THE ENACTIVIST CORRECTIVE: ABSORBED COPING

Much of this book has been a corrective to those who see us as natural objects wired into nature. An unintended consequence may have been to suggest that we are somehow entirely cut off from nature and live at a spectatorial distance from the material world. For many contemporary philosophers, this kind of thinking is the last trace of a departing Cartesian ghost. The idea that actions are in some sense driven by, informed by, or even prompted by, propositional attitudes – such as desires, less full-blooded ones such as beliefs, even more anaemic ones such as intentions, and entirely bloodless ones such as reasons – is untrue, they argue, to the reality of voluntary behaviour. We are not mere spectators who, every now and then, choose to dirty ourselves by engaging with the material world.

This is not the view that is advanced in this book; nor is it one with which I am in agreement. Yes, and crucially, we are able to operate on a material world with and in the service of our material bodies from an outside opened up by intentionality and greatly expanded by the joining of intentionality within ourselves (notably through memory) and with that of others to create the vast realm of knowledge and expertise supplemented by technology. But we are not metaphysical flâneurs, engaging with that world as and when and how we like. What we do is part of an ongoing life. We are swimming in a sea into which we are often thrown by events. Our daily existence, that is to say, is not as reflective and elective as the emphasis on the central role of propositional attitudes in our behaviour may suggest to some.