Noë observes a dichotomy between what he calls the intellectualist approach to concepts, the view that concepts are judgments, which is endorsed by Kant and Frege, and the existential phenomenological approach, such as that endorsed by Dreyfus, which argues that concepts are usually only used by the novice, and that understanding is otherwise already given through context and situation.[2] Noë disagrees with both positions. He rejects the idea that concepts are only judgments, fixed and just “out there”, to help us represent the world; yet contrary to the anti-intellectualists, Noë also emphasizes that conceptual understanding is not limited to the novice, but “at work wherever we think and perceive and act and talk”. What the existential phenomenologist thereby misses, according to Noë, is that skillful mastery involves learning and development. Noë assumes that, like intellectualism, anti-intellectualism makes the presupposition that concepts are equal to judgments and thus implicitly reduces the mind to a “realm of detached contemplation” (2012, p. 25). For that reason, Noë calls anti-intellectualism crypto-intellectualist.
Noë seeks to find an alternative to the two positions by questioning their very fundaments. Rather than assuming that the world is just given and that everything is already present to us, Noë emphasizes the active contribution of the individual organism (2004, 2009). He proposes that we should adopt a pluralistic approach to concepts, according to which conceptual understanding is basically having the skills required for accessing the world. There are different types or modes of access to the world, including the modes of perception and action, the (inter)personal, and the emotional mode. On this pluralistic account, thinking and perceiving are not very different from one another. Both are “a skillful negotiation with what there is, just another modality of our environment-involving transactions” (Noë this collection, p. 16). From this perspective, judgements belong to a particular mode of access and form part of a broader set of skills of conceptual understanding. Noë then specifies the nature of our access to the world. The world is not just out there ready to be understood. Rather, it always has to be made available and actively brought into view or into “presence”, as Noë puts it. Concepts are the means by which we can achieve this. They are the techniques “by which we secure our contact” with the world (ibid.). But bringing the world into presence is not a fixed, one-time or uni-directional endeavour. Conceptual understanding involves continuous engagement with the world; it can change and also fail. Noë proposes the notion of fragility as a key for understanding conceptual activity as an open and necessarily vulnerable phenomenon, instead of a perfect application of definite representations of the world. In this way, he overcomes the limited view of both the intellectualist and anti-intellectualist perspectives according to which concepts are judgments about an independent world.
One of Noë’s crucial insights is that the traditional dichotomy between an objectively given world and subjectively experienced, internally-processed data about worldly objects can be overcome by grounding all conceptual activity in a broader “common genus”, i.e., skilful engagement with the world. But what is even more important, and in this I think Noë does not actually diverge far from Dreyfus and other existential phenomenologists, is that the established unity of different modes of understanding is not merely a unity in terms of styles of access to the world, but also a unity grounded in the individual mind as a whole. But what is that individual mind as whole?
Noë quite clearly presupposes that we are not our brains. We understand the world through navigating it with our thinking, skilful sensorimotor body (Noë this collection, 2004). This view breaks with the cognitivist paradigm with regard to the constitutive elements of the system that does the understanding, and it also breaks with it with regard to the relation of the understanding system to the environment: the system is not passive, but rather active and dynamical. What this elaboration implies, yet does not make explicit, is the fact that conceptual activity is done by a bodily agent who understands or has access to the world. After all, conceptual understanding is not just understanding about something but always also understanding for someone and by someone. To argue that thought and perception are unified as modes of access thus presupposes an individual who employs these different modes of access, someone for whom the world can show up. Without an agent that does the understanding, postulating a unification of modes of understanding would not make any sense, as any understanding would remain an action that has neither origin nor actor.
This is a point that Evan Thompson, who is also a proponent of embodied cognition, has already made on some of Noë’s earlier work on enactive perception (2007). According to Thompson, while emphasising the role of experiences of objects, Noë underestimates the role of subjectivity as such: the “sensorimotor approach needs a notion of selfhood or agency, because to explain perceptual experience it appeals to sensorimotor knowledge. Knowledge implies a knower or agent or self that embodies this knowledge” (Thompson 2007, p. 260). This is where I think Noë’s underlying epistemology requires elaboration. Who or what is the individual subject that engages in this fragile endeavour of securing access to the world?
Thompson provides an insight that can be seen as a major step into the right direction: he proposes addressing the body–body problem, i.e., the question of how the agent can be at once subjectively lived and an organismic or sensorimotor body that is embedded in the world (2007, pp. 235–237), by proposing an enactive notion of selfhood. According to this notion, individual agency is defined in terms of autonomy. It is seen as a self-organised network of interconnected processes that produce and sustain themselves as a systemic whole—a bounded identity within a particular domain (Varela 1997; Maturana & Varela 1987). According to Thompson, it is this autonomous self that gives unity to the sensorimotor skills in terms of self-organisation and operational closure (2005, 2007). Operational closure means that some process relations of the autonomous network remain constant despite structural dependence on the environment, i.e., each process within the network is not only enabling but also enabled by some other process. With the production of such a self-organised autonomous identity the individual also acquires a basic subjective perspective, from which interactions with the world are evaluated respectively. This subjective perspective is what Thompson calls a pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness (2007, p. 261).
On Thompson’s enactive account, the individual is now not only active and embodied but also an autonomous subjective agent. Importantly however, Thompson shares with Noë a dubious fundamental pre-supposition, namely the idea that the individual mind or subject can be equated with the individual sensorimotor body or organism. The autonomous agent is a self-organised “sensorimotor selfhood” (Thompson 2005, p. 10). As a consequence, in both Thompson and Noë’s views, the mind is empowered and freed, as it is no longer restricted to the passive, information-consuming existence that is distant to the world and confined to the narrow shells of our heads. Nevertheless, it still remains a mind of a body in isolation: in isolation from the world of others.[3] This risk of an individualist account of the agent is the first horn of a dilemma underlying Noë’s proposal. The second horn has to do with the fact that for Noë understanding is actually not an isolated endeavour. The social world is mentioned throughout the paper in the form of other subjects that seem to enable the individual’s understanding in various ways. Some of the skills of access are interpersonal and also, as Noë emphasizes, have to be learned.
The question is, how do we learn skills? We usually learn through a teacher, and thus through the help of another being. Similarly, how do we discover a piece of art? By discussing it with a friend, who helps to bring about a new perspective on it. The person whom we misunderstand and try again to understand is another subject. Understanding is a highly intersubjective endeavour, not only developmentally—in the sense that we need others at some point in life to learn a particular skill—but also in a continuously on-going sense, for much of the very process of human understanding happens through and with others contemporaneously. Strikingly, however, though Noë admits this in acknowledging that understanding happens through communication and thus through the contribution of other subjects, the social does not seem to matter constitutively in his general theory of conceptual understanding. The mechanism and structures of the process of understanding are defined in terms of sensorimotor processes, not in terms of interactions with others, and the unity that grounds conceptual understanding is constitutively the sensorimotor body in object-oriented action; it is not, more dynamically put, the individual in its relation to other subjects. The worry is that in Noë’s approach, the social part of the world would therefore only play the weak role of an outside and divided context. In contrast, on a strong reading of the relation between understanding and sociality, engagements and relations with others would have a more than developmental or contextual relevance. Instead, they would also be considered part and parcel of the very structure of the process of understanding, and they would (as I argue below) figure in the minimal constitution of autonomous selfhood.
Noë characterises Dreyfus’s anti-intellectualist stance as “crypto-intellectualist” because Dreyfus allegedly accepts the premises of the intellectualist’s view that understanding is rule-based judgement. Yet one might say that in his attempt to overcome the dichotomy between existential phenomenology and classical conceptualism, Noë inherits a very similar problem. Noë’s actionist approach opens the individual up to the world; but, perhaps because he is trying to avoid an implication of Dreyfus’ existential phenomenology, namely the risk of losing the individual (as already immersed) in the world, Noë also risks over-emphasizing the status of the embodied individual, thereby missing the deeper relation between the individual and the social world. The undesirable implication is that conceptual activity is essentially an isolated undertaking (since according to standard approaches to embodiment there is nothing social about the individual body or organism per se). It is the lonesome individual by herself who navigates through the world, equipped with a great set of skills that enable her to act and to secure the access to the world.[4] Because Noë seems to implicitly accept the individualistic premise of the traditional cognitivist view, one might say that that his proposal is crypto-individualist.
Noë is not alone in making the crypto-individualist presupposition. According to Post-Cartesian and non-cognitivist philosophy of cognition, the mind supposedly involves an active and dynamical engagement with the social and material environment, and also has an experiential dimension (Shapiro 2011; Clark & Chalmers 1998; Varela et al. 1993; Thompson 2007). But the integration of these aspects, and in particular that of the social and bodily dimension with regards to the individual that has or is the mind still remains a fundamental question. This is what I have called the body–social problem: how can the mind be at once a distinct bodily individual but at the same time remain open and connected to the social world? At the moment there is a dichotomy between views that posit that the mind is embodied and views that emphasize the relevance of situatedness and embeddedness. On the former view, the mind is active but confined to being an isolated individual. On the latter, the mind is primordially immersed in the (social) world. The first view risks a new form of methodological individualism where the individual mind, while no longer restricted to the brain, is now confined to the body. Here the social world becomes the external, independently given world into which these newly embodied and active, yet essentially isolated individuals parachute (Kyselo 2014).[5] The second view focuses too much on the interaction dynamics and risks losing the immersed individual mind in the world (and social interactions), thereby blurring the very epistemological target of our philosophical inquiry (Kyselo 2013, 2014).
The body–social problem reveals a deeper linkage between Noë and the stance of the existential phenomenologist that he actually seeks to debunk. Both positions disagree with the traditional Cartesian picture of the mind; both hold that embodiment matters vitally for the mind. But notice that they also focus on different aspects of what a true alternative to the classical view might look like. The overall alternative basically involves a fundamental shift in thinking about the relation between an individual and the world. In this vein, Noë is right to emphasise the individual’s power, giving it more responsibility in the very construction of its own mind and of the world it experiences, but so are the existential phenomenologists when they focus on worldly embeddedness and the fact that a great deal of our being in the world relies on pre-given structures that can surpass the individual’s capacities. An emphasis on individual action and responsibility cannot mean that the individual is all alone. We would not have made enough progress if the main difference between Noë’s proposal and the representationalist division between individual and world was that now, while being able to move towards the world, the world does not also move toward us but remains separate with regard to other subjects. Other people are active, too, and they shape not merely the world for us but also who we are as subjects. But, speaking to the potential worry of losing the individual in worldly engagements, the solution is of course neither to negate any need for differentiation nor the necessity of the individual to have its own share in the very mechanism of understanding the world. Where I think both positions go wrong is in extrapolating from a part of adult human phenomenology (even when it is paired, as in Noë’s case, with an objective account of the constitutive mechanism of experience) to a general theory of understanding. In crypto-individualism the individual mind carries a heavy burden. It is free from passivity and yet enormously restrained by the responsibility of achieving the access to the world (and the social world) and itself, all by itself. Existential phenomenologists, in emphasising the importance of the social world and its pre-given structures in bringing about understanding then ease the burden and free the individual from some of the responsibility in achieving this; and yet at the same time they also risk depriving the individual of its power and right to have a say in that endeavour.[6]
It should be clear that neither position on its own will suffice to overcome the dichotomy inherent in the intellectualist view on concepts. The individual cannot understand the world simply by being an individual body, but neither is the world already understood just by simply being immersed in it.