Ciência, Geografia e Tecnologia da Informação.

In this section, I shall explicate Dreyfus’s account of the intentionality of practical coping without foregrounding his insistence upon its tacit, atheoretical, and asocial character. The contrasts to explicit interpretation, theoretical understanding, and social normativity then stand out as subsequent, debatable claims about the scope of practical intentionality rather than as constitutive contrasts that express its distinctive character as an intentional directedness.

By “practical coping,” Dreyfus means to indicate the mostly smooth and unobtrusive responsiveness to circumstances that enables human beings to get around in the world. Its scope extends from mundane activities like using utensils to eat, walking across uneven terrain, or sitting and working at a desk, to the extraordinary mastery exhibited in competitive athletic performances or grandmaster chess. Tools figure prominently in these coping activities. Often we competently deal with a wide range of equipment as the background to more thematic performances: while holding a conversation, we unobtrusively adjust ourselves to a chair, the lighting, or the movements of others in the room; in writing a letter, we deftly wield the pen, hold the paper, lean on the desk, take a sip of coffee, and so forth.

The intentionality of practical coping is a directedness of bodies rather than minds. Dreyfus emphasizes bodily coordination and orientation toward the task at hand, as one hammers a nail, sits in a chair, drives to the grocery, or exchanges pleasantries at a party. Here a body is not an object with fixed boundaries, but the practical unification of coordinated activity. Mastery of a tool allows its incorporation within the field of one’s bodily comportment; the difference between smooth competence and clumsy ineptness reflects the degree of bodily assimilation of the tool. Merleau-Ponty’s example of a blind person’s cane, or a myopic’s eyeglasses, display relatively permanent extensions of die bodily field, but pens, chopsticks, automobiles, or wheelchairs (not to mention clothes) can be temporarily assimilated onto the near side of one’s practical comportment toward the world. Bodies, one might say, are geared toward the world.

Such practical comportment is directed toward an actual situation. Three points are figured in this formulation. First, practical intentional comportment is not mediated by mental representations, a sensory manifold, tacit rules, or other forms of intentional content abstractable from the material setting of what one is doing. Practical coping instead discloses things themselves freed from intentional intermediaries. Second, these “things” are not discrete objects, but an interconnected setting organized around one’s practical concerns. A fast-breaking basketball player is directed not just toward the ball she dribbles, but also toward the basket, the defenders, the teammates trailing the play or setting up on the wing, the cacophony of the crowd; or rather, to none of these things separately but toward the game in all its complexly articulated interrelatedness. Third, practical comportment is not a self-contained sequence of movements, but a flexible responsiveness to a situation as it unfolds. The situation is thus not a determinate arrangement of objects but the setting of some possible comportments. Some ways of responding to the situation are “called for,” while others are out of place. These are not, however, a denumerable set of “actual” possibilities in hand, but the portent of some indeterminately “possible” ones.

This situational character of practical coping is an analogue to other intentional manifestations in a particular aspect or under a description. Intentional directedness traditionally has a sense, a particular “way” in which its object is manifest. Dreyfus takes this aspectual character of practical coping to be neither an “objective” characteristic of the things manifested, nor a definite projection or anticipation by an agent, but rather an intra-active¹ configuration of solicited activity and possible resistance and accord.

In everyday absorbed coping,. .. when one’s situation deviates from some optimal body-environment relationship, one’s movement takes one close to that optimal form and thereby relieves the “tension” of the deviation. One’s body is solicited by the situation to get into the right relation to it… . Our activity is completely geared into the demands of the situation.²

The situation is significant, and configured as a field of relevance, at least for the body that is set to respond appropriately.

The intra-activity of this manifestation reinforces Dreyfus’s insistence that practical coping takes us directly to the things themselves. We can think in the absence of what is thought about, without losing the sense of our thoughts. To dribble in the absence of the basketball, however, is merely to pretend to dribble (or to fail to dribble). The activity is entirely different if there is no actual pattern of resistance and affordance to what one does, for practical coping is a responsiveness to such patterns. It is directed toward the actual environment, not toward some merely possible state of affairs. Thus, unlike familiar accounts of mental or linguistic intentionality, practical coping cannot coherently express its sense of a non-existent object. Such coping activities can indeed fail to engage their surroundings effectively. When that happens, however, intentional comportment at least momentarily falls apart. In reaching for a light switch that isn’t there, or stepping toward the landing one stair too soon, I thrash or stumble, failing for the moment to get a coherent grip on anything without some adjustment. Unsuccessful moves are not senseless, but their sense is not even successfully expressed, let alone fulfilled.

This feature of the intentionality of practical comportment highlights Dreyfus’s conjoining of two points that have often been conceived in opposition to one another. Practical comportment is a thoroughly material responsiveness to a material world. The hand that gently conforms itself to the contours of a teacup in a well-balanced grasp, the softball player who tracks the incoming fly ball and the tagging runner at third as she sets herself to catch and throw home in a single fluid response, or the conversationalist whose stance, expressions, gestures, and tones register and respond to the expressive posture of her interlocutor are bodily engagements with a material configuration of the world. Yet these are also meaningfully configured situations. For the softball player, the looping fly and the tagging runner stand out as salient, while the airplane passing overhead and the brawl in the stands behind third base recede into indeterminate background, even though the airplane and the brawl may be bigger, louder, and more “dramatic,” than the ball and the runner along similar sight lines. The meaningfulness of bodily responsiveness to situations becomes obtrusive when a philosophical or psychological analysis omits it. Thus, Dreyfus tellingly objected to attempts to reduce situations to “merely” physical juxtapositions of things:

[AI researcher John] McCarthy seems to assume that [“being at home”] is the same thing as being in my house, that is, that it is a physical state. But I can be at home and be in the backyard, that is, not physically in my house at all. I can also be physically in my house and not be at home; for example, if I own the house but have not yet moved my furniture in. Being at home is a human situation.³

There “is” nothing there in the situation besides its material constituents, but the situation is a meaningful configuration of those constituents. As Dreyfus put it, “the meaningful objects embedded in their context of references among which we live are not a model of the world, . . . they are the world itself.”⁴

What “configures” a situation is the possibility of intelligible response to it by a being to whom the situation and its outcome matter. A situation is thus organized as a field of possible activity with something at stake. Dreyfus’s Heideggerian account of situatedness structurally resembles Kant’s conception of agency as the “end” of a practical stance toward the world as “means.” Human beings are that “for-the-sake-of-which” a situation is meaningfully oriented; its constituents are “in-order-to” realize some possible way of being a “for-the-sake-of-which.” The stakes in a situation, however, are not some more or less definite end, but a way of being: an open-ended practical grasp of how to make one’s way in the world as a teacher, a gay man, a politically engaged citizen, a parent, a Presbyterian, a tough SOB, etc. Such ways of being are not definite plans of action directed toward the achievement of specific ends, but an ongoing integration of one’s activities within a coherent “practice.”⁵ Moreover, wielding relevant equipment and interacting with other practitioners is not an indifferently instrumental taking up of various discrete “means” to chosen ends, but a referentially interrelated in-order-to-for-the-sake-of complex which sustains the intelligibility of its “component” practices and equipment.

The normativity that marks practical coping as genuinely intentional might thus seem pragmatic instead of alethic, marked by success or failure in dealing with circumstances and fulfilling various roles, rather than correct representation. Successful coping, however, is not the fulfillment of prespecifiable success conditions, but instead the maintenance and development of one’s belonging to a practice through a flexible responsiveness to circumstances (think of successfully riding a bicycle across changing terrain). It would be better, therefore, to blur any such contrast between practical success and alethic disclosure. Not only does Dreyfus follow Heidegger in seeing practical coping as a kind of revealing; he explicitly denies any sharp contrast between acting and perceiving. Perceiving is neither a passive registration nor an intellectual synthesis, but is itself a kind of coping activity. Seeing a moving object, hearing spoken words, tasting a liquid, or feeling a texture requires an appropriate bodily set and a coordinated exploratory movement. Likewise, sustained activities involve a perceptive attentiveness to relevant circumstances, what Heidegger calls a “circumspective” (umsichtig) concern. Hence, pragmatic success and alethic disclosure should be understood to belong together.

We can now see an additional reason why a situation is not identical to a “merely” physical juxtaposition of objects. The situations that call for practical coping are constitutively temporal. The intentional directedness of an embodied agent does not just extend spatially beyond itself toward the object of its concerns. It is also a temporal directedness ahead toward the possible activities that would sustain its way of being. Such a situated directedness toward intelligible possibilities does not exist apart from actual configurations of equipment that can engage extant bodily repertoires of responsiveness, repertoires that must themselves be maintained and developed over time. A situation thereby incorporates a history; the present situation is both the outcome of a history embedded within it, and a solicitation toward and portent of possible futures.

This “historical” dimension of practical coping is perhaps most evident in the disciplining of bodies. Bodily repertoires for coping with surroundings are “produced by a specific technology of manipulation and formation.”⁶ Both the pervasive normalization of “das Man” and the bodily disciplines described by Foucault are ways in which bodily capacities are shaped and refined by physical surroundings and other bodily responses. These capacities are not produced by habitual repetition of movements, however, but by constraining and redirecting a body’s active exploratory coping with its surroundings. Bodies are the assimilation of past practice refocused toward future possibilities; their capacities are neither causally imposed from without nor freely generated from within, but instead mark the ongoing intra-active configuration of a bodily field of activity. Bodies are situated within fields of power relations, without thereby becoming disempowered.

Recognition of the role of Foucauldian disciplines in shaping practical coping capacities might mistakenly suggest that the body as meaningful practical repertoire could be assembled from meaningless motions. After all, Foucault described techniques for the analysis and reconstruction of movements, “a breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body to be used . . . and that of the parts of the object manipulated . . . then the two sets of parts are correlated together according to a number of simple gestures [in] canonical succession.”⁷ Yet Dreyfus has repeatedly emphasized that such reconstructions cannot take full effect until the reconstructed sequence has been assimilated into a smooth bodily flow that revises and continues to adapt the initially practiced routines. The body that proceeds step by step in specified movements is the incompetent, inflexible body. The steps from learning to mastery shed the initially specified cues and patterns in favor of a fluid, adaptive responsiveness to meaningfully configured circumstances.

To recapitulate briefly, practical coping is “intentional” in two crucial respects. First, it is directed toward a situation under an aspect, which is constituted by the interrelations between how one comports oneself toward it, and what that comportment is for. How one reaches for, grasps, lifts, and tilts a cup gets its coherence from the cup’s being for-sipping-from, and from the ways coffee-drinking belongs to a larger held of activity. Second, its directedness is normative, it can succeed or fail. Yet coping diverges from familiar renditions of intentionality in several crucial ways. It involves no psychological or semantic intermediaries, not even tacitly predetermined success conditions (which are instead flexible and openended). Nor is the body an intermediary, but is instead the intentional directedness itself: one does not form one’s hand into a cup shape and move it to a presumed cup-location; one’s hand reaches for and adjusts to the cup itself. Coping is thus always directed toward actual possibilities rather than a possible actuality. Its success is not the fulfillment of some determinately projected end, but an ongoing accommodation to what is afforded by circumstances. Failure, in turn, is not the expression of an unfulfilled sense, but an unconsummated expressiveness. One partially loses a grip on one’s surroundings, without thereby getting hold of a setting that does not happen to exist. Finally, while bodily comportment is complex, it is not compositional: its “constituents” are not separable component movements, but merely distinguishable moments of a unified whole. Indeed, while one often acquires coping skills by practicing discrete component movements, their residual discreteness marks a possible failure of intentionality; they succeed only when transformed by assimilation into a relatively fluid unity.

1. Karen Barad coins this term in her discussion of scientific apparatus and the phenomena it measures, to emphasize that neither measurement apparatus nor objects measured are determinately identifiable prior to or apart from specific forms of encounter “between” them. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Lynn H. Nelson and Jack Nelson. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1996, 161-194. Similarly here, neither activity nor the world’s resistance or accommodation to it are determinate apart from their mutual intra-action. ↩

2. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Hermeneutic Approach to Intentionality,” presented to the 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Montreal, Quebec, 1992, 3. ↩

3. Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence, rev. ed.. New York: Harper Sc Row, 1979, 214. ↩

4. Ibid., 266. ↩

5. Dreyfus, being-in-the-world, 96. Dreyfus specifically cites “medical practice” as an exemplary sense in which being a for-the-sake-of-which can be described as “a practice. ” Ibid. ↩

6. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2d ed.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 166. ↩

7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1977, 153. ↩