Levinas’ radical embodied phenomenology Matt Bower Texas State University
[email protected]
1. Radical embodiment Standard approaches to cognitive science view the mind as essentially representational, computational, and disembodied in nature. Representationalism: The mind directly deals only with internal mental stand-ins (e.g., something like an image or a proposition), and not with anything extra-mental. Computationalism: The mind encodes its inputs as representations which can be transformed according to rules (which may also be represented) into other representations, and the downstream products can combine with other representations to yield behavior. Disembodiment: The brain is the sole proprietor of all mental representation and computation, because, e.g., of the possibilities of envatment or multiple-realizability. Radical embodied cognitive science (RECS) (Chemero 2009) denies that the mind is necessarily representational or computational, and affirms that it is necessarily embodied and embedded. RECS appeals to ecological psychology (Gibson 1979) to undermine representationalism and to dynamical systems theory (e.g., Thelen and Smith 1994) and situated and evolutionary robotics (e.g., Brooks 1991; Beer 1990) to undermine computationalism and support embodiment and embededness. 2. Phenomenology’s lack of radicalism The most well-known phenomenological critiques of representation are incomplete. Husserl does reject the idea that what we experience directly is a mental content, contending instead that we experience things themselves “in the flesh” (Husserl 1983). Yet, it is plausible to regard Husserl’s noema as a representation of sorts, whether it is regarded as an intensional entity (Smith and MacIntyre 1984) or belongs to the phenomenon qua phenomenon (Drummond 1990). Heidegger (1962) and Merleau-Ponty (2002) both insist that our ground-level experience of things cannot be reduced to a mental image or overt judgment, nor any impassive or disengaged regard for things. But these claims do not amount to a criticism of representation per se. Given the evolution of the notion of representation in the last several decades, these critiques will not suffice. Nowadays, representations may be viewed as transparent (Tye 2002); they are no longer universally viewed as propositional, image-like, action-neutral, or impassive (Millikan 1995; Mandik 2005); and they may even extend beyond the brain (Clark 2008). 3. Levinas’ radicalism: Against representation Possessing semantic content is plausibly the distinctive feature of mental representations. Levinas elaborates a fundamental and broad class of experiences that lack semantic content or “sense,” i.e., that property of an experience enabling it to refer experience something as thus and so. This class encompasses, e.g., temporal experience, consciousness, self-awareness, sensation, feeling, desire, action, social interaction, and aesthetic experience. Such experiences are crucially dissimilar to mental representation, inasmuch as the latter “discovers nothing before itself”, “involves no passivity” (Levinas 1969, 125), and is inherently “non-reciprocal” (ibid., 126). Consider Levinas’ remarks about “existence” in Existence and Existents, a primitive experiential background or baseline. “Existence is […] antecedent to the world.” (Levinas 1978, 8) “[I]n the world we are dealing with objects. Whereas in taking up an instant we are committing ourselves irreparably to existing in a pure event which does not relate to any substantive, any thing, in the world”, i.e., to any “substantives bearing adjectives” (ibid., 27) “[E]xistence is not, properly speaking, a term, is not a substantive, and instead of being at a distance adheres to the I.” (ibid., 39) 1
Levinas’ radical embodied phenomenology Existence is non-semantic, but not simple or unstructured, being articulated as a “drama” or a “dialectic”: One is possessed by (ibid., 14), assumes (25), is absorbed with (28), or is exposed to (54) it. Existence is discernible in, e.g., fatigue (ibid., 17-25), effort (19-24), desire (27-38), and insomnia (6164). Further, the body figures in existence as the “base,” or “position” from which conscious experience is possible, belonging “to the order of events and not to that of substantives” (ibid., 69) The primary modality of existence, in Totality and Infinity, is enjoyment (sensibility) (Levinas 1969, 190). “It was said [cf., e.g., by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty] that we always find ourselves among things: color is always extended and objective, the color of a dress, a lawn, a wall; sound is a noise of a passing car, or a voice of someone speaking.” (ibid., 187) But consider: “This critique of sensation failed to recognize the plane on which […] sensible life is lived as enjoyment. […] [Here, experiences’] content dissolves into their affective content.” (ibid., 187) “Enjoyment is not [one] psychological state among others […], but the very pulsation of the I.” (ibid., 113) “But we can speak of enjoyment or of sensation even in the domain of vision and audition.” (ibid., 187) The “content” of enjoyment is called the elemental, which presents “its qualities without support, its adjectives without substantive” (ibid., 132). “[S]ensibility touches the reverse, without wondering about the obverse.” (ibid., 135) Enjoyment, e.g., in vision, is to be “born by the very image that I see” (ibid., 128). In enjoyment, “[l]ife is a body, not a lived-body, […] but a cross-roads of physical forces, body-effect.” (ibid., 164) Enjoyment is “autochthonous” existence; rootedness in one’s bodily condition is apparent in qualities of enjoyment as “agreeable” or “indigent.” References Beer, R. (1990). Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior. Boston: Academic Press. Brooks, R. (1991). “Intelligence without representation.” Artificial Intelligence 47: 139-159. Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge: MIT Press. Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drummond, J. (1990). Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Gibson, J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Trans.). New York: Harper Collins. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. F. Kersten (Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. A. Lingis (Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levinas, E. (1978). Existence and Existents. A. Lingis (Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Mandik, P. (2005). “Action-oriented representation,” in Cognition and the Brain. A. Brook and K. Akins (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. C. Smith (Trans.). New York: Routledge Classics. Millikan, R. (1995). “Pushmi-pullyu representations.” Philosophical Psychology 9: 185-200. Smith, D. W. and R. McIntyre (1984). Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language. Dordrecht: Springer. Thelen, E. and L. Smith (1994). A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tye, M. (2002). “Representationalism and the transparency of experience.” Nous 36(1): 137-151.
2
