Learning How To

Being 'experienced' at something means knowing 'how to do' it. So, since how something is done unifies the various motions involved, it is the Form of the Experience. Now, this Form entails more than the simultaneous coordination of bodily motions, e. g. of the movement of the surgeon's hands and eyes as an incision is made. For, the incision must come subsequent to the anesthetizing of the patient, and prior to, e. g. the removal of the appendix. In other words, the Form of most activities is a sequential ordering as well. furthermore, knowing how to do something means having learned to do it, and it is most likely that the learning process entailed step-by-step movements through the stages of the activity. To learn how to walk, a baby must first learn to stand, and then to put one foot forward, and then the other. This natural analysis of the Form of an Experience helps demonstrate two main ways that observation and movement interact in it. First, the inner awareness of the localized bodily movements constrains and coordinates them; in this interaction, the awareness is subsequent to the movements. On the other hand, movement can be subsequent to awareness: the awareness that one is standing up, or that one has completed an incision, is the point of departure for the next phase of the activity, putting a foot forward, or removal of the appendix. Examples such as these suggest what is problematic in both Teleological theories of behavior, and Platonism. The former insist that behavior has a point or points of termination, whereas the Teleologist is hard-pressed to cite any example of a completed action that is not itself the point of departure for a new action. Plato thought that Contemplation of Form was just such a terminal point, but he leaves unexamined how such Contemplation might also be the starting point of another activity, e. g. how Contemplation moved he himself to write voluminously about it.