[1]
By saying that sociality matters constitutively for the human self, I mean that without continuously relating and engaging in interactions with others, there would be no human self as a whole. The social is not only causally relevant for enacting selfhood, but it is also an essential component of its minimal organisational structure.
[2]
The existential phenomenological approach refers to phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty who investigate the basic structures of human existence. One of their assumptions is that prior to any reflexive understanding, we are already attuned to the world simply through our bodily being in it. Dreyfus calls this pre-reflexive attunement to the world “absorbed coping” (2013, p. 21).
[3]
Thompson clearly recognises the importance of intersubjectivity for the process of understanding, arguing that “human subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, and no mind is an island” (2007, p. 383). He proposes (in line with Husserl) that humans are from the beginning intersubjectively open. However, it seems that Thompson’s emphasis on sociality is either developmentally motivated and concerned with the intersubjectively-open intentionality in object perception or a question of our (rather sophisticated ability) to understand others and to make the distinction between self and other. But the subject herself, despite being intersubjectively open, is still a “bodily subject” (Thompson 2007, p. 382). In other words, the structures of subjectivity itself, the very network processes that bring about the individual as an autonomous system, are determined bodily, not intersubjectively.
[4]
Note that it does not actually matter whether one posits that the mind is in the head or in the body, both claims are compatible with the weak reading of the interrelation of individual and social world, according to which the social remains separated from the individual.
[5]
This image is adapted from Varela et al. (1993), who criticise the traditional view as implying that the environment is a “landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world” (p. 198); instead, they argue that the relation between world and individual mind is co-determining.
[6]
This commentary is not the place to discuss this issue in detail, but it should be noted that such a view can be expanded to political philosophy and the philosophy of law, where it might have far reaching consequences for questions concerning the nature of individual rights and approaches to legal responsibility.
[7]
Interestingly, this is also an insight Dreyfus pointed out much earlier when he argued that the “human world, then is prestructured in terms of human purposes and concerns in such a way that what counts as an object or is significant about an object already is a function of, or embodies, that concern” (1972, p. 173).