Espacio por actividad

Thus far, we have looked at how Heideggerian ‘subjects’ – that is, in-the-world beings who enact their existence through co-determined subjectivity – encounter worldly entities during everyday activities. We know that such beings frequently engage with the world in a smooth, yet mindful manner, and that worldly entities can be transparent constituents of such beings’ ontology. However, what has not been considered is how such subjects engage with the social world; that is, how they interact with other subjects and social structures. As I mentioned at the outset, this chapter is primarily laying groundwork for subsequent chapters, and the matter of social encounters is particularly prevalent in later material. Prior to this later material, there are two important points connected to aforementioned issues that are worth briefly discussing.

Firstly, there is the fact that the expert know-how of daily activities is nested within networks of further contextual understanding, which inevitably taper towards social features of existence. In order to appreciate this, let us return to the idea that we encounter entities as having a ‘for-what’ quality (Heidegger, 1976/2010; Dreyfus, 2007a). In virtue of being for something, each entity is always involved in some activity that is performed by a subject, and is thus said to realise “an involvement” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 115). That is, environmental entities are encountered as meaningfully relevant due to a “conceptually prior” involvement-structure (Wheeler, 2005, p. 146). Returning to the hammer, for example, we can say that it is only ‘for hammering’ if it is present in an involvement in which there are things to hammer (such as nails and wood) and a purpose for hammering which is relevant to a subject. Wheeler (2005) describes these involvements as “the roles that equipmental entities play – the ways in which they are involved – in the human agent’s normal patterns of activity” (p. 145). They are not independent structures, but are interconnected so as to form a holistic “network of referential significance” (ibid.). So the context of any given activity is part of a unique involvement-structure, which is in turn part of a system of further involvement-structures, which holistically connect to form a “totality of involvements” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 121). This totality of involvements is essentially what Heidegger means by the “world” which we all find ourselves inescapably in. So we find

that perception is the direct detection of features within an independent environment (ibid., p. 204). Regardless of whether this interpretation is correct, I am using a broad notion of affordances (see, in particular, footnote [4]), rather than endorsing all of Gibson’s views on the matter. On this broad interpretation, affordances have a distinctively enactivist quality, which is that they are a relation

between an agent and her world. As such, they can be used to capture the idea of co-determination between an agent and her environment, such that what an environment affords is dependent on the agent’s sensorimotor capacities and her history of coupling to the environment. This view is unquestionably something that most enactivisits would welcome. The key move is that affordances are not simply an agent ‘picking up’ environmental features, but instead capture the (bidirectional) relation between the agent and environment.

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that even in the simplest events, such as an entity affording ‘hammering’, there is a global context of significance in play:

with this thing[...] which we accordingly call a “hammer”, there is an involvement in hammering; with

hammering, there is an involvement in making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter[...] that is to say, for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s Being. (ibid., p. 116)

As a subject engages in hammering in order to build a shelter, they are thus not only realising an afforded-action, but also realising a specific way of Being-in-the-world. Without delving too deeply into the complexities that are in play here, we can appropriate this notion of involvement-structures in order to confront the social-normative embeddedness of everyday existence.

Consider, for example, the following (paraphrased) description of the non-uniform referential links which make up Heidegger’s interconnected involvement-structures:

A subject can work with a computer (a relation that Heidegger calls a “with-which”), in the practical context of an office (an “in-which”), in order to write a book (an “in-order-to”), which is aimed

toward presenting some philosophical analysis (a “towards-this”), for the sake of academic research,

which is for the sake of being an academic (a “for-the-sake-of-which”). (Wheeler, 2005, p. 147)

Wheeler uses this to exemplify how Heidegger’s contextual structure will ““bottom out” in involvements which are for-the-sake-of-which in form” (ibid., p. 148). The importance of this is that engaging with everyday entities, which entails the realisation of an involvement- structure, is (in virtue of ‘bottoming out’ at being for the sake of something), in a fundamental way, “a concrete act of human projection[...] in which a human agent interprets itself in terms of certain behavioural norms” (ibid.). In other words, as a subject projects herself into an everyday activity, she will “interpret herself in definite ways” which are identified by “certain normatively constrained, public ways of behaving” (ibid., p. 122). So as a subject is expertly acting in a domain-specific manner, their skilled and unreflective behaviour is subsumed into a situated social normativity that is appropriate for the sake of being a certain way. Think, for example, of the waiter (Mr. X) who was discussed in section 3. He goes about his work with an attitude and movements that are generally expected of waiters. In this way, he is behaving in accordance with socially normative constraints (manifest in what is socially expected of a waiter), whilst also realising a system of involvement-structures which confronts the relation of acting for-the-sake-of-being-a-waiter. The waiter is encountering and engaging with a field of normatively-laden relevant affordances which facilitate self-interpretation as a

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Now, if we take this idea and extrapolate it to all other situations (not just that of being a waiter), we find that the ‘bottom’ of our involvement-networks is inevitably social. Whether one’s purposive engagement is ultimately for the sake of being a parent, a partner, a sports champion, a professional, a leader, a priest, an anarchist, or a waiter, one’s fundamental relation to the world is inescapably social. This becomes clearer when we consider the normative roots of being a good parent, partner, champion, leader, or whatever. These roots are not individualistically manifest (if they were, there would be no consensus regarding typical behaviours across and within societies), but are socially generated and maintained through ongoing interactions. How one acts for-the-sake-of-being-a-parent or for-the-sake- of-being-a-partner is normatively regulated by a collective aggregation of what makes a good parent or good partner. In the most basic existential sense conceivable, relating to the world for-the-sake-of-being-a-human is itself a social relation, as individual humanness (normatively speaking) only makes sense from within the world of humanity (there will be more on this in chapters 2 and 5). In this way, “the human agent’s everyday world is, in the first instance, and of its very essence, a shared world” (Wheeler, 2005, p. 149; Heidegger, 1927/1962).

By applying this underpinning social relationality at the behavioural level of engagement with worldly entities, we can uncover a final (social) insight into everyday existence. Recall, for a final time, the Heideggerian notion of encountering entities as ‘for-what’s’. This is a relatively straightforward feature of how the world is experienced, considering entities in and of themselves (albeit within given contexts). However, once the social normativity of involvement-networks is in play, it is perhaps now more precise to describe an entity as ‘for- what-for-us’. This is due to the fact that no action can be viewed as a strictly individual accomplishment because every experience is saturated by sociality. A hammer, for instance, would seemingly be ‘for-hammering’ whether or not others are present. Yet the very act of hammering only makes sense in the social world; it only becomes meaningful in virtue of being, in part, an expressive act which reinforces one's own understanding of hammering whilst also informing the understanding of others. To hammer is to modulate the collective normative understanding of the activity of hammering. At a ‘deeper’ level, my act of hammering will modulate the normative understanding of what it is to be a good builder, or partner, or whatever worldly relation I am enacting. In this way, any pragmatic engagement with the contextual environment both takes its meaning from being in the social world and is inherently meaning-conveying for the social world. Even when hammering in a completely isolated fashion (far away from the presence of others), the act of hammering is still socially constituted because social meaning pervades even our most solitary instrumental copings with the world.

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Through this brief exposition of the social nature of our ‘totality of involvements’ with the world, it is hopefully apparent that the social dimension of everyday existence cannot be ignored. Indeed, the particularities of the social dimension of everyday existence will go on to dominate the bulk of this thesis and will thus soon be analysed in much greater detail.