Zealots: Religious and Atheist

Again looking back...

Have a look at Jonathan Raban's wonderful 2002 piece in the New Yorker: "My Holy War".

It's a good reminder of just how modern contemporary jihadism is. Just one example that Raban points out is that Fathi Shiqaqi, the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was assassinated in 1995, is on record as having been a T. S. Eliot fan. As Raban points out,

it's not hard to see how Eliot's characteristic preoccupations could chime with those of the decline-of-the-West jihadis. It would appall Eliot, the Anglo-Catholic churchwarden, to hear it, but his vision of a society collapsing into spiritual ruin is very close to what Qutb tries to conjure in his depiction of jahiliyyah. The moral indictment of the West, central to the Islamist case, has impeccable Western credentials.

September 11: Returning to first impressions

I just reread Paul Rogers early response to the World Trade Center attack (http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article-2-2075.jsp).

Rogers pointed out at the time, as many of us did, that the attack was almost certainly designed to provoke a large scale military response, and that a heavy-handed act of revenge would almost certainly be in Al-Qaeda's interests.

Rereading Rogers' piece, though, I was struck by how this simple perspective has disappeared from the debate. We who are against the wars no longer talk of whether the military response is a sensible or proportionate one. In fact, we don't talk at all about combatting terrorism, largely because we have become (understandably) obsessed with the thought that the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism. It is about control of the middle east, about oil, about the destruction of resources for the sake of reconstruction contracts, and the imposition of a capital-friendly political regime.

These "revelations" have provoked a great deal of anger, not least because they have made us feel incredibly naive and impotent, but I think this anger needs to be resisted.

If we want to evaluate our success in resisting both neo-con imperialism and terrorism, we need to ask ourselves: what partnerships have we created? who's profile is being raised by our speech?

We need to remember that we empower our interlocutors. For that reason, we need to choose carefully who we address. If all our speech and all our political action is directed toward governments and corporations, we continually give them a forum.

Shall we go and find our interlocutors elsewhere, among the moderates of those people whose plight we claim to be inspired by? Perhaps it is time to recognize our feelings of betrayal, and not to allow ourselves to be highjacked by them any longer. We need to substitute a genuine concern for others for this obsession with our betrayal at home.

Wedge politics works by pulling focus, because focus is power, whether or not it is popular. We can only resist that power by centring our focus elsewhere.

I think that's what we need to do, but I don't claim to know precisely how to do it.

Perhaps advocacy is the best way in. Start by simply reflecting the views of someone from somewhere else. Write your own press releases for them. Fill in their background. Contact them and find out if you don't know. Find people who know them. Make understanding *their* position, *their* goals, *their* hopes, *their* fears, *your* issue. Criticise them if you will, debate them. That's fine. So long as they remain the story.

It might also be good to target people who don't get any coverage. A good way to find them might be to take someone who is relatively well known (a prominent cleric, a leader) and choose someone who is close to them. Offer them a platform, which means letting people know what you're doing. Write something about them for the Wikipedia or join a discussion on OpenDemocracy with the intention of representing your subject and informing people about him/her. Start a blog about your research. Send your press releases to newspapers and magazines. They may just bite!

If you have any other ideas about how to be generous with your political focus, either add them as a comment below, or email me at justin.tauber++@++arts.usyd.edu.au

Economic Responsibility and the Environment

Apparently, the govt's first ever anti-Green leaflet is being distributed today to that small percentage of hourseholds who decide who runs the country. According to the SMH, the pamphlet argues that

Just as the major political parties must be environmentally responsible in pursuing economic responsibility, so too the minor parties and the Greens must be economically responsible in pursuing their environmental policies.

So, the argument cuts both ways. Economic policy needs to be environmentally responsible as well. What could that mean? Well, for a start it would mean acting to make our environmental duties more affordable.

Environmental policy, like economic policy, should be about providing the best for our children and our childrens' children. Can Grandpa Howard really cry poor for eight years? - claiming that we can't afford Kyoto - especially when he's down at the pub at election time buying rounds for the marginal voters!

Surely, someone's got to tell him to save up for the kids' future. By investing in structural changes to the economy to make it more environmentally sustainable.

In July, I asked the "responsible" govt ministers to respond to a report by the Australia Institute on our current contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and the suggestions they made of how to address the problem. Here's the text of my letter. So far, no response.

================

Sirs.

As the responsible federal ministers, could you please comment on the recent report by Hal Turton of the Australia Institute called "Greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries: Where does Australia stand?", and in particular let me know whether the government would consider the suggestions made within that report on strategies for reducing Australia's emissions?

The report makes two claims that I found surprising. The first is that Australia's per capita emission's are not merely high, but in fact the highest in the industrial world. Australia's contribution are usually presented as high, but exceeded by other countries such as the US, on the basis of data on per capita energy-related emissions. The report suggests that this data gives only a partial representation of that contribution and that it should be replaced with data drawn from national communications and greenhouse gas inventory submissions to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change) secretariat. When calculated from this more comprehensive data, the conclusion drawn is quite different:

Australians have the highest emissions per person of all industrial countries. At 27.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (t CO2-e) per person, emissions by Australians are 27 per cent higher than those of US citizens (21.4 tonnes) and more than double the average for industrialised countries.

It also argues against the assumption that, even if Australia has a high per capita contribution, because our population is so small, our total contribution is negligible. Again, I quote from the report:

While Australia accounts for 3.4 per cent of total Annex I emissions, Australia’s total emissions exceed those of major European economies such as France and Italy (each with around three times Australia’s population), and are only 20 per cent lower than those of the UK. Thus if Australia’s contribution to the climate change problem is trivial then so are those of these countries.

Are you, the ministers, disturbed by these findings? Do you disagree with the content of the report, and if so, are there other studies can you point me to which offer a different opinion?

Finally, I ask you to respond to three suggestions that the report makes, and to clarify the government's position on each of these proposals.

First, the report suggests that a less GG intensive mix of fuels (more natural gas and less coal) explains the smaller emissions of larger EU states, and changing Australia's mix is one avenue for future policy.

Another avenue is in transport policy. The report challenges the assumption that the large distances between centres explains Australia's higher GG emissions due to the transportation of freight. In fact, the average distance for freight in Australia is slightly shorter than Europe, because such a large of proportion of freight is transported within rather than between regional centres. Instead of lamenting the tyranny of distance we confront in Australia, the report suggests that policy-makers, such as yourselves, should set about influencing the number of additional trips and the average weight of freight transported, factors which do actually distinguish Australian freight practices from their European counterparts.

The third suggestion that the report makes concerns the status of the Aluminium smelting industry. The government clearly recognizes the significant contribution that this industry makes to Australia's GG emissions. On DFAT's "Kyoto Conference - Environment Home Page" the following comment is made:

Trade specialisation has caused Australia's economy to become more energy- and greenhouse-gas-intensive. The importance of changing trade patterns and specialisation of countries is probably best illustrated by Australia's aluminium industry, which is among the most energy-intensive of industries. Australia's aluminium industry has been among the five fastest growing industries in Australia, whereas elsewhere in the OECD it has been one of the most rapidly declining industries.

Yet, the report points out that it is also a heavily subsidized industry, "to the tune of $210-250 million per year through contracts for cheap electricity". It therefore suggests that the reduction of these subsidies may be a cost-beneficial response to the issue. Has the government considered reinvesting these subsidies in making the industry more environmentally friendly, rather than simply fuelling a growth that the same DFAT page suggests will be supported by greater trade liberalisation. Does the government feel that it needs to doubly support this industry by liberalisation of foreign trade and the maintenance of domestic subsidies?

One final question: the government's policy on Kyoto has been centred on the idea that an equitable protocol is one that has the same economic impact on all participants. What else is the government doing to ensure that Australia is in a better economic position in the future to contribute to the reduction of emissions? How have the government's policies over the past eight years improved Australia's ability to afford climate control?

Your response would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Justin Tauber

Internet cafes: the new salon?

In the eighteenth century, the salons of Paris became famous as the hotbeds of political and social debate. There collections of usually wealthy Parisians gathered to discuss, argue, polemicise, interrogate and dispute over a whole range of issues that had previously been reserved for the royal court. The salon did a lot towards democratizing French politics.

It also initiated a more important, albeit informal and indirect, role for women in policy formation. There is a more recent example of a similar phenomenon. In the 1970's Phil Donahue, or rather his audience, revolutionised the American political scene, by broadcasting the opinions of everyday women in suburban USA. Talk-back radio is another example.

Despite the tremendous impact of (almost) universal education, women's suffrogacy, broadcast television and talk-back radio, in the early part of twenty-first century, the greatest political problem we face is political participation. It seems that all these advances have shown us is the size of the gap between the democracy we represent and the democracy we actually have. Policy is not set through participation in the broadcast media, but more often by the owners of those media. Traffic has become one-way, and when the flow is reversed, it tends to take the form of Orwell's one-minute hate.

If the key task before us is to reinvigorate our political environment, then we must recognize that democracy means more than freedom of expression, or access to the means of expression. It must also include the accessibility of means of collaboration.

People often complain about the dumbing-down of the electorate, and long to relinquish authority to an expert elite. Alternatively, they address the electorate as though it were an idyllic community of experts already.

Both approaches are flawed, but we can see a way past them if we recognize what they have in common. Neither view imagines that the electorate can teach itself anything. Both right and left seems to imagine a body politic that is less-than-human, because it is not capable of learning.

Educators have for some time realised that there is a serious distinction to be made between deep learning and surface learning. I would suggest that, where there is an education of the electorate, it takes the form of surface learning. It is entirely passive, there is no emphasis of helping each other understanding, or, for that matter, on employing the knowledge being distributed - through print, radio, television, the web - in any way.

I think that a deep approach to political education - one that emphasizes collaboration, active choice (say about which issues, about what form, about when to consider them etc) and producing something for others - could address both the issue of participation and of education at the same time. A political education directed toward social ownership of the issues - and not solely reactive responses to the issues - is what is required.

How do we do this? There may be too many possible projects to enumerate here, and please add a comment if you think of any, but for starters we could begin by recognizing this:

The web is not solely a space for opinion, or comment. It is also a collaborative space, a space for the collective production of considered responses, among people who need have nothing in common but a concern and a desire to participate (though not necessarily by leading or even speaking).

We have the technology to establish minature political spaces, random and momentary collectives, whose only purpose is to briefly further the debate, and to think through their desires, their differences of opinion, together, for each other and for others (who knows who?).

It's time for us to combine our best learning practices with our varieties of political expression. Society is our assignment. It's time to transform our politicians from arbitrary, power-driven, lecturing decision-makers, into the moderators and facilitators of an interrogating, imagining, collaborating and ultimately learning body politic.

Why bother with insect intelligence?

This most delicious comment comes from slashdot. For someone who's spent five year reading embodied, embedded cognitive scientists congratulate themselves on absolving their intellectualist tendencies and discover the concrete, this is pay day!

A taste:

Every year we generate many millions of the most perfect and adaptive biological being the world have ever seen... babies...humans. Yet most of them get nothing but shit and are doomed to live on a dollar a day for their entire lives.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122121&cid=10272822

Reading spaces = thinking room?

I was just thumbing through Robert E. Horn's tome Visual Language (MacroVU Inc., 1998) and came across this little gem:

Leaving spaces between words: reinvented during Charlemagne's reform of writing, the leaving of spaces between words enabled many readers to switch from reading aloud (which was the common way to read during the Middle Ages) to reading silently. Franc, c. 800CE.

What I find fascinating about this fact is the kind of mental space that silent reading allows. Pragmatists, like Wilfred Sellars and impressed by Wittgenstein's argument against private languages, have emphasized the need to see thinking as development from speaking, i.e. as the internalisation of a communicative function. This is opposed to a more classical view of speaking as derivative from thinking - as the expression of a thought that precedes the locutive performance.

The pragmatist approach subordinates theories of mind to theories of social practice. Minds are the kinds of things we have by virtue of our participation in a sophisticated social community.

Pragmatists regard traditional theories of mind, which take an individual's cognitive relation to a value-neutral world as primary, to be beginning with the wrong question. They see the development of the notion of an objective, mind-independent natural world in terms of its particular social function.

So far so good. Pragmatism works well as a criticism of traditional epistemology. However, I'd prefer to avoid a pragmatism that sees everything in terms of social values, because I think people are capable of disputing and interrupting social values in many ways. I also think that much of that resistance to social norms - which ultimately gives those values their normative significance - centres on the anomalous subject's embodiment.

Now, a full blown critique of (the strictest forms of) pragmatism would need to show that the development of the very social practices to which pragmatists appeal cannot be understood except via an account of corporeal embeddedness.

And this is where we come back to the spacing of words. What is the relationship between the spacing of words and the internalization of communication as thought? Charlemagne was responding to the capture of literacy by the priestly class, and proposed no less than a revolution in communication through the different corporeal stance toward a text. Charlemagne's reforms traded on the Gestalt properties of vision to break the connection between text and speech. These Gestalt properties cannot be understood in terms of social practices.

In the case of Charlemagne's reforms, it is the Gestalt character of the perceived world that acts as the hinge around which the reform of social convention occurs. Social change involves exploiting aspects of a presupposed embodied relation to a pre-social world (pre-social in the sense that the social conventions that determine the meaning of the text do not determine the limits of this relation as well).

It is through our bodies that social conventions get a grip, and it is through exploiting the ambiguity of embodiment - it's ability to escape being comprehensive controlled through its actual performances, because it maintains around it an aura of possible performance - that we can modify and affect the character of our social world.

So, our embodied perception of gestalts allows for thinking room between reading and speaking. Merleau-Ponty says that vision is thought within a field. Here the field (room) for thought is the space between words.

Corporeal Schema

It's just hit me.
A corporeal schema is not a structure, it's a background - as MMP says, it is the flip-side of the projective activity that leaves objects round about it as traces of its acts and at the same time uses them as springboards to future acts.
Existence is not any particular structure, it is a movement from contingency to necessity (sedimentation) and necessity to contingency (innovation).

Our discussion of boundedness is meant to reinstall the subpersonal in a situation, but this situation is never entirely biological.
Merleau-Ponty was concerned to oppose a Kantian transcendental ego that constitutes its world in its entirety. But he would also be opposed to a pan-biologism that sees on biological situation, and which recognize no dialectical relation between this biological situation and a personal one.

But how are we to think of the influence of the personal on the biological?

The idea of the discussion of boundedness was not to trace prepersonal commitment to biological structure, but to interpret those structures in terms of that commitment, i.e. in terms of existence.

We do not exist in a purely biological situation, in fact, it takes incredible suffering to remain in such a situation for any extended period of time. The objection to Kantianism is that the organism is never entirely incorporated into our personal life. But the reverse is also true. Our personal life is rarely lived in that prepersonaltime of pure sensibility.

What's wrong with investing the sub-personal with intentionality?

Gallagher, in his survey of ways of relating cognitive science to phenomenology suggests that we need to be vigilant against investing sub-personal processes with intentional contents.

Now, to be sure, there is definitely something wrong with arbitrarily or unreflectively investing, for example, beliefs and desires into brain processes. Dennett has done a wonderful job of articulating this in his discussion of "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain".

However, what empirical grounds are there for denying that these processes (just calling them processes rather than behaviours seems to prejudge the question) are directed toward anything at all? It seems to me that ruling out any and all talk of intentionality at this level is just as metaphysical (in the bad sense) as ruling it in.

It rests on the presupposition that the personal and the subpersonal are discrete levels of description. There are however good reasons for undermining their discreteness, not least because though treating them as discrete allows us to describe pathological behaviours, it makes normal behaviour seem mysterious.

Ron McClamrock's argument for a task-centred version of the information processing hypothesis, which he claims will make it compatible with externalism, will provide an opportunity for us to propose a conception of the subpersonal which exhibits a kind of intentionality that is scientifically bearable. Our conception involves expanding on McClamrock's suggestion that a task-based account of cognition might even be extended to the design level.

Our conception attempts to take account of the way in which scientific taxonomies are developed, or rather, the responsibility to the organism that prompts scientific taxonomies to change. Recognizing this responsibility does not allow us to shortcircuit the development of these taxonomies, but it does capture the sense in which these taxonomies are always a scientific attempt to do justice to the otherness of its objects. In this case, the move to enactivism and DST is an attempt to bear witness to the self-conceptuality of the organism (Morris), i.e. to the fact that the dimension of its description are and should be relative to its strategies of inherence.

So we revise the relation of embeddedness, from something akin to the relations of immersion or component-to-system, to something more like a inalienable strategic relation. In doing so, we are able to inject a little intentionality - an intentionality that needn't be equated with the intentionality of projects - into our third person descriptions.

Extended Minds or Mindtools

Inspired by reading Jonasson on Mindtools (esp final sections)
http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/Mindtools.pdf

The idea behind the extended mind is that we offload cognitive processing onto the environment.
The fact that we can do this suggests that cognitive processing is not inherently internal.
The tendency then is to demolish the biological notion of cognitive identity which treats the brain/skin barrier as the grounds of cognitive identity.
From there, it is tempting to abandon cognitive identity altogether (meme theory).
But, since we attribute intelligence to cognitive identities, this move involves abandoning the attribution of intelligence.

One way of resisting this tendency is to distinguish between intelligence and its tools.
However, a hard distinction between intelligence and its tools, which are ultimately its means of expression, is problematic, not least because we do not know what intelligence could be in the absence of its expression.
We can't treat intelligence as that which is common to intelligent expression without blurring the boundaries between distinct knowledge domains; boundaries which reflect differences in means as they do differences in form.

The distinction between intelligence and its tools is about preserving our ability to ascribe intelligence to someone - which we need for coordination of projects and scorekeeping practices (such as those Brandom describes) - and the question is: what sort of cognitive identity do we actually have?

"Our goal as technology-using educators, should be to allocate to the learners the cognitive responsibility for the processing they do best while requiring the technology to do the processing that it does best. Rather than using the limited capabilities of the computer to present information and judge learner input (neither of which computers do well) while asking learners to memorize information and later recall it (which computers do with far greater speed and accuracy than humans), we should assign cognitive responsibility to the part of the learning system that does it the best. Learners should be responsible for recognizing and
judging patterns of information and then organizing it, while the computer system should perform calculations, store, and retrieve information." (15)

Notice the different verbs used here: learners are responsible for their tasks, computer systems perform theirs. This distinction is amplified in the following quote:

"Derry and LaJoie (1993) argue that "the appropriate role for a computer system is not that of a teacher/expert, but rather, that of a mind-extension "cognitive tool" (p. 5). Mindtools are unintelligent tools, relying on the learner to provide the intelligence, not the computer. This means that planning, decision-making, and self-regulation of learning are the responsibility of the learner, not the computer. However, computer systems can serve as powerful catalysts for facilitating these skills assuming they are used in ways that promote reflection, discussion, and problem solving." (14, orig. emphasis)

It is almost ironic that the very offloading of cognitive processes that inspires the extended mind hypothesis and its concomitant notion of distributed intelligence should motivate educationalists to emphasize the importance of unintelligent learning tools. What this suggests is that while intelligence can be considered as a property of the mind-world system, improving the sophistication of this system does not a fortiori imply improving the intelligence of its participants. So, it is just as inappropriate to collapse the distinction between participant and system, between intelligence and its means of expression, as it is to uncritically assert their independence. Simply put, the cognitive identity we ascribe intelligence to - participant or system - makes a difference. If it didn't, then smarter computers would make for smarter students, which is exactly what the educationalists reject.

This has some surprising consequences for embodied, embedded cognitive science. It suggests that intelligence is attributable to neither the body nor the total environment. We cannot attribute intelligence to the environment because intelligence not devolve from system to individual. It is as little a characteristic of the environmental totality as it is a feature of some Kantian transcendental unity of apperception. Nor can we attribute intelligence to the biological body, and this is because the body is embedded and its processes are meaningless in the absence of a background, and similarly meaningless in abstraction from the way they couple to this background.

So, if I were... here's what I'd say. Pt 2

Let's try to get our bearings. Cognitive science, roughly speaking, is the attempt to understand human consciousness as information processing. Cognitive science takes a generally functionalist approach to the mind, which means that it characterises mental states in terms of their functional roles, independently of the physiology of the brain. This way, while it remains broadly materialist, it hopes to avoid making any substantive metaphysical claims.

To understand its embodied, embedded strand (also known as enactivism), it is important to understand the changes cognitive science has undergone in recent years. As little as ten years ago, cognitive science could be characterised by its adhesion to the symbolic hypothesis: the claim that cognition amounts to symbol-processing, the ratiocination of discrete pieces of information according to inferential rules. On this view, the senses and actions are accordingly understood as the transduction of

So, if I were to tell you what my thesis is about, here's what I'd say. Pt I

In the early nineties, two very different intellectual communities developed a renewed interest in the work of a French existential phenomenologist from the 1940's and 50's called Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was a contemporary and friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for much of his life. Together they helped to found and edit the famous journal Les Temps Moderne. Merleau-Ponty is most famous for his Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, which sought to establish the primacy of the perceiving or 'lived' body ahead of both the physiological body and transcendental consciousness in the order of phenomena.

While he was widely regarded by his peers as the greatest of the post-war phenomenologists, interest in his work fell away in the anti-phenomenological climate of the Marxist, post-modernist 70's and 80's. It has recently simultaneously revived among, on the one hand, a particular breed of cognitive scientists and theorists of cognition who claim Merleau-Ponty as a precursor to their embodied, embedded cognitive science; and on the other, among feminist philosophers (particularly Australian feminist philosophers) seeking to establish an understanding of ethics that does justice to embodiment without effacing sexual difference.

As a consequence, the study of Merleau-Ponty's works today stands at a very strange intersection of interests, where reproductive ethics meets the science of consciousness, where neurophysiology confronts the sex-gender distinction, and where artificial intelligence meets the politics of identity and oppression.

I am interested in how Merleau-Ponty might catalyse a productive interaction along these lines. More specifically, I want to show how Merleau-Ponty's lived body forces us to reconsider the relationship between ethics and cognition, and allows us to grant ethical relations among embodied existents a kind of primacy, in the sense of grounding cognitive identities and more or less directly motivating cognition.

Beyond disambiguation: situation as other

Incompletable reduction
- precludes arriving at phenomenological 'data' as Borrett et al suppose

Heinamaa: incompletable reduction is not domain-restricted
- there is no distinction to be made between reducible / irreducible domains, as Dreyfus supposes
- discovery of pre-reflective intentionality of the body does not make the reduction irrelevant
- true, pre-reflective intentionality does not constitute its objects via classical representations, but this does not mean that the body's objects are simply given, and not constituted, nor that this constitution is immune to phenomenological clarification

Me: On the contrary, to imagine that the relationship between my situation and my body is that of lock to key, and that my body can unproblematically disambiguate my situation by virtue of its being a body, is to imagine my situation as a mere correlate of my body; it is to endorse a strange sort of corporeal subjectivism, in which the world is but the world for my body. It differs from the traditional form of subjectivism in being disabused of subjective freedom. The subject or subject-body here is a body of habit, or, in Dreyfus' case, a body of chaotic attractors. It is not a body of desires, but a body of tendencies and dispositions, all of which can conveniently be articulated in physiological terms.

However, in the end, this corporeal subjectivism begs the question of the constitution of the objects of perception as objects, i.e. as things that transcend our maximal grip on them. Or, if you prefer, the question can be put in subjective terms; i.e. in terms of how one might recognise the inadequacy of one's own skills in grasping (often literally, in getting a grip on) their objects. Ultimately, Dreyfus reduces skill acquisition to a kind of internal refinement.

Consider for example, the notion of experience that informs his model of skill acquisition. It is nothing more than brute repetition - Dreyfus does preserve a role for rule-following: rules frame practice, and allow the novice to acquire experience, but Dreyfus makes a strong distinction between the rules and the experience by implying that it is the experience and not the rules that constitute the skills.

Dreyfus's interpretation can itself be interpreted as an abortive attempt to move from static to genetic conceptions of phenomenology. The key feature of the move from static to genetic phenomenology is the return of the natural. But this relation to the natural, which I have through my embodiment, is not the truth behind an illusory relationship between the pure transcendental Ego and its intentional correlate. It is not that my embeddedness in a natural world by virtue of my body puts the lie to the representationalism of reflective consciousness, nor to the eidetic reduction that clarifies it. We cannot dispense with reflective consciousness in the wake of the discovery of a pre-reflective consciousness, because it is only through reflection that this pre-reflective consciousness is apprehended. These are not two domains, forcing us to decide whether to grant separate existence to both via some form of dualism, or else to assert the reality of one at the expense of the other.

Depraz 2

Didn't get much done this arvo.

But decided that Depraz piece in Nat. Ph. argues not for an analogy, but for a (potential) convergence between emergentist cog sci and phenomenology.

She has a perspective of the relationship between ph. and sci. that reminds us of David Morris, although Depraz has a far more positive approach to sci, and Morris is far more Hegelian.

Depraz hits her straps

I don't want to stop working, but its getting late, and I can feel my carefulness slipping.
Nonetheless, I'm very excited about continuing this tomorrow!

The section I've just completed (1st part of Depraz: Genetic to Generative) pretty much puts to bed the difficulties raised by Borrett et al and Dreyfus (although the hammer is yet to fall on the latter).

Fortunately, the next few pages of Depraz (from 472 onwards) promise to open up a whole range of themes (the following list is not comprehensive)
1 - the need to begin from architectonics while undermining a static layered conception (we need to introduce personal and prepersonal in order to move beyond the distinction - first to sedimentation and innovation, and then to an ethical demand that motivates cognition).
2 - static ph. is characterised by its activity (acts of consci immune to nature), while genetic phenomenology is characterised by its passivity. Generative phenomenology moves beyond these alternatives. (We can read Evans as saying: If cog sci fails to move to a generative persp. it threatens to impose a passive nihilism on spirit.)
3 - from the spectre of biologism to communitarian and historical perspective, anticipating the transformation of body-ethics in Diprose.

Chapter One... or maybe One-And-A-Half

Thinking of this section as separate, it sets up a lot of the intuition of the following chapters.
This section moves around the various alternative reading strategies -
Heinamaa, from phenomenology as rigorous science to ph. as openness to the other (ethical moment)
Depraz, from genetic to generative ph. - from individual in nature to person within community
- could take this as meaning that the other in Heinamaa is not the world as nature.
Evans, from analytic observer to ph. observer (political moment)
- the loss of openness as nihilism, cog sci risks turning into technocratic rationality
Think of them as three proto-readings, hooks on which to hang my own attempt
Mine is really closest to Heinamaa's work on Beauvoir's proximity to Merleau-Ponty, though she has not yet brought that to bear on cognitive science directly.

Preface, outline of ch1, bottom pg 1
...Our discussion culminates in the realisation that we need a different strategy for reading Merleau-Ponty if we are to break out of this oscillation and enable a genuinely Merleau-Pontian engagement with cognitive science.

A first opportunity arises from Heinamaa's criticism of Dreyfus. Heinamaa challenges Dreyfus' opposing Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. While it allows enthusiasts and critics of cognitive science to articulate themselves, it is not an accurate representation of either Husserl or Merleau-Ponty.

This re-reading of Merleau-Ponty's relationship to Husserl has recently been taken up by Dan Zahavi, who also argues against Dreyfus' reading. Zahavi points out that Merleau-Ponty's familiarity with Husserl's later work, especially his generative phenomenology, allowed him a richer and more accurate interpretation than much contemporary Husserl scholarship.

Generative phenomenology is missing from the Dreyfusian reading of Merleau-Ponty. Interestingly, it is also what is missing from embodied, embedded cognitive science, according to Natalie Depraz. In Naturalizing Phenomenology, Depraz outlines very well what is at stake in producing an analogue to generative phenomenology in the cognitive sciences.

To be sure, Depraz believes that Merleau-Ponty's work neither can nor should provide such an analogue. But Depraz' article is important for two reasons. Firstly, it situates the other major protagonist in the cognitive science's reception of Merleau-Ponty's work: Varela, Thompson and Rosch, the authors of the Embodied Mind. Depraz regards the Embodied Mind, with its emphasis on emergent phenomena, as an analogue of genetic phenomenology. Where emergent cognitive science falls short, in Depraz' opinion, is that it threatens to fall into another interminable oscillation, but between a trascendental pan-psychism and a brute materialism. (Between Kant and Dennett? Check this out!)

Depraz' article is also important because it introduces us - and more importantly, the readership of Naturalizing Phenomenology - to a theme central to generative phenomenology: the placing of the the constitution of consciousness within the context of a intersubjective consititution, or generative community.

While neither Heinamaa's criticism of Dreyfus nor Depraz' programmatic ambition amount to a criticism of cognitive science per se, such a criticism is possible. Fred Evans shows us how it may from a political point of view.

Man and Adversity

"A man cannot receive a heritage of ideas without transforming it by the very fact that he comes to know it, without injecting his own always different way of being into it...
How would we dare enumerate acquired ideas, since even when they have gotten themselves almost universally accepted, they have always done so by also becoming different from themselves?
Furthermore, a catalogue of acquired knowledge would not suffice. Even if we were to lay the "truths" of this half-century end-to-end, in order to restore their hidden affinity, we would still have to revive the personal and interpersonal experience they are a response to, and the logic of situations in reference to which they were defined. The great or valuable work is never an effect of life, but it is always a response to life's very particular events or most general structures...
Yet this transformation of our understanding of man, which we cannot hope to determine by a rigorous method on the basis of works, ideas, and history, is sedimented in us. It is our substance... What we can try to do is to mark within ourselves, according to two or three selected relationships, modifications in the human situation." ('Man and Adversity', Signs, 224-5)

Genesis, Generativity and Anonymity

Genesis

Merleau-Ponty moves to genetic phenomenology through a discussion of the meaning of pathology, and the inability of separating bodily injury from symbolic consciousness - "It was through sight that mind in him was impaired." (Schneider, PhP126).

The task of genetic ph. is to understand how "Form integrates within itself the content until the latter finally appears as a mere mode of form itself" (127) The architectonic of embodied consciousness must recognize a movement from bodily content to mental form; consciousness as leaping-off of bodily or natural accident ("spontaneity") and the tendency of its acts to become sedimented and provide springboards for further acts. Thus, "...mental illness may... be linked with some bodily accident... because it cannot be consciousness without playing on the significances given either in the absolute past of nature or in its own personal past, and because any form of lived experience tends towards a certain generality whether that of our habits or that of our 'bodily functions'." (137)

Generativity

Merleau-Ponty moves to generative phenomenology through the discussion of sexuality. The discussion of economics and historical materialism is relegated to a footnote.

Zahavi describes generative ph. as "An intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy" (109)

Husserl says that "What I generate from out of myself (primally instituting) is mine. But I am a 'child of the times'; I am a member of a we-community in the broadest sense... I am what I am as an heir" (Hua 14/223, in Zahavi, 138)

Through generative phenomenology, Husserl comes to see the birth and death of the subject as having not only empirical, but also transcendental significance.

and Anonymity

We can only understand Merleau-Ponty's account of sensation in generative terms. "Each sensation... is a birth and a death... it arises from sensibility which has preceded it and which will outlive it, just as my birth and death belong to a natality and a mortality which are anonymous." (216)

Through this account of sensation, Merleau-Ponty preserves Husserl's view that generative intersubjectivity must unfold itself through a "transcendental primal ego" (Zahavi, 139). That is, that the discovery of generative intersubjectivity does not undermine the necessity of the phenomenological method, which takes its departure from the first-person perspective. We must come to understand the meaning of these anonymous traditions through an explication of the way in which they are inhabited, through the meanings that constitute and constrain experience.

The anonymity of generativite intersubjectivy is thus the 'one' in the cryptic phrase: "I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive." (215)

It is important, however, to realise that this anonymity is not the product of ignorance. Generative intersubjectivity cannot be made explicit once and for all, and the phenomenological task of revealing the essences of experience in incompletable.

It is at this point that phenomenology and anonymity begins to take on new significance. Anonymity becomes the freedom through which these essences can change, and phenomenology becomes a kind of responsibility to this anonymity, through which "The world [and the other] is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself" (407).

We need to look in PhP for precursors to the lectures on the perception of others in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language.

Everyone needs a plan

I have been trying for the last few sessions to wrestle with a chapter introducing the feminist reading of Merleau-Ponty. So far, I haven't been very successful.
I'm going to take a step back today, and just try to develop a list of themes and concepts which I borrow from feminist literature in the other chapters.
So, I'm going to:
(a) read through the chapter outlines, noting down the work that feminist thinkers do in each
(b) make a two column list - one of thinkers, the other of themes/positions - and match them up
(c) I'm going to number the lines between the columns, and start writing notes on each of them in the wiki (sorry Dave)

Often, describing a thinker's position, or the differences between thinkers on a theme, requires the elaboration of other themes. I need to keep these as secondary themes. They don't deserve nearly as much attention. It's ok for them to be inadequately dealt with, until a reader tells me otherwise.

So the plan for this week (i.e. before next wednesday) is to get these notes finished.

Getting started

This is the first installment of what will hopefully be a very productive affair.
This blog is primarily a way for me organise myself daily around a particular thought, and to encourage me to keep my PhD in mind, even though I am working full-time.
Anyway, let's get to it!