world interface and emphasises our worldly embeddedness, such that we react to and interact with the environment, rather than analysing it and acting on it in a removed manner. In other words, discontinuity between a subject and her environment is existentially dismissible during absorbed activity (Haugeland, 1998). Thus, when an affordance brings forth a response, it is not phenomenologically detached from us, nor are we isolated subjects; the affordance becomes a constituent of our phenomenological experience – it is a relation between a subject and the environment rather than a context-independent objective offering. During absorbed behaviour we therefore find that the unfolding activity – viewed as a phenomenologically lived experience – is constituted by the organism (brain and body) and world, and the existentially transparent organism-world interface.

Of course, it is not the case that every engagement with worldly entities is a smooth and unreflective activity in which equipment is encountered as ‘unveiledly transparent’. Many everyday scenarios will require conscious focus and effortful reasoning. The point is that the complementarity of a subject and her environment results in a vast number of everyday activities being accomplished in a smooth and unreflective way (with such activities being prone to the kinds of mindful inputs that have been discussed earlier). Even as a subject is engaged in an overtly analytical task such as playing chess, she can still expertly have a sip of water, check her watch or adjust her clothing without having to explicitly reflect on the execution of these acts. Part of the reason that many everyday tasks are executed unreflectively is that a subject’s skilled bodily nature is always fundamentally pre-figured by overarching subjective concerns (Rietveld, 2008a). One can state this by saying that there is

purposiveness to subjective behaviour (that is, behaviour is explicable and conceivable only

as being causally grounded in accordance with purposes (Kant, 1790/2000, p. 220)). In virtue of having a specific purposive stance towards the world, subjects’ “responsiveness[...]

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212).[6] _{Thus, while worldly entities tend to afford specific responses in accordance with some}

socially defined role – for example, a pen affords ‘writing’, a book affords ‘reading’ and a football affords ‘kicking’ – it is also integral to the structure of everyday existence that this response-drawing accords with a subject’s situational purposiveness. For instance, although a hammer typically affords ‘hammering’, its role can be refined or altered according to specific circumstances; it could thus be employed as a metal forger, a wood-splitter (in conjunction with a chisel), a missile, a theatrical prop or a mountain climbing aid. Exactly what the hammer affords depends on the circumstantial disposition of a given subject in her given environment.

With this understanding, we can further refine our notion of the complementarity between a subject and her environment. It is not the case that worldly entities afford fixed possibilities for action, nor that they are encountered through context-independent properties; instead, entities ‘show up’ in subjective experience according to their relevance to circumstantial purposiveness. Such purposiveness can of course ‘switch’ across and within any context as attention can be diverted in myriad ways, but the connection between subject and environment remains a complementary one due to the environment’s flexibility in meeting subjective needs, interests and concerns. In the next section, I will further clarify this notion of nesting any given situation within an overarching network of subjective needs and concerns.

The brief ruminations of the preceding paragraphs have fleshed out further the nature of everyday existence within a broadly ‘Heideggerian’ framework. In particular, the complementarity of subject and environment helps to elucidate a specific aspect of the notion of being in-the-world. This is all the more relevant as it subserves the phenomenologically inspired theory of enactivism, which will be discussed at several points in later chapters. In a similar vein to a Heideggerian subject being embedded in a meaningful world, in which a subject is purposively disposed and environmentally sensitive, enactivism claims that a subject is always “bringing forth” a world by actively generating meaning through environmental interactions (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991; Capra, 1996; Thompson, 2007; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). Both theoretical approaches thus reject the idea of an isolated subject who computationally represents a world through discrete propositions and instead endorse the idea of an embedded subject who enacts a meaningful world through purposively configured and historically sedimented expertise.[7] _{This notion of}

[6]

Whilst I am referring to purposiveness, Rietveld gives a unique description of a similar notion that he refers to as our task-directedness

(Rietveld, 2008a, p. 342). That is, a subject’s expertise in a given situation exhibits itself a “task-directed system of possible actions [that] unifies many domain-specific capacities” (ibid.). So in any given domain, a subject’s task-directedness ensures that environmental entities afford possibilities for action that are relevant to a subject’s present “needs, projects, or interests” (ibid.). By this definition, a subject’s behaviour is always explicable as causally grounded in situational purposes, as it is through the notion of purposiveness.

[7] _{Aligning the affordance-led notion of complementarity between an agent and her environment with enactivism is a controversial move} for some, in that the original formulation of enactivism is explicitly declared to be incompatible with Gibson’s (1979) ecological theory of perception (Varela et al., 1991, pp. 203-204). However, this incompatibility is due to the fact that Varela et al. interpret Gibson as claiming

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embedded, in-the-world beings is henceforth how the term ‘subject’ (or ‘agent’) should be understood throughout the thesis.