The importance of self-movement

2.1  Making fully intelligible

The aim of Husserlian so-called “constitutive” or “transcendental” phenomenology is to make the life-world intelligible. More precisely, the task is to uncover the experien-tial structures that permit the world to be manifested or given to a subject. The aim of making the world transcendentally intelligible in this way should not be confused with the idealist project of reducing the world to subjective or mental structures. As Husserl explains:

In advance there is the world, ever pregiven and undoubted in ontic certainty and self-verification. […] There can be no stronger realism than this, if by this word nothing more is meant than: “I am certain of being a human being who lives in this world, etc. and I doubt it not in the least.” But the great problem is precisely to understand what is here so “obvious.” The method now requires that the ego, beginning with its concrete world-phenomenon, systematically inquire back, and thereby become acquainted with itself, the transcendental ego, in its concreteness, in the system of its constitutive levels and its incredibly intricate [patterns of] validity-founding. At the onset of the epoché the ego is given apodictically, but as a “mute concreteness.” It must be brought to exposition, to expression, through systematic intentional “analysis” which inquires back from

the world-phenomenon. (Husserl 1970b: 186–187)

Two points need emphasizing here. First, the aim of Husserlian phenomenology is, as we might put it, a “hermeneutic” one. The point is not to prove, but to make intel-ligible. As Husserl writes, the phenomenologist is “unable to have any other scientific theme than that of transforming the universal obviousness [Selbstverständlichkeit] of the being of the world – for him the greatest of all enigmas – into something intel-ligible [eine Verständlichkeit]” (Husserl 1970b: 180). Second, this making-intelintel-ligible

proceeds via “intentional analysis”: we make the manifestation (or “being”) of the world intelligible by “inquiring back” from the world as manifested to the intentional experiences in which the world manifests itself. Ultimately, then, we will unveil struc-tures of the “transcendental ego” – the subject to whom the world is manifested.

Obviously, this means there is a difference between the phenomenological idea of a condition of world-manifestation and the textbook notion of a “necessary condition”.

To show that X is not a necessary condition of Y it is enough to produce a coherent example of Y without X. Thus, to show, for example, that believing that p is not a nec-essary condition of perceiving that p, we need only think of a case in which a person sees a pink rat running by; but, attributing the experience to the influence of alcohol or LSD, the person does not believe that a pink rat is running by. A condition for world-manifestation in the phenomenological sense, by contrast, is something in the absence of which we cannot make a world-manifesting experience “truly” or “fully intelligible to ourselves”, to borrow some useful phrases from P. F. Strawson (cf. P.F. Strawson 1966: 11, 49, 106, and passim). For a phenomenologist, therefore, there can be cases in which X without Y is logically possible – involving no “formal contradiction” – but in which we cannot make X fully intelligible without Y.⁵

In particular, as we shall see, there can be cases where we can coherently imagine that creatures, which lack a certain feature we have, experience the world just as we do;

but where, due to the lack of the mentioned feature, we cannot make their having such experience truly or fully intelligible to ourselves. In such a case, the phenomenologist will hold that the feature in question is a condition for world-manifestation, notwith-standing the fact that it is not a necessary condition in the standard philosophical sense. Because the phenomenologist is in the business of making intelligible, she or he has a special interest in the former, broader notion.

2.2  The problem of perceptual presence

I am right now looking at my coffee-cup placed on my desk. The cup is uniformly white, except for some writing on one side. From my current viewing position, how-ever, I do not actually see the writing. The side facing me is uniformly white. Howhow-ever, the “rear side” with the writing on it is not an experiential “nothing” to me in this expe-rience. My experience somehow seems to concern the cup as such, complete with front sides and rear sides – and an interior possibly still containing coffee (though I cannot tell from here). Compare the perceptual givenness of the desk. The cup occludes parts of the desk – namely, the parts directly under and behind the cup. Yet I somehow sense

5.  See Husserl (1983: 108–9); and Overgaard and Grünbaum (2007).

the desk as present under and behind the cup, even though I do not actually see those parts of the desk. Generalizing from points such as these, Husserl writes:

The object is not actually given, it is not given wholly and entirely as that which it itself is. It is only given “from the front,” only “perspectivally foreshortened and projected” etc. While many of its properties are illustrated in the core content of the perception, at least in the manner which the last expressions indicate, many others are not present in the perception in such illustrated form: to be sure, the elements of the invisible rear side, the interior etc. are co-intended [mitgemeint]

in more or less definite fashion […], but they are not themselves part of the intuitive, i.e. of the [strictly] perceptual or imaginative content, of the perception.

(Husserl 1970a 712–13; translation slightly modified) What are we to say about these co-intended rear-sides and interiors? Psychologists commonly speak of “amodal completion” – “amodal” because there is no sensory information regarding the parts of the table and the cup that are occluded. As at least the most enlightened psychologists emphasize, however, this does not mean that the phenomenon is not genuinely perceptual (e.g. Rock 1984: 120). It is no good saying, for example, that I somehow add the hidden and occluded features in thought or imagination. For, first of all, if I just glance absentmindedly at my desk, thinking of the text I am writing, is it at all phenomenologically plausible to claim that I add, in thought or imagination, any of the occluded features? Surely I do not. Yet no mat-ter how absentminded I am, the various objects are somehow fully present to me as three-dimensional objects with occluded backsides and so on. Second, consider the sheer magnitude of the task of thinking about (or imagining) all occluded features of a scene as crowded with objects as my desk (full of books, papers, pens, and so on).

Perhaps a powerful computer with the right sort of software might represent all these in a fraction of second; but it is hardly plausible to suggest that I might do so either consciously or unconsciously. Finally, consider the fact that when I imagine an object, I also imagine it as “presenting” itself from a certain perspective, with certain features

“in view”, and thus as having certain other features that are not currently “presented”.

(I cannot visualize an object seen from all perspectives at once.) We lose sight of this difference, however, if we say that the “unseen” features are imagined; because so, of course, are the “presented” features in this case (cf. Husserl 1997: 47).

Somehow, then, the presence of occluded features must be a “perceptual presence” (Husserl 1997: 43; Noë 2004: 60). We have a perceptual “sense” of their presence, even though they are not strictly seen or otherwise perceived. To a phe-nomenologist seeking an understanding of how our experience can present a world consisting of three-dimensional, material objects, this presents a problem, however.

The problem is to make intelligible how we can have a perceptual sense of unseen features of a scene. How are we to understand their presence? Following Alva Noë,

whose take on this problem seems deeply influenced by Husserl,⁶ I shall call this “the problem of perceptual presence” (Noë 2004: 59).

Note that this problem will be central to a phenomenological account of percep-tual experience. For arguably, it is crucial to the perception of objects as spatial or three-dimensional that we can have various different perspectives on them. But this precisely means having certain aspects of them in view, while others are “co-intended”, as Husserl puts it. It is obvious that other, strictly “absent” aspects or profiles must be somehow present. For unless my first glance at an object already somehow antici-pates other possible views of the same object, it is hard to see how any subsequent perception of the object from another perspective could count as a perception of the same unchanged object. That is, unless any perception of an opaque, three-dimensional object, already co-intends absent profiles of the same object, a continuous perceptual process revealing the object from other sides can hardly count as manifesting the same unaltered object. There must already be more to the object than what I currently see if any subsequent experience is to reveal new features of the same, unchanged object.

But why is it important that we can perceive the same unchanged object from varying perspectives? If all aspects of perceived objects are fully manifest, then per-ceived objects change whenever the sensory given changes. Suppose the sensory given of a particular experiential sequence is the same as I have when I first view my coffee cup from a position directly above it, and then slowly move my head back and down so that the cup is now in front of me. As we might put it, the sensory given at first involves a circular shape (corresponding to the circular shape the cup projects onto my retina), and then gradually more and more elliptical shapes. Unless we make room for an object to present different profiles to a viewer, then clearly the perceived object in our scenario changes. Every change in sensory content is a change in perceived object.

But how, in this sort of scenario, could my visual experiences be experiences of some-thing out there in the so-called “external” world? The perceived object collapses into the sensory given. That is, the perceptual experience would seem to absorb the object, so that there would be no difference between the perceived object and the experience (cf. Husserl 1997: 97–101). We only have a visual experience of a transcendent, physi-cal object if it is possible for the sensory content of the experience to change while the object remains unaltered. And we can only have the latter in so far as other profiles of the same object can be “amodally” co-intended.⁷

6.  Although I have only come across one single reference to Husserl in Noë’s writings (2004: 17), it is a reference to the volume that contains all the ideas I am outlining here.

7.  What, though, about shadows? Shadows seem to be objects “out there” in the world, even if they are not genuinely material in the way that cups and tables are. But although it is true, of course, that shadows do not have “sides” the way material things do, we can nevertheless

This means that if we are to make intelligible the perceptual manifestation of three-dimensional objects we cannot ignore the problem of perceptual presence. From what was said above, it is not plausible that the key to this problem lies in the notion that we construct mental models or representations of the absent profiles. The task would be daunting, to say the least. And besides, the suggestion that we constantly engage in such internal-model building doesn’t do justice to the phenomenology of experience.

But if we do not represent them, what is the status of the absent profiles? Both Husserl and Noë, in their respective ways, make the intuitively plausible suggestion that the absent profiles are “present” as somehow available, as something to which we have access (Noë 2004: 63, 67). They are, as Husserl puts it, “freely at our disposal” (Husserl 2001: 47). In other words, in having one side of the coffee cup strictly presented to me, the multiple absent profiles of the cup also have a certain presence, namely as profiles that are available to be (strictly) perceived. This, however, cannot count as a satisfac-tory response to the problem of perceptual presence. Surely, before we can be said to have made perceptual presence fully intelligible to ourselves, we must understand what this availability of the absent profiles amounts to. This question takes us to the heart of the Husserlian proposal.

2.3  Movement and perceptual presence

The proposal is marvellously simple. According to both Husserl and the enactive account, the basis of the availability of absent profiles is found in what Husserl calls our “kinaes-thetic capacity”⁸ and Noë refers to as “sensorimotor skills” (Noë 2004: 63).⁹ It is, in other words, because we are able to move and thereby change our perspective on things that we have a perceptual sense of the co-presence of absent profiles. Thus, for example, the

view the former from various perspectives, some of which may reveal features of the shadow that are not revealed from other perspectives (see Smith 2003: 70). Moreover, we can obviously have amodal completion of shadows. Not only can objects occlude other objects, or parts of them; they can also occlude their shadows, or parts of them.

8.  Husserl (1970b: 162). Husserl coins the term Vermöglichkeit to capture this; see the German text of the Crisis: § 47; also Husserl (1973b: 284–5). Vermögen means ability or capacity, whereas Möglichkeit means possibility. A Vermöglichkeit is thus a possibility that I am able to realize.

9.  An anonymous reviewer points out that “kinaesthetic capacity” and “sensorimotor skills”

are two very different things. The former is an experiential notion, whereas the latter is a phys-iological one that “has no anchorage in actual experience”. I think there is something to this point. In fact, I do believe Noë wants his sensorimotor skills to be understood as anchored in experience. Husserl and Noë, it seems to me, both want to claim that our awareness of absent profiles has to do with our ability to experience self-movement. But then here is the point: If that is what Noë wants, why the physiological vocabulary?

inside of my cup is available to me as something that would be (strictly) perceived if I view the cup from above; whilst the rear side is accessible as that which I would see if I moved around the cup (or picked it up and turned it around). All of this is perceptually present to me here and now because I have an implicit awareness of my potential (at least in principle) for moving, and of how such movement would produce ordered patterns of perceptual presentation. The “feeling of perceptual presence” we have of strictly absent profiles resides, as Noë puts it, “in the immediate accessibility, through control of one’s sense organs, of detail that is present there all along” (Noë 2001: 51).

Let me put some more flesh on this proposal. As Husserl likes to put it, the strictly or “properly” presented profile of an object such as a cup is embedded in a “horizon”

of other profiles, which are not currently presented in the strict sense. And it is so embedded because my current “kinaesthetic” situation – my current bodily posture and position – is embedded in a “kinaesthetic horizon”, a horizon of “freely possible series of movement” (Husserl 2001: 52) and thus of other viewing positions which I might adopt by moving myself. I am implicitly aware of the two horizonal “systems” as correlated in such a way that if I were to engage in this or that particular series of move-ment, then such-and-such a sequence of object-profiles would be presented to me.

There is thus a certain systematic structure to the relation between the kinaes-thetic horizon and the horizon of visual profiles. A movement of my head to one side will result in a “movement” of the visual profile in the opposite direction. If there is no such (quasi-)movement, then the object will not seem stationary, but will appear to move. A linear movement such as walking up to an object will be accompanied by a continuous quasi-expansion of the visual profile of the object. If not, the object is seen to change: either its position, by moving away, or its size (shrinking). Moving around an object will lead to a continuous revelation of new profiles of the object;

again, if not, then the object will seem to be turning. And of course, the continuity of the visual appearances is crucial here. It is the gapless, continuous flow of visual appearances corresponding to the continuous movement around the object that gives me an experience of the “closedness” of the three-dimensional surface of the object (Husserl 1997: 175).

So, when I cast a glance at my coffee cup on the table, the whole three-dimensional cup is present to me perceptually because the strictly presented profile is encompassed by a multitude of absent profiles perceptually “present” as available but not presented.

And this availability refers back to my implicit awareness of my own potential for bodily movement. My perceptual experience of the cup is an experience of it from a particular viewing position out of a multitude of possible viewing positions – positions that are, at least in principle, realizable via bodily movement. I am tacitly aware of the current distribution of (strict) presence and absence as one that is the result of my having realized this particular kinaesthetic situation out of an open-ended horizon of kinaesthetic possibilities.

It must be emphasized that the Husserlian claim is not that people who have become completely paralysed are unable to see transcendent, spatial objects. The cru-cial thing is that a subject has some (implicit) understanding of how visual appearances would change if such-and-such kinaesthetic capacities were exercised. A subject, that is, need not actually be able to exercise the skill in question. All he or she needs is an implicit understanding of the dependence of sensory appearances on self-movement.

It might, however, be hard to see how a subject could acquire such understanding without at least at some point having had experiences of self-movement. This seems plausible to me, and I shall assume the truth of this claim in what follows; but I shall not attempt to defend it.

The Husserlian approach, as I understand it, will thus include the following claim:

(1) Having an implicit understanding of oneself as potentially moving or being moved is a condition for the possibility of perceiving transcendent spatial objects.

Via the (I think plausible) idea that such an understanding can only be derived from actual experience of self-movement, we reach the further claim:

(2) Having had experience of self-movement is a condition for the possibility of perceiving transcendent spatial objects.

The enactive approach, however, as suggested by its name, goes on to make a stronger claim. Perceiving, in Noë’s words, “is a way of acting” (Noë 2004: 1). “Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do” (ibid.). And again,

“perceptual experience” is “a form of active engagement with the environment” (Noë 2001: 50). Note that the suggestion is not merely the plausible one that in fact

“perceptual experience” is “a form of active engagement with the environment” (Noë 2001: 50). Note that the suggestion is not merely the plausible one that in fact