Abstract
Christoph Durt offers a new view on the relation between consciousness and culture by investigating their intertwinement with significance. Against the widespread restriction of consciousness to phenomenal aspects and that of culture to “thick description,” Durt argues that consciousness discloses aspects of significance, whereas culture encompasses shared significance, as well as the forms of behavior that enact significance. Significance is intersubjective and constantly reinstantiated in new contexts of relevance rather than belonging to single individuals (cf. Gallagher, this vol.), as well as embedded in the shared world to which we relate by cultural forms of thinking and sense-making. Bringing together insights on the role of consciousness for the constitution of the world from Husserlian phenomenology with those on cultural forms of behavior by Wittgenstein and Ryle, Durt distinguishes different levels of significance accomplished by embodied consciousness and interaction. He contends that the real issue underlying “hybrid” concepts of the mind consists not in embodied versus disembodied systems of production (cf. Di Paolo and De Jaegher, this vol.) but in different levels of significance accomplished by consciousness and culture. Consciousness is embodied on every level, and it integrates different levels of significance.