Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 9 Number 1, April 2008

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Mindedness:

The style-giving background condition for perception, understanding, interaction, and aesthetic experience[1]

By

Malte Chr. Lyneborg

University of Copenhagen

This investigation wants to discuss the point that there is a way we are dealing with things and our surroundings that seems to have been much overlooked, but nevertheless is of importance when we want to understand what it is to be dealing with the world. We seem to do what we do, think what we think, etc. with a certain style or in a certain personal manner, which affects our actions, thinking, etc. The investigation will introduce a concept of mindedness as a concept that should point out this aspect.

It is the intention that the concept of mindedness should make us able to describe what directs the way we are dealing with the world both as ordinary persons in everyday situations, but also in more specific cases such as the skilled architect dealing with aesthetical and architectural aspects of the world. Mindedness should thus help explain the human formation process within a specific culture, a certain social and physical environment, and explain how this influences the individual in his or hers dealing with the world. The specific way a person is minded is thus functioning as a background influence that is a co-determining element on the person’s actions, way of thinking, and overall conscious and embodied style.

The investigation will begin by looking at other author’s contributions in the effort to reveal aspects that the concept of mindedness is aiming at describing. This account will relate to such people as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John McDowell, John Searle, Robert Pippin, and Pierre Bourdieu. It will consist in brief discussions in order to learn from them and have some indications of similarities and differences in relation to the present project. Secondarily, the concept will be developed in a phenomenological manner that tries to use the insights from the foregoing analysis, unfold it, and developing it further. And finally with the concluding remarks will be done a concrete exemplification of what could be at stake in an architect’s special mindedness using the developed vocabulary to point at some relevant aspects and perspectives.

1. Background of the concept of “mindedness”

In the book, “Mind and World”, John McDowell mentions the concept of mindedness a few times. He writes:

“Human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of that by noting that the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness.” (McDowell, 1994, 125).

Mindedness is here described as the way one adapts to the world through growing up ”in a space of reason”, which e.g. means a common way of doing things and finding certain reasons for why some things are done the way they are, which is a way of living life. The importance of being born into a language is meant to be some kind of being in accordance with one’s surroundings as an attunement of the subject in a specific way towards the world. In his “Mind, Value, and Reality” McDowell indirectly relates to this by describing mindedness as the ability to live competently in one’s surroundings (McDowell, 1998, 353). Competently here means that one adapts to the surroundings through norms, behaviour, and thinking, perhaps simulating them until they become an essential part of one-self as one grows up.

Secondly, it might be interesting to regard mindedness as a variant of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of life”, Lebensformen (as used in §§ 19, 23, 241 of “Philosophical Investigations”). Mindedness can as such be seen as relating to the understanding of the Wittgensteinian form of life as expressing a kind of inter-cultural and social relativism. To be minded within a certain language, within a certain culture at a certain geographical and historical place in the world, is a way to fit into one’s environment, which of course, negatively seen is a way to point at how these surrounding conditions restrict and limit the person in many aspects. Regarded positively the forms of life are a part of what build up persons. The form of life indicates the community as a background, which influences the way one is behaving, acting, and thinking. In “On Certainty” Wittgenstein speaks exactly about the formation of one’s world view as the handed down background. He says that the background resembles game rules of society and he claims they are like mythologies we do not critically reflects upon (Wittgenstein, 1969, §§ 94-97). As such he distinguishes between the judgements of experience that are likely to be reconsidered and the fixed judgements of experience that are like mythologies and embedded in a certain life form (Wittgenstein, 1969, §§ 98-99, 358).

Jonathan Lear presents a very similar understanding to one presented here, when he writes: “The central task of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is to make us aware of our mindedness.” (Lear, 1982, 401). Lear also connects it directly to the concept of life form, but in contrast to how would be done in the following of this article, he directly defines it in relation to what it is to follow a rule:

“Let us say that a person is minded in a certain way, if he has the perceptions of salience, routes of interest, feelings of naturalness in following a rule, etc. that constitute being part of a certain life form.” (Lear, 1982, 385).

Let us, thirdly, look at Robert Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel’s concept of the spirit, where he writes:

“The question of spirit is not one that can be settled by ‘external reflection’ on its substantial nature. The achievement of a certain form of collective mindedness, a way of living out a certain form of self-understanding, a living out made possible at all by what we collectively do, determines whether we are spiritual beings or not, and so whether or not we can ‘realize’ (verwirklichen) what it is to be spiritual, to be free.” (Pippin, 2000, 202).

Mindedness is here described as a social consciousness or a part of what the individual consciousness is formed by through its inter-subjective surroundings, which set up the frames of our self-understanding and the way to be in and understand the world. In this regard the subject can act and fill out its being as free, following Pippin. This is interesting because it points towards freedom being something that unfolds within social and normative restrictions, and that it is a misunderstanding to think of freedom without these relations. To be minded is therefore the condition for unfolding one-self all in relation to culture, sociality, and all the other factors that are shapening and affecting one’s mindedness.

Fourthly, some references to Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias might also be relevant, because they could be said directly to relate what we call mindedness to the social surroundings as something that has influenced and shaped the mind through social interaction, education, etc. On a sociological level, it is obvious that individuals in one social group are likely to resemble each other by their mindedness or more specific in the manner they approach the world and engage into social interaction. One’s mindedness is something that is formed by inter-relation with other people. It is as such dependent on one’s social environment. In sociological terms, the concept of habitus, which Elias introduces to Bourdieu, becomes relevant here. This concept is pointing towards the most fundamental structuring of habits, of our actions and practices, our ways of rationalising, and ways of feeling – something that is originated inter-subjectively through time as one develops. Therefore habitus can be seen as touching on an essential part of what is meant by mindedness as that, which is latently present in a certain mode in every individual. Habitus is here presented by Bourdieu as a “…structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices…” (Bourdieu, 1994, 170). It is something that develops in time through social interaction from one’s biological potential (the body). One of Bourdieu’s points is here that every class has its own habits, thinking, etc., whereby the specific habitus can be seen to be class related:

“The habitus integrates into the biographically synthesizing unity of a generative principle the set of effects of the determinations imposed by the material conditions of existence (whose efficacy is more or less subordinated to the effects of the training previously undergone as one advances in time). It is embodied class (including biological properties that are socially shaped, such as sex or age) and, in all cases of inter- or intra-generational mobility, it is distinguished (in its effects) from class as objectified at a given moment (in the form of property, titles, etc.)…” (Bourdieu, 1984, 437).

The reason that mindedness, as it will be presented in the present article, is in not completely the same as habitus, becomes obvious in the above cited quote: Mindedness is not thought specific in relation to classes, because the present ambition is phenomenological on a micro level, dealing with the single consciousness and its relation to inter-subjectivity. It is as such not a class or group feature although these features can be later extracted as done by Bourdieu. Although it will not be done here, mindedness has the possibility later to be related to a structuring level similar as Elias does when he relates habitus to the culture and class specific figuration – a concept that transgress the dichotomy between structure and individual (Elias, 1978, lxviii-lxix, lxxviii).

In the introduction, it was said that mindedness was to be understood as what forms the general way or style with which a person is thinking, rationalising, acting, behaving, etc. Bourdieu has an observation that can be used in this context, because he explains practices as something that includes having stylistic affinities:

“The practices of the same agent, and, more generally, the practices of all agents of the same class, owe the stylistic affinity which makes each of them a metaphor of any of the others to the fact that they are the product of transfers of the same schemes of action from one field to another.” (Bourdieu, 1984, 173).

Bourdieu therefore seems to be able to agree in the point that the style with which we approach the world is socially formed as are our habitus. If we take it a step further, we could say that it is the mindedness that influences the individual and form her or his style of thinking, acting, etc.

The last author that will be presented as an inspiring source for the present investigation is John Searle. Searle has been writing about what he calls the “Background”, which is some kind of tacit knowledge of practices or horizon of experience as a background for every intentional act. He claims that:

“In order that I can now have the Intentional states that I do I must have certain kinds of know-how to do things, but the kinds of “know-how” in question are not, in these cases, forms of “knowing that”.” (Searle, 1983, 143).

“The Background is “preintentional” in the sense that though not a form or forms of Intentionality, it is nonetheless a precondition or set of preconditions of Intentionality.” (Searle, 1983, 143).

It becomes clear in the above cited quotations that Searle thinks the Background as the underlying conditions for intentionality – what we later will call mindedness as the pre-reflective background condition for intentionality.

Searle further distinguishes two different kinds of Backgrounds, namely 1) what he calls:

“[T]he “deep Background”, which includes at least all those Background capacities that are common to all human beings in virtue of their biological make up – capacities such as walking, eating, grasping, perceiving, recognizing…” (Searle, 1983, 143-4),

and 2) what he calls:

“[T]he “local Background” or “local cultural practices”, which would include such things as opening doors, drinking beer from bottles, and the preintentional stance that we take toward such things as cars, refrigerators…” (Searle, 1983, 144).

What concerns the categorisations between local and deep Background in the above cited quotation; the clarity of the distinction might be questioned. It seems clear that the biological body and brain are conditions without which we could not be conscious and minded in the world. But it is unclear that what Searle calls the “biological make up”, which he defines as “capacities such as walking, eating, grasping, perceiving, recognizing”, “are common to all human” in the same way. It can therefore be argued that what Searle talks about as the “…“deep Background”…common to all human beings…” still is different from culture to culture and therefore not common to all humans in every aspect. Just compare the way people walk in Tokyo and in Paris and you will see surprisingly differences, details alright, but importantly indicating that it might not be the same walking in the two cultures: there are differences in the ways of doing it just as differences in thinking, which is an aspect that the difference in mindedness should be able to capture. And it could be argued that Searle’s division leads to blurred borders, because of the arbitrary difference between “deep” and “local” Background. If, on the other hand, Searle’s division is understood as going gradually from the deep Background to the local Background, it could still be appealing to apply his line of thought to the concept of mindedness as a background condition for intentionality. But this is also to refuse that mindedness is to be something like “biological make up” (or put on the edge: physical conditions like the body and its dispositions). The biological make up should rather be thought as the (physical) conditions for mindedness. Mindedness points at cultural practices or e.g. the tendency to be oriented towards certain things qua one’s experience and interests shaping of your background mindedness.

Searle’s Background is not an explicit knowledge and not something that can be termed in beliefs or summed up in sentences of what one knows about the world, but a way one is accessing the world, the background shaping my intentionality. One place where Searle resumes some of the ordinary but misleading ways one speaks about the Background, he writes: “…[O]ne speaks vaguely of “practices”, “capacities”, and “stances” or one speaks suggestively but misleadingly of “assumptions” and “presuppositions”.” (Searle, 1983, 156). Here we have to notice that the reason why Searle thinks it is misleading to speak of “assumptions” and “presuppositions” is because “…they imply the apparatus of representation with its propositional contents, logical relations, truth values, directions of fit, etc.” (Searle, 1983, 156). Searle prefers “practices” and “capacities”, because they can succeed or fail in their exercise without being understood as representations, although also “…they are inadequate since they fail to convey an appropriate implication that the phenomena are explicitly mental.” (Searle, 1983, 156). He here complaints that “we tend to lapse into an Intentionalistic vocabulary”, which is a reminder of the Background is pre-intentional.

   From this, but also from his later book, “The Rediscovery of the Mind” (1992), it becomes clear that Searle thinks not the Background but intentionality as representation. He thereby overlooks the constitutive elements in the intentional act partly provided by the formation of the mindedness. He overlooks what can not be formulated in propositional terms, that which has to do with styles and modes of intentionality. This can be illustrated from one of Searle’s examples in an earlier writing:

“Eating lunch in a restaurant, I am surprised when I lift my mug of beer by its near weightlessness. Inspection reveals that the thick mug is not glass but plastic. We would naturally say I believed that the mug was made of glass, and I expected it to be heavy. But that is wrong. In the sense in which I really do believe without ever having explicitly thought about it that interest rates will go down and I really do expect a break in the current heat wave, I had no such expectations and beliefs about the mug; I simply acted. Ordinarily usage invites us to, and we can and do, treat elements of the Background as if they were representations…” (Searle, 1983, 157).

Searle’s example is interesting. There can be no doubt about that in reaching for the mug I am executing an intentional act, and in Searle’s example I haven’t thought explicitly or reflected about the weight of the mug until I am surprised. This is the reason why Searle implicitly says that the weight of the mug is only a part of the non-intentional Background. But the reaching for the mug is an act, which Searle also says explicitly, and it is a directed act, not a reflex. It could further be said that it is a pre-reflectively act in which the mug is not explicitly thematizised; the mug is rather an object I have a “ready-to-hand” access to (Zuhandenheit) in a Heideggerian sense (Heidegger, 1927, 69). It can therefore be argued that also the non-tematizised, pre-reflective expectation that the mug is as heavy as if it were made of glass, is part of the intentional act. As such it is not a part of the non-intentional Background. It can be argued that being intentionally directed towards the mug I am using my tacit Background (or mindedness) of how to relate to a mug of glass, which reveals itself as being made out of plastic. This determines the way I will relate to the world (the mug) in a certain way (as being made of glass). The lightness of the mug surprises me and it is thereby dragging attention to it-self, which perhaps makes me reflect on it. It should be summed up as the Background being a part of my specific developed adaptation to the world, but Background only manifests itself in connection to intentionality, sine non qua.

One of Searle’s problems in the above cited quotation might be that he is writing against what might be called the paradigm of representation. This wants to regard knowledge as knowledge that as propositional knowledge, which entails certain philosophical problems how we should explain that we e.g. think of a certain kind of grilled beef and not a piece of raw meat when we order a steak in a restaurant. With this focus of these aspects he happens to confuse the Background with what should be termed a non-thematizised, pre-reflective, intentional act. He consequently ends up with a partly blurred concept of the Background. It is a part of the aim with the concept of mindedness that is should be able to describe the background for even small aspects as conditions for intentional nuances and style.

2. Unfolding the concept of mindedness in relation to the concepts of intentionality, style, historicity, and life world

In the following the insights from the above presented authors will be used in the effort to try to develop and define the concept of mindedness: This will be done in a primarily phenomenological perspective, which means that the concept of mindedness will be related to a phenomenological discourse. It will be necessary to argue that the meaning of mindedness is not covered by other terms, in the effort to give it its justification. Besides intentionality, the concepts that primarily have to be differentiated from mindedness are style, historicity, and life world. The investigation should at the same time make the definition of mindedness more explicit through the effort with distinguishing them from other aspects and concepts.

Within phenomenology there has been a long discussion of intentionality, i.e. the way the consciousness is directed towards objects. Intentionality has been a fruitful concept, because it allowed the investigation of the directedness of consciousness, i.e. how consciousness is directed towards the world or an intern, mental objects. It hereby problematized an otherwise neglected aspect of the subjective. In the traditional analysis of intentionality, one can distinguish between e.g. the perceived or thought of object and the directedness towards the object, the last making explicit the way one is directed. This is also the tool that gives the possibility to describe the qualitative differences in the way conscious experiences are given. One could e.g. mention the differences between glancing superficially over an object and the being deeply engaged in seen details and structures of the object, which are differences in the qualities of the way the conscious perception is experienced. If we accept the thesis, generally hold within phenomenology in a Husserlian vein that all consciousness is intentional; it seems to be relevant to underline that intentionality is here meant to be understood very broadly. Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the spectra of intentionality – from the focused directedness towards outer or inner objects to the aspects implicit and nearly unnoticed – as the “intentional bow” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 158, 184).

Introducing the concept of mindedness is, in a way, to add something that could be claimed to be entailed under the concept of intentionality, but it could also be argued that this would be to deal with a too broad concept of intentionality. We can hereby be said to have learned from Searle as presented above. Mindedness is the background condition for intentionality and as such not the intentionality itself. Mindedness should rather be regarded not as the intentional act, but that which characterises the style in a broad variety of intentional acts. Merleau-Ponty is using the concept of style. He says that “A style is a certain manner of dealing with situations…” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, 382; in French: 1945, 378), and he adds that the style of a person changes through the person’s life (ibid.). Although Merleau-Ponty does not develop the style in the technical way as done here connecting it to intentionality, he does not seem to be remote from the idea. We can therefore use the connotation of the term style and say that a person’s mindedness unfolds as a certain style general to all the intentional acts of the persons. Mindedness is still what lies underneath and determines the style of intentionality. It can be seen as certain over-all and long-term aspects of our engagement and dealing with the world, a certain attunedness towards the world. If mindedness is thus the condition for the manner one intentionally engages with the world, it follows that this includes some generally aspect about the manner the person engages with the world with a certain way to perceive including what is of importance for the individual to notice, react on, themes and aspects the person often deals with, interacts with, etc. Besides perceptual aspects of intentionality, it also has a role to play in interaction with other people, bodily experiences and styles of being embodied such as moving and acting, inner experiences, and relation to one-self. Because the mindedness is determinant of style of intentionality in a broad sense, it also affects the way of thinking, the way to rationalize, mode of inventiveness, etc. Mindedness is as such strongly embodied styles that go together with the cognitive styles, and consciousness and body is here regarded as intimately related. Mindedness is generally speaking what determines the individual’s specific mode of relating to the world, the ability to cope with and act in world.

Merleau-Ponty says that “…the style does of a person… does not remain constant for me. After ten years of friendship, even independently of any changes brought about by age, I seem to be dealing with a different person…” (ibid.). This can be explained with reference to the life experience: The mindedness forms the way a person experiences, but then the mindedness will itself be modified by what is experienced, which will again affect the manner of further experience. This is reflected in the ordinary experience of growing up, the life long process of personal development, getting old, etc. Technically it can be said that the mindedness implies a reversible process, and it is slow, because one is only relatively open towards new aspects of the world when one is already minded in a certain way.

It is by now already said that mindedness is affected by past experience. If we introduce the concept of historicity, i.e. consciousness as always containing some kind of mental horizon of its past, it might be fruitful to make clear how mindedness and the historicity of consciousness diverge. Historicity is used within phenomenology to describe that consciousness always relies on its past, and it is as such designated through its relating to the world within a specific historical frame, through its personal historical experiences. It now becomes obvious to regard historicity (as a temporal structure of consciousness with a previous experience) as a pre-condition for the mindedness. The minded consciousness must be understood in its historicity for us to make proper sense of the possibility to be minded. It is through the historicity of the consciousness that consciousness has the possibility to develop a mindedness as what determines intentional attunedness, style of consciousness, or way of being intentionally directed. And we can now begin to make some further connections saying that an individual is minded through its experiential history formed in a certain culture, education (and Bildung), etc., and it is as such culture-relative down to the smallest detail constituted by the concrete social surroundings, whereby we again embrace a part of what Bourdieu means by habitus and are getting close to be dealing with a Wittgensteinian form of life as e.g. a certain common sense manner of dealing with the world. One’s mindedness as constituted by the social-historical background also determines one’s use of concepts as embedded within a certain language sphere and stimulates certain ways of being rational or rationalizing in certain manners.

Mindedness can be regarded as what makes persons able to act correctly in the given social situation, or rather adapt to or behave correctly in certain social atmosphere, i.e. to say the right things, be well-behaved, etc. Being minded in certain ways will make it possible to notice and act upon specific aspects. Though it does not in any way exhaust what is entailed in social interaction, the culture-specific mindedness can be said to make it possible to be sensible for live practices or life forms or in accordance with a specific habitus.

The social-historical background comes close to another phenomenological concept, namely the concept of life world (Lebenswelt). In the Husserlian sense it is referring to the surrounding world as concretely experienced by the pre-scientific, dealing with it as unproblematic philosophically.[2] Edmund Husserl also talks about the life world as a world of meaning or Sinnenwelt (Husserl, 1992, 108). It hereby opens up the possibility of understanding the life world very broadly as the sphere of meaningful relations and entities in relation to the life practices of the person, social references, and horizon of experience (Husserl, 1992, 165). The life world is the world given in its concrete sensibility and it has similar forms among persons within the same culture which constitutes aspects as “normality” within a given society. It is a concrete horizon of experience and possible experience, the given world of experience in its full concretion (ontologically), but it is effected and constituted by inter-subjectivity (transcendentally) – mediated through other peoples’ explanation, opinions, ways of rationalizing, etc.

If this is an indication of what the life world is, it should be rather clear that it is one thing having a certain life world with horizon of possible experiences, intuitive understanding of why things are done, of social interaction, etc. and that it another thing that is indicated by the mindedness. A person’s mindedness should be reserved for that which determines the mode, way, and style the person is engaged with the world within hers or his horizon and life world. Two persons can share more or less the same life world, but have a more radical difference in the way one is minded. The life world and horizon of experience are what makes a person ready for the possible experiences, whereby the mindedness is affecting to the way one reacts to the experiences and deals with them.

It might also be relevant to relate the concept of mindedness to Martin Heidegger in his “Time and Being”, because it perhaps should be explained why mindedness is not an “existential” in the sense of the features that characterize the being of human “Dasein” (human) in the world. Heidegger’s analysis of the existentials is trying to describe the most fundamental (perhaps even universal) features by the way humans are in the world. “Care” (Sorge), “historicity”, and “situatedness” (Befindlichkeit) are examples of the existentials. If we take “care”, it can be said to designate the fundamental way Dasein has a carrying relation to the world at the same time carrying for its self, which is a characterizing feature about every Dasein’s being in the world. Mindedness would here designate the way one has a carrying relation to the world. The existentials can here be said to be conceived on a more fundamental level than mindedness. And some of the structures, which Heidegger explains as existentials, seem to be presupposed in mindedness in order for there to be mindedness. In this way the existentials can be conceived as conditions of possibilities for mindedness. Another obvious example is “historicity”, signifying that Dasein is always within a temporal context with its own historical experience as something it relies on. That the consciousness has historicity seems therefore to be a presupposed condition for mindedness, because a person’s mindedness is e.g. shaped and constituted by the personal life experience, because it is through experiencing that one develops in a certain way. Similarly, most of the other existentials can be said to function as pre-conditions for mindedness – depending of how complete one thinks Heidegger’s mapping of the human is. Mindedness can thereby be listed as residing on a level that lies between the existentials and intentionality and it is as such what conditions the individual’s style of intentionality.

If we go back to the existential of “care”, we can sum up and say that it is through having a carrying relation to the world that we are able to develop a personal style in our coping and dealing with the world. It is already there, not as something fixed, but rather as something that evolves through life experience given our historicity. And mindedness could be said of put in a similar relation with many of the existentials. Mindedness is this style-giving element that explains how each intentional act is characterised by a certain personal style adjusted to the social, mental, and physical context as being elements of our life world. It is this style-giving aspect that can be said to have been overlooked by the majority of the phenomenological tradition, because it only seldom is mentioned as an object for separate analysis.

3. Conclusion and perspectives

Mindedness is a concept that makes explicit that persons have a special attitude to what they do and think. They have a personal style. Though theme of the style of doing and thinking has been much overlooked in the philosophic discussion, perhaps because it seemed unimportant in comparison to e.g. questions like finding out what it is to know something about the world, it nevertheless has been presented here as an important aspect of thinking, acting, perceiving, etc. A person’s style will namely e.g. affect what a person notice in perception, which through the reversible interaction between past and new experiences will influence what aspects of the world that interests the person. This style-giving element is how the person is minded. Mindedness was presented as the precondition for all intentional acts. And because thinking, perceiving, acting, and interacting with other people are all intentional acts, the way a person is minded will influence these aspects. It is not knowledge that but the style by which one knows. Or it is what characterizes e.g. the attitude with which one engages into the investigation of a new object. Traditional epistemology is in this way another question, not dealt with here.

The personal mindedness is thereby only what determines the person’s consciously and embodied way of dealing with the world, whereby such aspects as thinking, perceiving, acting, etc., which have normally been conceived of as different domains, now find a common ground. Besides what can be described in a representational vocabulary, our use of mindedness should therefore be sensitive towards bodily consciousness, styles of moving, and the bodily relation to the style of acting and rationalizing as intimately connected.

Mindedness relies on inter-subjectivity in the way it is formed and originated through learning and adaptation to the surroundings. It is a general mechanism in all development. As a concept of formation, Bildung, etc. of the person’s ways of engaging the world, it must be underlined that every persons are minded in one way or another, and that the concept does not designate only one specific way of dealing with the world. We all are minded in some way or another. Mindedness in this way is not biological dispositions, but bodily-mental attitudes, stances towards certain aspects formed through various forms of interaction in the world. Because nobody has the exactly same social and historical background, the mindedness will naturally also vary even how close two ways of being minded might seem – twins are examples where a large degree of similarity in mindedness is often the case, but when one goes into detail even twins are different from each other.

Mindedness was presented as a personal attitude, which develops through new experience. The minded attunedness will be affected by the historical and cultural frame it unfolds within. Mindedness was as such placed in relation to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Wittgenstein’s concept of life form, because they in different manners have pointed to the aspect that the individual is always within some kind of specific sphere of practice and understanding that is relative to the cultural and historical context. Mindedness was also put in relation to McDowell’s use of the concept as something one develops through growing up and living in a space of raison within a language. And Pippin presented us some kind of idea of the inter-subjective spirit as a “form of collective mindedness”. And Searle could be said to be the role model in pointing out that mindedness should be seen as what conditioned intentional acts, although this insight was remove from Searle’s context of philosophy of language and imported into a more phenomenological framework. Together these were used as inputs that in some way or another precede relevant aspects of the present discussion.

In the rest of this text, we will be looking at a concretisation of one spectre of mindedness, both for making explicit what is entailed but also for making a further perspective for the possible use of the concept. Let us now exemplify by looking at architects as a special spectre of being minded. Architects are not born into being architects, but becoming an architect is a development one goes through. At university or academy they have professors opening up a world of architecture for them. What they do is questioned by professors making them reflect about why and how things should be done. They adapt a technical language pointing to specific aspects within their professional field. But the knowledge they acquire is not always possible to put in to words, rather it is a practice about how things could be done. They learn to see aspects of buildings, constructions, lightning, etc. that might not be within mental reach for everybody else having not dealt intensively with architecture. They will have a more or less well-developed sensibility towards special aspects of their field. This includes aesthetics (i.e. sensational or phenomenal)[3], small nuances in the perception of phenomena, or the awareness of atmosphere in a room or the sense and knowledge of how a building is constructed. They acquire know-how and develop a special attitude towards the world, which go into their private way of being so that being architect will not only be something they are when they work. The special access and attitude they develop becomes an embodied part of the way they are in the world, but something that is developed through norms, social expectations and frames of explanation. In other words they are minded in a certain way. And the way they are minded is crucial for the artistic creation. The mindedness influencing all intentional acts, will mark every act from the way they hold on a fountain pen with a special Gefühl and the way they draw, to the way they conceive buildings and plans. The aesthetic and architectural mindedness could perhaps be said to having a sense of aspects that make up a space or building and to have a developed sense of space in order to work it out and create well-functioning and perhaps experimenting, designed spaces.

Being minded in the right way will in the end let the architect be inspired and have ideas about how a project could be worked out with a qualified sensibility towards the artistic possibilities in a project. It might be objected here that inspiration could depend a various things like being in the right mood etc. Here it could only be agreed, because being trigged by some ideas, getting in the right mood seems to be something that happens in an interaction between one’s background mindedness and the present situation and the attunedness in one’s surroundings. I.e. the mindedness, although collectively formed and developed, is attached to a single subjective and embodied dimension of experience that will be affected in the concrete situation of experience of the physical surroundings, what just happened, soft aspects such as moods, etc. But in any way, the mindedness will be the pre-condition for how and with which style a person will recognize the situation, be intentional aware and embodied as a historical embedded consciousness that manifests it-self as having a certain intentional style in relation to the world and its worldly practices.

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