Dreyfus and Deleuze on l'habitude, coping, and trauma in skill acquisition

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 539-559

  Reynolds, Jack ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TASMANIA   (Australia)

Author keywords

Deleuze; Dreyfus; Equilibrium; Learning; Merleau Ponty; Skill acquisition

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249160252     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09672550601003348     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Marquis de Sade, as cited in Deleuze's essay 'Coldness and Cruelty', in Masochism, trans. J. McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 78.
2. Although Deleuze's work will be our focus in this essay because of his sustained negotiation with issues to do with learning and skill acquisition, his position is reflective of a general trend in poststructuralist thought. I will try to intimate this throughout, albeit largely in footnotes, but see also my earlier essay on Derrida's enduring contention that any habitual conditions must be ruptured in any decision worthy of the name (J. Reynolds, 'Habituality and Undecidability: A Comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on the Decision', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 10(4) (November 2002), pp. 449-66).
3. And questions of home can never be wholly disassociated from questions of habit and inhabiting - for more on this, see Scott Weiner's 'Inhabiting in the Phenomenology of Perception', Philosophy Today, 34(4) (Winter 1990), pp. 342-53.
4. and David Morris' recent book, The Sense of Space (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). This discussion of place and home is also a large part of Heidegger's work, as well as of those working in his footsteps, and, as such, it serves as another key point of differentiation between the phenomenologists and the poststructuralists. The question of whether one can thematize embodied coping without subscribing to a reification of home and place is a difficult one. I like to think that it is possible, but I cannot show that here.
5. H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, 'The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science', in H. Haber and G. Weiss (eds) Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 109-10.
6. See H. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), particularly part 3, 'The Role of the Body in Intelligent Behaviour'.
7. C. Davies, The Age, reprinted from the Telegraph, 'As the Crow Flies: Follow the A34 and Turn Right'.
8. H. Dreyfus, 'Intelligence without Representation' (cited version of paper is on Dreyfus' website, p. 1).
9. but see also H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, 'The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science', in Haber and Weiss, Perspectives on Embodiment, pp. 103-20.
10. In fact, various different essays recapitulate these key themes, but for a more detailed treatment of the phenomenology of skill acquisition, see H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine (New York: Free Press, 1982).
11. M. Merleau-Pontv, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1996) (hereafter PP), p. 136.
12. G. Evans, as cited in S. Kelly, 'Merleau-Ponty and the Body', in M. Proudfoot (ed.) The Philosophy of the Body (London: Blackwell, 2001).
13. M. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 138.
14. S. Kelly, 'Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive Science of Skilled Behaviour', in M. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds) Essays in Honour of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2: Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
15. Kelly, 'Merleau-Ponty and the Body', p. 367, n. 33.
16. H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, 'The Ethical Implications of the Five-Stage Skill-Acquisition Model', Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society, 24 (2004), pp. 254-71.
17. See also Dreyfus' website and the essay 'What is Moral Maturity? A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical Expertise'.
18. P. Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 75.
19. See Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. J. O'Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
20. Axel Honneth reaffirms this connection between phenomenology and forms of communitarianism when he suggests that Michael Sandel's famous critique of the neutral subject of Rawls' A Theory of Justice tacitly relies upon a phenomenology (see A. Honneth, The Fragmented Social World (Albany: SUNY, 1995), p. 234). Although it might not need repeating, Sandel argues that Rawls' model for determining distributive justice - self-interested calculations behind a 'veil of ignorance' - presupposes an isolated and autonomous self that is capable of being divorced from the ends that it has, as well as the goals of the society that it is a part of. While there are many ways of rescuing Rawls from this criticism (i.e. the veil of ignorance is intended more as an heuristic device to draw out the consequences of our intuitive attachment to the idea of 'justice as fairness'), Sandel opposes this Rawlsian subject to the thoroughly situated subject that his own unacknowledged phenomenology reveals to us.
21. Of course, there are numerous other interpretations of the early Heidegger than that offered by Dreyfus in Being-in-the-World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and elsewhere.
22. The stereotypic reading of Heidegger's work, after all, is probably still that of the hero of authenticity, resolutely facing up to the anxiety and trauma of one's being-towards-death in order to be fully individuated. Such an interpretation brings Heidegger closer to Deleuze, at least in the centrality it gives to trauma if not in the 'mineness' that Heidegger associates with the experience. However, such an interpretation of Heidegger seems to depend on viewing the ready-to-hand as inextricably linked to das Man, the latter of which is understood as herd-like and involving a banal immersion in average everyday-ness, something that looks unlikely on Dreyfus' communitarian-inclined interpretation, which focuses upon coping and being-with. Nevertheless, Frederick Olafson, for example, has argued that Dreyfus' exposition focuses too exclusively on this aspect of Heidegger's work (see his article 'Heidegger à la Wittgenstein or Coping with Professor Dreyfus', Inquiry, 37 (1994), pp. 45-64, as well as Taylor Carman's response in the same volume).
23. H. Dreyfus, 'What is Moral Maturity?', p. 2.
24. See John Stuhr's analysis of Deleuze's link with the American pragmatists in Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993).
25. This relation between phenomenology and what Deleuze denigrates as ur-doxa is explored at length in J. Reynolds, and J. Roffe, 'Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity, and Phenomenology', Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology (October 2006).
26. Other secondary material that addresses the relation between Deleuze and Merleu-Ponty includes: L. Lawlor, 'The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty', Continental Philosophy Review, 31 (1998), pp. 15-34;
27. G. Weiss, 'Ecart: The Space of Corporeal Difference', in F. Evans and L. Lawlor (eds) Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995);
28. and D. Taylor, 'Phantasmatic Genealogy', in T. Busch and S. Gallagher (eds) Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics and Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
29. Taken together, these enigmatic comments seem to suggest that the unconscious is part of repetition and habit, rather than something distinct and separable from them as the Freudian meta-psychological model tends to imply. A more detailed analysis of this relation can be found in K. Faulkner, Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
30. G. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. C. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
31. This basic point is indebted to Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)), but my own Australian Research Council-funded rapprochement of analytic political philosophy and poststructuralism also considers this issue in depth. See my forthcoming essay 'Rawls, Derrida, and the Intertwining of Political Calculation and Ultra-Politics', in Theory and Event, 9(3) (2006).
32. Hence the title of Michael Hardt's book on his work, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL, 1993).
33. Patton, Deleuze and the Political, p. 46.
34. See J. Williams, An Introduction to Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), where he reads these as the two dominant motifs of Deleuze's book.
35. This is why Todd May's anarchist interpretation of poststructuralism has a certain plausibility. See T. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).