Rather than as external agents wholly in control of the unfolding processes of importance to us, we need to see ourselves as being internally related to still-in-process, flowing ‘worlds’ of intermingling activities, activities which influence us as much, if not more, than we can influence them. We are not just in the world, but of it - we are a living part of it, within it.
Thus, clearly, our bodies are not just passive recipients of stimuli from an external world 'over-there'. Rather, they are (or can be) attuned to the world. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out, even in the case of a minor reflex action, an organism’s perception is meaningful in the sense that “reflex actions are never themselves blind processes: they adjust themselves to a 'direction' of the situation, and express our orientation towards a 'behavioural setting', just as much as the action of the 'geographical setting' on us” (p. 79) - the relation is not just a mechanical, cause-and effect one..
Consequently, there are two kinds of difficulty that we can face in life, not just one: there are 1) difficulties of the intellect and 2) difficulties of orientation or ways of relating: 1) We can formulate difficulties of the intellect as problems which, with the aid of clever theories, we can solve by the use of a ‘manipulational’ form of reasoning, making use of inner mental representations which we take as corresponding to an outer reality. 2) Difficulties of orientation or attunement, however, are of a quite different kind, for they are to do with how we relate ourselves bodily towards events occurring around us, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for these are the ways that determine, that ‘give shape to’, the lines of action we resolve on as appropriate to the situations we find ourselves to be in.
Indeed, to go further, it is only from within an achieved orientation shared by all within a social group that we all, as members of that group, can each, individually, pick out the things we need to attend to in our surroundings, and each make our own contribution to the solving of a problem understood in common by all in the group.
Attunement, or the idea of an orientation within a setting, or of a way of relating ourselves to our surroundings, is in fact a pervasive biological phenomenon, common to both human and non-human organisms in their responsive, living relations to/with their environment.
For example, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) again points out: “when an insect's leg is severed, it substitutes it with a free one; however, no such substitution occurs when the leg is tied to another because the tied leg continues to count in the insect's scheme of things, and because the current of activity which flows toward the world still passes through it” (p.78).
Vygotsky (1929) makes a similar comment with regard to the handicapped child: “The positive uniqueness of the handicapped child is created not by the failure of one or another function observed in a normal child but by the new formations caused by this lapse. This uniquely individual reaction to a defect represents a continually evolving adaptive process. If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child, then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means. And, for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course, along which he must lead the child. The key to originality transforms the minus of the handicap into the plus of compensation” (in The Fundamental Problems of Defectology, p.2).
Kurt Goldstein (1995/1933) too notes: “We have become so accustomed to regard symptoms as direct expressions of the damage in a part of the nervous system that we tend to assume that, corresponding to some given damage, definite symptoms must inevitably appear. We do so because we forget that normal as well as abnormal reactions (“ symptoms ") are only expressions of the organism's attempt to deal with certain demands of the environment.... Symptoms are answers, given by the modified organism to definite demands: they are attempted solutions to problems derived on the one hand from the demands of the natural environment and on the other from the special tasks imposed on the organism in the course of the examination” (p.35).
Our attunement or orientation toward the others and othernesses around us is reciprocated by their actions on us — we occupy what elsewhere I have called “agential spaces” (Shotter, 2013). Even our physical surroundings are not just ‘there’, awaiting our intentions to act upon them; they ‘call for’ certain actions from us. For instance, a Parkinson’s patient finds it very difficult to take a step on a flat floor, but can walk down stairs (and across illusory stairs) with fluency (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc-8gzTDD5I).
In other words, we are seeing/experiencing here circumstances where people/organisms are acting in terms of the meaning of their surroundings to them. This, it seems to me, is what von Uexkull was trying to capture in his notion of a person’s/organism’s Umwelt — which is not the ‘mere’ environment an outsider might observe but the environment as perceived and experienced by the organism itself. 'Entering-into' strange 'ways of being in the world' would be the task of an intra-ontology.
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