Abstract
When Husserl discussed the phenomenology of willing, he concluded that the sole theoretical foundation of the intentionality of consciousness is insufficient to account for voluntary acts as they do not primarily represent their content as given entities, but instead create the willed during their performance. Nonetheless, Husserl did not suspend the theoretical foundation of intentionality, meaning that the theoretical concept of objectual intentionality juxtaposes a practical concept of performative intentionality. Recent results from the field of robot-assisted gait rehabilitation provided experimental findings that may clarify this relationship, to the effect that the foundational structure of consciousness builds upon a heterarchical model of objectual and performative intentionality. A combination of phenomenological interview results, neural motor control, the functional design of the robot, and clinical data qualifies gait initiation as a non-objectifying act that creates its intentional object (i.e., the willed movement). In sum, the experimental findings support Husserl’s proposal of a genuine practical or performative intentionality that points to a heterarchical understanding of the relationship between representational and performative foundations of action consciousness.
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The relation of the Studien to the Vorlesungen is complicated to the extent that the Studien partially proceed within the initial or purely theoretical foundation and further develop this account toward complementing evaluative and practical forms of intentionality. Considering the amount of text in the Studien, it is therefore beyond the scope of this investigation to track Husserl’s development in detail. It is, however, argued that the Studien provide sufficient argument for a practical extension of Husserl’s theory of willing. In the following, all references to Husserl’s works will be made to the German pagination of the Husserliana edition (abbreviated ‘Hua’) including volume and page number.
FIM-M is the “Functional Independence Measure” for motor-related scores on a scale from 0 to 100 (Chumney et al., 2010).
Opposed to common hierarchical views of action control, where the governing function (mostly the intention) determines the action, a heterarchical order allows for situation-specific configurations of intention and initiation as independent functions (Cumming, 2016). Depending on the situation and needs of the agent, one or both of the functions can govern the overall behavior because an agent is able to employ intention and initiation simultaneously or independently. However, it is important to note that a heterarchy is not the opposite of a hierarchy. Rather, heterarchy can include hierarchical and network relations simultaneously, while these orders can also change due to the behavior of the system.
Spano (2022c) distinguishes three steps in the development of Husserl’s foundational account: the initial account in the Logical Investigations, followed by an elaboration in the Vorlesungen, and the final version in Vorlesungen and Studien.
Objectual intentionality is also founding for intentionalistic theories of action (Bratman, 1999; Mele, 1992) and, partly, for accounts of the sense of agency (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, Chapter 8; Pacherie, 2008). The following discussion is confined to the classical phenomenological use of intentionality.
If not mentioned otherwise, translations are by the author.
See also Smith (2020) for a corresponding analysis of the act of walking.
This issue corresponds to the current (and still unsolved) debate about how the propositional format of intentions can be linked to the motoric format of motor programs (cf. Mylopoulos & Pacherie, 2018).
See also supplement 12 on the question “To what extent the fiat presupposes the representation of the action” (Hua XLIII/3, 2020, p. 262).
The same applies for evaluative acts (cf. Spano 2022c).
Although the experience of gait initiation as a performance can be explained by the phenomenological characterization of the fiat as a non-objectifying act, whether the “foundational intertwining” suffices to meet Scheler’s and Heidegger’s cognitivist criticism of Husserl (cf. Spano, 2022c, 49–50) is a topic for further discussion.
The practical foundation of the fiat demonstrates that it is also distinguished from pre-reflective self-consciousness with which it shares the feature of not being “an object-consciousness at all” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 62). However, the fiat is more than “recessive and rather lacking in detail” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 178) because it can involve the full phenomenal presence of the initiation of the action and exercises real-world efficacy.
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I would like to thank Detlev Pätzold and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
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This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under Grant 18K00035.
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Grüneberg, P. Intentionality and performance: the phenomenology of gait initiation. Phenom Cogn Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09953-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09953-8