Let us now explore a couple of implications that a deep dynamics view has for conceptual understanding. By basing conceptual understanding on an understanding of the individual as a socially enacted autonomous system, we can do justice to existential phenomenologists who emphasize the importance of situatedness and flow and also to Noë’s rightful actionist call for emancipation of the passive individual mind. For Noë, the unity of conceptual modes is derived from positing an active, thinking, sensorimotor body. The present proposal suggests that the unity is grounded in a socially co-organized individual. Noë’s idea of thinking of experiencing and understanding the world as a “relation between a skillful person and really existing thing” (2012, p. 42), could thus be elaborated by saying that the intentional relation is also a relation to other subjects, so that intentionality is actually co-generated. Yet this co-generated intentionality is not merely about sharing a perspective on the world; it is a co-generated relation that feeds into the very organisational structure of mind itself. The person involved in the intentional relation is a social subject. In accordance with the two-fold structure of socially enacted autonomy, this would also mean that self-reflexivity has a social structure, entailing a sense of being a self as separate individual and a sense of being open and connected to the world.
Here lies the deeper reason for why the process of understanding is fragile. The fragility of understanding consists precisely in the fact that the unity of mind is never a given, but is itself an on-going achievement. Since, as I suggest, this is an achievement with others, presence does not merely depend on what we do, but also on what others do, and especially on what we do with them. In other words, presence is actually co-presence. It is clearly outside the scope of this commentary to explicate this in more detail, but generally speaking it means that understanding simply never really is the endeavour of an individual mind. This complements Noë’s perspective and invites future explorations in at least two fundamental senses.
First, with regards to the role of others in empowering the individual by enabling access to the world: our conceptual skills are acquired and the acquisition of these skills usually happens in interaction and by learning together with others. But our ways of understanding are also continuously shaped and mediated by being with others, be it through cultural norms, biases, advice, or advertisement. Apart from the obvious fact that much of instantaneous understanding happens together with others, even in the absence of others, in the process of understanding, we often presuppose another subject or at least some implicit act of relationality. Noë says that “there is no such thing as a perceptual encounter with the object that is not also an encounter with it from one or another point of view” (2012, p. 138). I could not agree more, and yet I suggest we also embrace the idea that these other viewpoints are not merely defined in terms of changes in head or body-movement but also in terms of loops to and from different subjective and intersubjective view points.
If conceptual understanding has the purpose of bringing us into contact with the world, as Noë claims, then we should not underestimate the role of others and of our being open to them in making this contact possible. To consider human understanding as fragile is also to admit a limitation of the individual’s capacities and to allow others and our dialogues with them to play a fundamental role. In this sense fragility can be a source of power. Our minds are open, not only to the world, but also to contributions from others.
But that said, and this is the second and final implication of the enactive self for the basic nature of human understanding, the social nature and fragility of mind also restricts the individual’s capacities. When the social plays a marginal and contextual role, the individual’s responsibility in understanding the world is immense and the optimism in the individual’s capacities can become a heavy burden. The other side of fragility is that the presence of the world is not only “not for free”, as Noë puts it, but it is actually sometimes not available at all. It is not available because other subjects have a say in the construction of our understanding, and given that they have perspectives and interests of their own, their contribution may sometimes be out of reach, run contrary to what we need, or even confuse us deeply. The fragile nature of our social mind can therefore also deny us access to the world.