Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology

Ondrej Svec, Jakub Capek, Ondrej Svec, Jakub Capek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367595005
• eBook ISBN: 9781315453873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology offers a complex analysis of the pragmatic theses that are present in the works of leading phenomenological authors, including not only Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as it is often the case within Hubert Dreyfus' tradition, but also Husserl, Levinas, Scheler, and Patocka. Starting from a critical reassessment of existing pragmatic readings which draw especially on Heidegger's account of Being-in-the-world, the volume's chapters explore the following themes as possible justifications for speaking about the pragmatic turn in phenomenology: the primacy of the practical over theoretical understanding, criticism of the representationalist account of perception and consciousness, and the analysis of language and truth within the context of social and cultural practices. Having thus analyzed the pragmatic readings of key phenomenological concepts, the book situates these readings in a larger historical and thematic context and introduces themes that until now have been overlooked in debates, including freedom, alterity, transcendence, normativity, distance, and self-knowledge. This volume seeks to refresh the debate about the phenomenological legacy and its relevance for contemporary thought by enlarging the thematic scope of pragmatic motives in phenomenology in new and revealing ways. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of phenomenology who are interested in moving beyond the analytic-continental divide to explore the relationship between practice and theory.

Part I
Contemporary Pragmatic Readings of Phenomenology

1
On Layer Cakes: Heidegger’s Normative Pragmatism Revisited

Mark Okrent

In Being and Time Heidegger grants a certain kind of ontological priority to the being of equipment over the being of “objects that are merely present and of their matter-of-factual, nonnormative properties” (Brandom 2002a, 325). “To lay bare what is just present-at-hand and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-hand in our concern. Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially” (Heidegger 1962, 101). That is, Heidegger asserts that Zuhandensein has ontological priority over Vorhandensein. In Being and Time, this priority of the equipmental over the factual is related to a second kind of ontological priority. For Heidegger, Dasein’s being has priority over Vorhandensein. This is an immediate consequence of Heidegger’s claim that Being, and with it all ways of Being, is dependent on the possibility of an understanding of Being.

Of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible), “is there” Being… Being (not entities) is dependent on the understanding of Being; that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care. (Heidegger 1962, 255)

It is not entirely clear how, interpretatively, we are to understand the way in which Heidegger thinks these priority relations, or why we should believe Heidegger is right regarding these priorities.

In “Dasein, the Being That Thematizes,” Robert Brandom accuses Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland and me of adopting a position that Brandom labels the “layer cake model” of the priority of Dasein and the equipmental over the merely present. It is appropriate to say Brandom “accuses” us of adopting the layer cake model because Brandom thinks that this model involves a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s text.¹ As Brandom articulates it, the “layer cake model” interprets the Heideggerean priority theses as maintaining that agents can be Dasein and understand entities as equipment with Zuhandensein as their kind of being, even if those agents are incapable of making assertions and thus incapable of intending Vorhandensein. Since a fair amount turns on Brandom’s exact formulation of the layer cake model, it is worthwhile to quote extensively from his specification of that model.

It is natural to understand these priority claims in terms of a “layer cake” model, according to which there could be Dasein and Zuhandensein without Vorhandensein, which arises from them only if Dasein adopts certain optional practices and practical attitudes, involving the use of certain sorts of sophisticated equipment, namely, sentences used to make claims and state rules. This is an understanding according to which the claim that “assertion is derived from interpretation and understanding” invokes derivation in a sense implying the autonomy of the underlying layer of “circumspective” (that is, practical) acknowledgments of proprieties in dealing with equipment. The level of assertions, and so of adopting the practical attitude of treating things as occurrent, looks like an optional superstructure, which might be erected on top of human existence (Dasein) and the being of equipment (Zuhandensein), but which equally well might not be found with them.… On this reading, Heidegger portrays an autonomous, preconceptual, prepropositional, prelinguistic level of intentionality—namely, practical, skill-laden, norm governed directedness towards equipment treated as available.

(Brandom 2002a, 328)

It is this natural, but according to Brandom, erroneous layer cake understanding of Heidegger that Brandom attributes to Dreyfus, Haugeland and me. In this paper I defend this model for interpreting Heidegger and beyond that, for understanding intentionality.

1. Normative Pragmatism

The reason that it is profitable for me to engage with Brandom is that we share a great deal in common. Philosophically, both of us are committed to a set of core views that Brandom calls “normative pragmatism,” although as the sequel will show, I have differences with Brandom concerning some of the crucial nuances of that position. Regarding Heidegger, both Brandom and I interpret the early Heidegger as a normative pragmatist, although I suspect that Brandom would probably assert that Heidegger was a normative pragmatist, while for me Heidegger is a normative pragmatist. For Brandom, there is a lot of Sellars and Hegel in Heidegger; for me there is a lot of Dewey in Heidegger.

As Brandom articulates it, normative pragmatism is characterized by two commitments, commitments having to do, first, with the relation between the normative and the factual, and second, the relation between “norms taking the explicit form of rules and norms taking the implicit form of proprieties of practice” (Brandom 2002a, 324). Normative pragmatism is the position that results from turning the philosophical tradition upside down by asserting that a certain kind of norm is in some sense more basic than facts, and that implicit proprieties of practice are in a certain sense more basic than action informed by appeal to explicit rules:

Heidegger treats as primitive a certain kind of social normative articulation and seeks to define the factual as a special case picked out by subtracting something, namely, certain kinds of relations to human projects.… Heidegger treats as primitive a certain kind of norm that is implicit in practice and seeks to define explicit rules, principles, and claims in terms of the practical proprieties of using them. (Brandom 2002a, 324–325)

As Brandom points out, Anglophone philosophers should be quick to recognize the second aspect of Heidegger’s normative pragmatism as similar to the late Wittgenstein’s claim that there must be a way of satisfying, or failing to satisfy, a norm that is implicit in the actual behavior of the agent and does not involve the agent’s mentally interpreting a rule. For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, there must be such implicit adherence or failure to adhere to norms because it is a necessary condition on an agent being able to follow explicit rules that that agent be capable of implicitly adhering to norms in his or her actual behavior. The other aspect of normative pragmatism is more unfamiliar. According to Brandom, Heidegger’s basic thought in this area involves both a negative and a positive thesis. The negative thesis is that if one starts with the ontological category of a fact, or of a nonnormative state of affairs that can be represented in the content of an indicative sentence, one will never be able to understand or account for the possibility of normative determinations. The positive thesis has two sides. First, it is impossible to understand the possibility of beings such as ourselves, who are capable of language and reason, unless one can account for normative determinations. Second, one can account for nonnormative, merely factual determinations in terms of normative determinations

So, normative pragmatism is committed to two theses. First, it is committed to the claim that Vorhandensein is possible only if there is some respect in which it is appropriate to respond in certain situations or to certain entities in certain ways. And second, it is committed to the claim that it is correct to respond in certain situations or to certain entities in certain ways has primarily to do with norms implicit in behavior rather than with following explicit rules. To clarify what is involved in normative pragmatism then, one must articulate the respects in which behavior itself can implicitly be correct or appropriate, and the way in which that correctness can underpin both the following of explicit rules and Vorhandensein.

For Brandom, the crucial way in which behavior itself can be appropriate or inappropriate according to implicit norms has to do with the social practices involved in interacting with a particular class of entities, tools, or equipment.

The available comprises what Heidegger calls equipment—things that are dealt with in social practices and so are thick with practical proprieties or significances that determine how it is appropriate to treat them. To call something available is to treat it as something that can be used correctly or incorrectly, according to proprieties implicit in practices instituted and pursued by Dasein. (Brandom 2002a, 326)

Consider Heidegger’s favorite example, hammers. The being of hammers is Zuhandensein. Certain entities are hammers, in the sense that in a given community it is appropriate according to community standards, to use them in given socially determined situations, in certain socially accepted ways, in order to achieve certain socially acceptable results. Someone treats an object as a hammer if she attempts to use that object as a hammer is to be used in order to, for example, drive nails into boards. If the entity used in this way is accepted as a hammer by the community (that is, implicitly accepted as to be used as it is used on this occasion, insofar as the members of the community do not correct the activity), and the performance is carried out as it should be carried out, according to the supporting and sanctioning behavior of the other members of the community, then the performance is appropriate and correct. That is, a given overt performance of hammering is correct or incorrect in virtue of being accepted by the community, or not accepted, as an act of hammering, not in virtue of falling under some rule or failing to do so. Finally, if a given individual is in general capable of supporting and sanctioning behavior as it is to be supported and sanctioned within the community, that is, as other functioning members of the community do so, and is recognized as such by other community members, then she counts as a member of the community whose responses carry authority regarding the appropriateness of performances with equipment.

So, on this view of what it is to be a tool, there is a way in which correctly or incorrectly engaging in tool-using behavior is a matter of being accorded a definite status within a community. And for this kind of correctness, adhering to a norm is a matter of implicitly following the norm in one’s behavior, and implicitly being recognized as doing so by one’s peers’ overt responses to that behavior, instead of falling under, or failing to fall under, some explicitly statable rule. But what reason do we have to think this way of adhering to norms has priority, in any sense, over adhering to a norm by following an explicit rule? And even if it does, how does this priority help us to understand why, whether or in what sense the normative has priority over the factual?

For a very long time now, it has seemed to me that the beginning of all wisdom regarding these issuing from the transcendental tradition concerning ontology and ontological priority is Kant’s “supreme principle of all synthetic judgments”: “The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience” (Kant 1998, 283). It is a pervasive feature of the transcendental tradition inaugurated by Kant that the best way to understand what it is to be an entity of any given type is by understanding the conditions under which it is possible to intend entities as of that type. For Kant, what it is to be an object of experience must be articulated through understanding how it is possible to experience those objects. Similarly, for Heidegger one can understand Zuhandensein, or what it is to be a tool, only if one understands how it is possible to intend something as a tool, one can understand what it is to be a substance with nonnormative properties, Vorhandensein, only if one understands the conditions on an agent intending something as such a substance, and one can understand the being of Dasein only if one can grasp what is involved in intending Dasein as Dasein. Further, all ontological priority theses must be read through a similar lens. To say that what it is to be A depends on what it is to be B is to say that no agent can intend anything as an A without being capable of intending something as B. So, for example, to say, as Heidegger does, that reality, or the being of the real, is dependent on care, or the being of Dasein, is just to say that no agent can count as intending anything as real unless it is also capable of intending something as Dasein.

His writings give us good reason to think that Brandom, as a good normative pragmatist, accepts something very like the supreme principle of synthetic judgment as I’ve just articulated it, and that this is the key to his interpretation of Heidegger’s normative pragmatism. In a different context Brandom distinguishes between two kinds of conceptual dependence: sense dependence and reference dependence.

Concept P is sense dependent on concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q. Concept P is reference dependent on concept Q just in case P cannot apply to something unless Q applies to something. The distinction between these is enforced by the observation that sense dependence does not entail reference dependence. (Brandom 2002b, 50)

To use Brandom’s example, consider the concepts “pleasure” and “pleasant.” “Pleasant” is sense dependent on “pleasure” because what it is for an entity to be pleasant is to be such that it would tend to bring about pleasure in beings like us that were exposed to it. Because what it is to be pleasant is essentially specified in terms of what it is for something to have pleasure, an agent can’t grasp what it is to be pleasant if that agent cannot grasp what it is to be pleasure. But because the conceptual linkage between the two concepts is by way of a counterfactual “would,” pleasant is not reference dependent on pleasure. Since all that is required for something to be pleasant is that it would give pleasure to beings like us if they were exposed to it, something can be pleasant even if there never were any beings like us and thus no actual occasions on which beings like us experience pleasure.

It is crucial to notice that Brandom’s distinction between sense and reference conceptual dependence turns on two factors. First, many concepts apply to their objects in such a way that they apply whether or not they are ever grasped by any agent as applying. S can seem to P to be A, even if it is not A, and S can be A, even if it does not appear to be A to any agent, and this can be so even when the condition that must be met for S to be A is specifiable only in terms of S’s relation to P. Something can be pleasant even if there is no one to whom it gives pleasure, or even if there is no one to whom the pleasure could be given, even though what it is to be pleasant is to be such that it would give pleasure to agents of a certain sort, if there were any such agents. Second, sense dependence is essentially a matter of the conditions under which it is possible to intend something as something, while reference dependence is not. That is, if concept P is sense dependent on concept Q, this is in virtue of the fact that no agent can count as intending something as P unless she also is capable of intending something as Q. But the conditions on intending something as P or Q might be entirely irrelevant to the reference dependence of P on Q.

We can use Brandom’s distinction to explicate what is involved in Heidegger’s claim that implicit adherence to norms in tool-using and tool-sanctioning behav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Localizing the Pragmatic Turn in Phenomenology
• PART I Contemporary Pragmatic Readings of Phenomenology
• PART II Pragmatic Readings Challenged by the History of Phenomenology
• PART III Opening Up Perspectives
• Contributors
• Index