Tuesday, June 01, 2004

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.

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