Abstract
Extended cognition theorists claim that the definition of cognition can be extended to include not only the brain, but also the body and environment. In a series of works, Mark Rowlands has envisioned a new science of mind that explores the externalism of consciousness and cognition. This paper connects Rowlands’ work with the phenomenology of Aron Gurwitsch. It shows how Gurwitsch’s field of consciousness, in particular his conception of the marginal halo, can provide a distinct, organized way of thinking about extended cognition. A key question considered is from where do cognitive processes project and disclose meanings? By thinking of location as locus—a projecting pathway of points of intentional opportunity—organization in extended cognition becomes organization in a field of consciousness. The marginal halo in the field of consciousness is articulated as this locus of intentionality, what Rowlands (The new science of the mind: from extended mind to embodied phenomenology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010) calls “the noneliminable intentional core”. Problems of cognitive bloat and personal character are addressed in light of the findings. In addition to situating Gurwitsch’s work within the extended mind movement for the first time, this study highlights the importance of the marginal halo, largely neglected in previous Gurwitsch scholarship.
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Notes
In the following, I will stay with perceptual examples, though negation applies to any conscious activity for Sartre. In his work, Rowlands (2003: 69) discusses Sartre’s concept of negation, but it is important here to be more explicit about negating activity.
External negation is not the same as externalism. The former is activity of consciousness, the latter is a philosophical position. Sartre’s philosophy supports both of these distinct but related concepts.
“Separated” or “distanced” as a result of negating activity does not mean disconnected, as we will see.
In the context of debates of externalism and internalism, Lenay and Steiner (2010) discuss how the body helps distinguish and constitute the space of perception. This is worth mentioning here since it is a different but equally positive way of talking about location. “The distinction between inside and outside is thus defined functionally in the course of the very same constitution of space where it comes to have a meaning; this being so, it is not difficult to understand that this distinction depends on the capacities of the lived body to act and to feel, capacities which are modified according to the coupling device that the subject takes in hand” (2010: 948). They also stress possibilities, as will this paper: “Saying that there is only one space, is therefore saying that every objective space is to be understood on the basis of the space of possibilities for a conscious being” (2010: 949; cf. Zhok 2016). It turns out that the marginal halo is about opportunity or possibility, including but not limited to the living body.
The term “gestalt” will be capitalized for the discipline of Gestalt psychology theory but not otherwise.
Drawing inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smyth writes, “For the outer horizon of experience has epistemic priority. This is easily overlooked because acknowledging it as the most general level, it might seem reasonable to suppose that phenomenology could at least begin soundly on an intuitional basis at subordinate levels. But the crucial point is that all experience is conditioned by its outer horizon. Representing the ‘worldhood’ of the world, so to speak, it is, strictly speaking, here that phenomenology properly begins” (2016: 385).
For the three constants of the margin, I prefer to use gerunds where possible (e.g., streaming, environing, living-body) rather than nouns (stream, environment, embodiment) to express better the view that consciousness is essentially dynamic (as seen in Sartre and Gurwitsch).
In discussing exploration of terrain as a paradigmatic example of revealing activity, Rowlands writes “The point here is that revealing activity, in general, is something that is done in the head, in the body, and also in the world” (2010: 199f.). The question being asked in this paper is where is the point of reference for the revealing? It is body without being too focused on body, it is world without being too focused on world, and it is “head” or brain processes without being too focused on the processes—these are the three realms of the margin we have described and the “without being too focused” is the way we have described the halo as related, but irrelevant to the theme.
The articulation of the marginal halo as a projecting pathway of intentional opportunity resonates with the role of possibility in Husserl’s work. Zhok writes, “Possibility appears to be rooted in what is, each time, actual experience and is characterized by the potential and forward-looking character inherent in horizons. Inner and outer horizons are Vermöglichkeiten [practical possibilities], which are primarily characterized by ‘teleological’ (axiological) instances; they are animated by an inexhaustible drive towards synthesis, an ontological drive that does not mirror facts but expresses fundamental instances” (2016: 232). She concludes, “That is, actual experiences create the room for possibility; they are possibilizations… Experience is emergence in both an epistemic and an ontological sense, because it creates the room for possibilities. Such a dynamic possibilizing dimension expresses a constitutive ‘drive.’ To be a living consciousness hunting for meaningful units is tantamount to being a possibilizing actuality” (2016: 233). One way to conceive of this priority of possibility, which designates consciousness as emergence, is to identify a locus or projecting pathway for conscious life—the marginal halo.
This irrelevancy is the sense of non-positional consciousness.
Aydin (2015: 80), Heersmink (2016a: 580) and others point out problems with the concept of extended cognition, for example, it assumes an inside/outside measure and the measure of extension is vague at best. An answer to the from where question can help. If the present articulation of the marginal halo is right, then the “extension” is from the middle of the cognitive process, the marginal halo.
Gurwitsch similarly writes, “Just as in a particular perception the perceptible thing presents itself one-sidedly, i.e., from a certain angle and under a certain aspect but never under the infinite totality of all its possible aspects, so too the present segment of the stream of consciousness, when grasped by reflection and apprehended in its pointing to the Ego, appears as that part, side, or aspect of the Ego which happens to fall under actual experience” (1985: 23).
“The [pure] ego is the flux itself, that one well determined identical totality which, however, is never accomplished or finished, but rather involved in perpetual growth” (Gurwitsch 1966: 282).
Gurwitsch writes, “Orienting the concept of objectivity with respect to that of transcendence, the genuine and only phenomenologically legitimate concept of subjectivity comes to be defined by way of contrast to transcendence. Because no transcendent object is constituted by the unity and order between mental states as arranged along the chain, the order in question is a subjective order. Correspondingly, the subjectivity of mental states consists in, and only in, their being members of the chain in the aforementioned way, in their forming an order of experiences as a merely temporal order yielding nothing ‘objective’ whatever, i.e., nothing transcending the sphere of mental states as psychological events” (1966: 281).
“To be sure, reflection does not apprehend the stream in its entirety all at once, but only that segment which culminates in the present. Through reflection in memory it is possible to extend the apprehended segment and to ascend to past experiences more and more remote from the phase experienced at present. However far we go in this direction, it is impossible ever to apprehend the stream in its entirety at a single glance” (Gurwitsch 1985: 20).
The metaphor of a stream of consciousness is also dynamic by definition. The assumption and articulation of consciousness as temporal is found in most early phenomenologists, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and their followers, as well as the originator of the “stream” metaphor, William James. Sartre compares consciousness to skiing a steep mountain slope, where one must project forward toward the bottom, varying speed but always moving. Consciousness is the speeding skiing and the resisting snow is Being (1956: 582–585).
Concerning Gurwitsch and his non-egological conception of consciousness, Vincini and Gallagher (2016) argue that problems of agency and attentional transformations require a different way of talking about the ego. I cannot expand here on their arguments. But I believe Gurwitsch’s non-egological conception is defensible if we find a more robust way to articulate the persistence of the marginal halo, e.g., as a projecting pathway of intentional opportunity, as sketched in this paper. The issue of agency can also be addressed if we recall Gurwitsch’s use of Gestalt theory in arguments for saliency versus selectivity and the influence of past achievements on subsequent ones in the “growth of the mind,” discussed in Parts One and Two of The Field of Consciousness (1964: 15ff.).
An added advantage is that Gurwitsch’s Gestalt-phenomenological theory of conscious organization can help in articulating how cognition is patterned, systematic, or multidimensional.
In a unique study of identity in a Hassidic community, Tenary describes how character is marginal and active. “Living in a community such as the Hassidic community means learning to tacitly expect these kinds of interactions [friendly and unfriendly]. It is in this sense that being a Jew is not only something done at specific points of time. By tacitly expecting the nods of other Jews on the one side of the spectrum, and the possibility of an anti-Semitic slur on the other, the categorization of one as a Jew is formed on the margins of embodied consciousness—active without being interactionally attended to” (2010: 65).
Aligning with the idea that future possibilities characteristically align with past practices, Sartre remarks that character is a vow: “In this sense there is no character; only the project of oneself” (1956: 551f.).
Considering similar issues of disposition and saliency, but in the language of practical and teleological dimensions of possibility in Husserl, Zhok writes, “These considerations tell us that being as such, in its constituted (ontic) sense, which involves intertemporal existence and coexistence of all that is absent, has an essentially dispositional nature. The real possibilities that inhere in constituted being rely on the availability of settled practices (in an extended sense) and on the constituting dimension of teleology. Settled practices define the contents that we are able to entertain in mind and to vary in phantasy, while a telic drive defines the thresholds and generality (difference and identity) of meaningful units” (2016: 227, emphasis added).
This study is dedicated to the memory of Professor Lester Embree (1938–2017).
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Arvidson, P.S. The Field of Consciousness and Extended Cognition. Hum Stud 41, 21–40 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9453-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9453-5