Abstract
This chapter investigates the phenomenon of freedom in unreflective decision making and action from the perspective of the philosophy of embodied cognition. Phenomenological analysis suggests that in skillful unreflective decision and action we allow ourselves to be responsive to relevant affordances. Even though we respond to affordances with instinctive ease, we do not experience these actions as fully automatic, or beyond our control. I propose that if we want to understand the phenomenon of freedom in episodes of unreflective affordance-responsiveness, we should investigate it on its own terms and do justice to its specific phenomenology. I critically assess ideas on this type of freedom by Dreyfus and Kelly and show that their accounts still presuppose the possibility to reflect, which makes them inapt as accounts of the unreflective freedom in affordance responsiveness that adults share with children who do not yet have the capacity to reflect. I suggest that being bound by relevant affordances does not contradict freedom and sketch the outline of an alternative account of freedom in unreflective action.
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Notes
- 1.
Let me briefly sketch the context in which freedom (strong spontaneity) appears within McDowell’s (1996) framework. McDowell wants to place strong spontaneity steadfastly in nature. He argues that conformity to natural law does not exhaust the notion of nature. Second nature is nature too. The notion of Bildung (upbringing) clarifies how we acquire the conceptual capacities (second nature, again remembering that this really is nature) that belong to strong spontaneity and make it possible to step back and reflect. We acquire these conceptual capacities thanks to our being initiated into language (McDowell 1996: 125–126). This account should make sure that such freedom is not considered as supra-natural or spooky.
- 2.
Both humans and non-human animals (henceforth ‘animals’) can perceive affordances. McDowell, for instance, recently wrote: “[R]esponsiveness to affordances, necessarily bound up with embodied coping skills, is something we share with other animals.” (McDowell 2007a: 344).
- 3.
Note that this leaves open the possibility that in the end the possibility to step back is relevant in unreflective freedom. I just want to avoid presupposing it, because that could easily lead to an over-intellectualization.
- 4.
Thanks to Rasmus Thybo Jensen for helpful suggestions on how to make my approach explicit.
- 5.
It is crucial to see that strong and weak notions of freedom are not necessarily exclusive. Someone can hold that our understanding of freedom in unreflective action benefits from using a weaker notion of freedom, without committing herself to denying that mature human beings in unreflective action have the capacity to step back and reflect (that is, strong spontaneity).
- 6.
Merleau-Ponty gives a good description of an episode of absorbed coping: “For the player in action the football field is […] pervaded with lines of force […] and articulated in sectors (for example, the ‘openings’ between the adversaries) […]; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal’, for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field.” (Merleau-Ponty 1983/1942: 168–169).
- 7.
Sean Kelly gave a lecture on this topic at Cornell University’s ‘Perception and Action Symposium’ on May 7, 2006. I would like to thank him for allowing me to discuss a text that is only a draft manuscript. The draft is available online: http://philpapers.org/rec/KELPNA.
- 8.
The role of such lived normativity (Rietveld 2008a) becomes, for instance, clear in Dreyfus’ and Kelly’s elaboration on Sartre’s (1954) example of running to catch a streetcar: “[T]here is no ego […] in the runner’s mind when he is absorbed in reaching the streetcar […] But […] the experience of chasing a streetcar does not leave the mind empty. It essentially involves a felt solicitation to act in a certain way with respect to the streetcar.” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2007: 53, my italics). This “felt solicitation” contains a normative tension. The mind is not empty in absorbed coping because we “experience our current bodily situation as a tension away from the optimal stance” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2007: 53), and are immediately drawn to improve, running faster and getting closer.
- 9.
Note that this seems to presuppose that resisting an affordance is something that I as a reflective subject must do.
- 10.
Kelly models his account of a change in the nature of attention (from engaged to detached) on Heidegger’s (1927) account of a worldly breakdown: “The phenomenological story I’ve sketched so far involves moving from the kind of sensitivity to environmental norms that is involved in skillful absorbed coping to the kind of detached experience of an independent world that one can have when one is paying attention to it. In the metaphor from the introduction, it involves the crystallization of self and world.” (Kelly 2006: 14, my italics).
- 11.
Note that sometimes Kelly (2006) uses the word ‘attention’ as shorthand for this attentive observation or detached attention.
- 12.
Note the analogy of this aspect of Kelly’s proposal with McDowell’s account of strong spontaneity, which is based on the capacity to step back and reflect. A difference is that, as we will see below, Kelly stresses that the individual cannot exercise this capacity for attentive observation willfully in absorbed coping.
- 13.
“[T]he source of the movement [from absorbed coping to attentive observation is] not the world but the coping agent himself. That is why it is a story about human freedom, rather than a story about worldly breakdown.” (Kelly 2006: 15).
- 14.
Dreyfus and Kelly convincingly make this point by means of Sartre’s (1954) streetcar example: “When I run after a streetcar…there is no I…. I am plunged into the world of objects … which present themselves …with attractive and repellant qualities – but me, I have disappeared.” (Sartre 1954: 48, as quoted in Dreyfus and Kelly 2007: 46). This description suggests that we should not speak of a reflective subject or ego in absorbed coping: “[T]here is no ego […] in the runner’s mind when he is absorbed in reaching the streetcar […]” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2007: 53). Note that this example does not exclude the possibility that there is pre-reflective self-awareness in such an episode of absorbed coping. Even though in this episode of absorbed coping we do not experience ourselves as a reflective subject, on the basis of this example we cannot say that there is no self-awareness at all. We have to understand what is means that the mind is not “empty” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2007: 53). Minimally this type of skillful engagement with the world includes an experience of the lived body being drawn by solicitations.
- 15.
Just to be clear: this is an aim my chapter does not share with Dreyfus.
- 16.
To repeat Dreyfus’ own words: “Our involved freedom makes possible on some occasions finding ourselves becoming detached and choosing a course of action which, like all willful actions, we can perform at best competently, while on other occasions, letting ourselves be drawn to reenter our involved expert activity.” (Dreyfus 2007a: 355).
- 17.
He writes for instance the following about such an experience in absorbed coping: “My experience of environmental norms is always such that resistance could occur, and this differentiates me from the animals. And to the extent that the norms continue to hold me, there is a sense in which I have allowed them to do so.” (Kelly 2006: 16). Kelly describes the experience of freedom in unreflective action well here, but the account he gives in terms of “noticing” does not do justice to this phenomenon.
- 18.
- 19.
This example comes from the work of primatologist Frans de Waal (2004). This example is also interesting because it reminds us of the importance of the network of social relationships for understanding freedom, the crucial link between care and freedom, emphasized in the closing sentences of Merleau-Ponty’s (2002/1945) chapter on freedom. Moreover, De Waal quotes Jane Goodall (1990: 213, in De Waal 2004: 389) saying: “In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands, surrounded by water-filled moats … Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning – and were sometimes successful.” De Waal (2004: 389) notes that studies of animal behavior show that dolphins and elephants have similar powerful tendencies to help others.
- 20.
Dreyfus (2005a: 60) calls the question about this transformation an “urgent” one.
- 21.
On the other hand, we should not presuppose that intuitive responsiveness to possibilities for action does not also play a role in the activity of explicit deliberation. It might well be the case that explicit deliberation, as a form of skillful action, shares more characteristics with skillful unreflective action than is generally assumed at the moment. Moreover, the balance between reflection and unreflective action is typically maintained unreflectively (De Haan, Rietveld & Denys 2013).
- 22.
A Wittgensteinian case of such a transition in a flow of unreflective action could be the situation in which the lapels have adequately been dealt with by the tailor and now he is moved to improve by another part of the same suit.
- 23.
Note that in the case of mere movements that are not actions, for example when we are unexpectedly pushed by someone, the initial movements we make are not instances of responsiveness to relevant affordances. On the other hand, the way we respond briefly after being pushed, for example by grasping someone’s arm (but not her breasts or hair) to avoid falling, and the way the compensatory movements develop over time after the initial automatic reaction, can be understood in terms of such responsiveness to affordances.
- 24.
I mean here situated normativity in the basic sense of distinguishing in the context of a particular situation between better and worse, optimal and suboptimal, appropriate and inappropriate, what is significant and what it less significant, etc.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Hubert Dreyfus, Nico Frijda, Janna van Grunsven, Sean Kelly, Martin Stokhof, and Rasmus Thybo Jensen for feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. This research project was financially supported by ‘Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research’ (NWO VENI- and VIDI grants). I would like to express my gratitude for awarding these grants.
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Rietveld, E. (2013). Affordances and Unreflective Freedom. In: Jensen, R., Moran, D. (eds) The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 71. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01616-0_2
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