Primal Impression and Enactive Perception

Abstract

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently argued that perception is enactive (e.g., Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Noë 2004; Di Paolo 2009).1 To put it simply, perception is action-oriented. When I perceive something, I perceive it as actionable. That is, I perceive it as something I can reach, or not; something I can pick up, or not; something I can hammer with, or not, and so forth. Such affordances (Gibson 1977, 1979) for potential actions (even if I am not planning to take action) shape the way that I actually perceive the world. One can find the roots of this kind of approach in the pragmatists (e.g., Dewey 1896), but also in phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty (1962) is most often cited in this regard, but Merleau-Ponty himself points us back to Husserl’s analysis of the “I can ” in Ideen II (Husserl 1952), and to his analysis of the correlation between kinaesthetic activation and perception (1973; see Zahavi 1994 and Gallagher and Zahavi 2008 for further discussion). With this enactive view in mind, we revisit Husserl’s account of time-consciousness. In his analysis the very basic temporal structure, protention-primal impression-retention is said to characterize perception, as the most basic form of cognition, as well as consciousness in general. As such, the temporal structure of perceptual consciousness should in some significant way reflect or enable its enactive character. Our question is this: if perception is enactive, then at a minimum, shouldn’t its temporal structure be such that it allows for that enactive character? 1 Following Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), we take ‘enactive ’ to signify that perception (and cognition more generally) is characterized by a structural coupling between the agentive body and the environment, which is both physical and social, which generates action-oriented meaning.

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