In this paper, I argue that the temporal openness of perceptual experience provides insight into the basic structure of learning. I draw on Husserl's account of the mutability of the retained past in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Merleau‐Ponty's account of the perceptual field, as well as his remarks on habit, in Phenomenology of Perception, in order to elucidate the relation between the perceptual past and the future it portends. More specifically, I argue that retention and habituation in (...) perceptual experience open dimensions of meaning that transform the initial, initiating, experiences in which meaning is first established. As a result, our experience of meaning is always subject to further development that we cannot anticipate. This temporal openness has consequences for our learning to navigate a perceptual field, but also, I argue, for our developing more complex ways of engaging with the world. Specifically, I show how learning requires that we commit ourselves to an object or task before we are in a position to recognize the implications or significance of our commitment. I further consider the role that others play in the inherent openness of learning to the development of new meaning. (shrink)

This thesis uses Manuel DeLanda's realist emergentist ontology to indicate a foundation for an ethics of open possibility and experimentation. DeLanda's emergentist ontology will be used as a bridge that links nature as a creative system to human life as self-consciously creative. As an emergent goal of human life as such, personal experimentation has an irreducibly ethical dimension. I will argue that John Russon's concept of mutual equal recognition or universality-as-sharedness best explicates the ethical implications implied by but not explored (...) in the work of DeLanda. Chapter 1 is a general introduction and lays out the three competing views to which this thesis is opposed and to which it offers an alternative. Chapter 2 explains the meaning and implications of DeLanda's conception of natural processes as creative, suggesting that there are ethical implications for how we ought to live life if reality is as DeLanda claims. These ethical implications are emergent properties of natural and social organisation. Thus, Chapter 3 will look at a selection of material from other contemporary thinkers on emergence, aiming to bring DeLanda's conception into further relief and explain its unique appropriateness for the ethical implications this thesis is explicating. In Chapter 4, the ethical implications of DeLanda's ontology will be made fully explicit. I will demonstrate how Russon's principle of mutual equal recognition is an emergent property of human history and, as such, the social foundation for the ethics of personal experimentation and open possibility implied by but not explicated in DeLanda's ontology. (shrink)