Like riding a bike
We talk about’knowing’ how to type, or how to ride a bicycle. However, what sort of understanding is that? Descartes, who introduced the mind-body divide, would break down those actions into distinct stages. Firstwe feel the keyboard, or the bike and the street, then we create a mental representation of it. Once we have shaped that cognitive image of the thing and the environment, we form an intention to the thing — I will type this out phrase on the computer keyboard, or pedal the bike in that direction — and then act upon it. For Descartes, understanding is held in the mind.
But this just is not a very precise description of what we do when we sort or ride a bicycle. When the activity has been discovered, we don’t keep thinking about each minute motion — if anything, it’s only once we no longer need to consider the activity whatsoever that we say,”I know how to sort”, or even”I could ride a bike”. Yet these actions are more than simply reflex: they are deliberate.
For a better description of habitual activity, we could turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argued that understanding is embodied — meaning the body responds directly to the world, not to mental representations of it. As Merleau-Ponty wrote,”to understand how to touch type isn’t to know the place of each letter among the secrets”. Instead, it’s”knowledge from the palms”. It’s our bodies which”understand” how to type or ride a bike. The bike isn’t an immutable thing but instead something produced and re-made by our physiological perception of it. A freedom-machine for one body might just be useless crap for another.