HUBERT L. DREYFUS
Style is the way the everyday practices are coordinated. It serves as the basis upon which old practices are conserved and new practices are developed. A style opens a disclosive space and does so in a threefold manner: (a) by coordinating actions; (b) by determining how things and people matter; and (c) by being what is transferred from situation to situation. These three functions of style determine the way anything shows up and makes sense for us.
One can best see these three functions of style in another culture. Sociologists point out that mothers in different cultures handle their babies in different ways that inculcate the babies into different styles of coping with themselves, people, and things. For example, American mothers tend to put babies in their cribs on their stomachs, which encourages the babies to move around more effectively. Japanese mothers, contrariwise, put their babies on their backs so they will lie still, lulled by whatever they see. American mothers encourage passionate gesturing and vocalizing, while Japanese mothers are much more soothing and mollifying.
In general American mothers situate the infant’s body and respond to the infant’s actions in such a way as to promote an active and aggressive style of behavior. Japanese mothers, in contrast, promote a greater passivity and sensitivity to harmony in the actions of their babies. The babies, of course, take up the style of nurturing to which they are exposed. It may at first seem puzzling that the baby successfully picks out precisely the gestures that embody the style of its culture as the ones to imitate, but, of course, such success is inevitable. Since all our gestures embody the style of our culture, the baby will pick up that pervasive style no matter what it imitates. Starting with a style, various practices will make sense and become dominant and others will either become subordinate or will be ignored altogether.
The general cultural style determines how the baby encounters himself or herself, other people, and things. So, for example, no bare rattle is ever encountered. For an American baby a rattle-thing is encountered as an object to make lots of expressive noise with and to throw on the floor in a willful way in order to get a parent to pick it up. A Japanese baby may treat a rattle-thing this way more or less by accident, but generally we might suppose a rattle-thing is encountered as serving a soothing, pacifying function. What constitutes the American baby as an American baby is its style, and what constitutes the Japanese baby as a Japanese baby is its quite different style.
Once we see that a style governs how anything can show up as anything, we can see that the style of a culture does not govern only the babies. The adults in each culture are completely shaped by it. It determines what it makes sense to do, and what is worth doing. For example, it should come as no surprise, given the caricature I have just presented of Japanese and American culture, that Japanese adults seek contented, social integration, while American adults are still striving willfully to satisfy their individual desires. Likewise, the style of enterprises and of political organizations in Japan aims at producing and reinforcing cohesion, loyalty, and consensus, while what is admired by Americans in business and politics is the aggressive energy of a laissez-faire system in which everyone strives to express his or her own desires, and where the state, business, or other organizations function to maximize the number of desires that can be satisfied without destructive instability.
The case of child rearing helps us to see that our cultural style is in our artifacts and our bodily skills. Since it is not something inner, but a disposition to act in certain ways
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