Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World

The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate

Joseph K. Schear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135124694
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

John McDowell and Hubert L. Dreyfus are philosophers of world renown, whose work has decisively shaped the fields of analytic philosophy and phenomenology respectively. Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate opens with their debate over one of the most important and controversial subjects of philosophy: is human experience pervaded by conceptual rationality, or does experience mark the limits of reason? Is all intelligibility rational, or is there a form of intelligibility at work in our skilful bodily rapport with the world that eludes our intellectual capacities? McDowell and Dreyfus provide a fascinating insight into some fundamental differences between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, as well as areas where they may have something in common.

Fifteen specially commissioned chapters by distinguished international contributors enrich the debate inaugurated by McDowell and Dreyfus, taking it in a number of different and important directions. Fundamental philosophical problems discussed include: the embodied mind, subjectivity and self-consciousness, intentionality, rationality, practical skills, human agency, and the history of philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty. With the addition of these outstanding contributions, Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World is essential reading for students and scholars of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.

Part I

A BATTLE OF MYTHS

1

THE MYTH OF THE PERVASIVENESS OF THE MENTAL

Hubert L. Dreyfus

John McDowell’s general conceptualist thesis

In Mind and World John McDowell sounds like he is channeling Heidegger when he speaks of “our unproblematic openness to the world”¹ and how “we find ourselves always already engaged with the world.”² His view is also seemingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s when he notes that: “[a]n experiencing and acting subject is … herself embodied …”³ Moreover, like these existential phenomenologists, McDowell makes the bold claim that “this is a framework for reflection that really stands a chance of making traditional philosophy obsolete.”⁴

But, unlike the existential phenomenologists, McDowell speaks of this embodied engagement in the world as pervaded by conceptuality. And he goes on to argue in a Kantian vein that perception and action must be conceptual – in effect, that intuitions require concepts so as not to be blind and that conceptual capacities must be operative in a bodily movement for it to count as an action. As he puts it, according to Kant:

[E]xperiences are actualizations of our sentient nature in which conceptual capacities are inextricably implicated. The parallel is this: intentional bodily capacities are actualizations of our active nature in which conceptual capacities are inextricably implicated.⁵

McDowell’s thesis here is what I’ve called the Myth of the Mental. The Myth is not the claim that conceptual activity is required for some types of perceiving and acting. That claim is obviously true. Our practices open a world in which, among other things, perceptions can serve to justify judgments about an independent reality and actions can be judged as to whether they correspond to the requirements of the current situation. But McDowell holds that for such a normative relation of mind and world to be possible perception and action must be pervaded by conceptuality.

He comments:

Dreyfus dismisses the thesis that mind is pervasive in a distinctively human life as a myth, on the ground that the thesis cannot be combined with a proper phenomenology of embodied coping skills and proper placement of embodied coping skills in an account of our orientation towards the world. But I have been arguing that this is wrong. Acknowledging the pervasiveness of mind in a distinctively human life is consistent with appreciating those phenomenological insights.⁶

McDowell notes that “[t]he world is embraceable in thought” and goes on to claim that “that constitutes a background without which the special way in which experience takes hold of the world would not be intelligible.”⁷ But it isn’t obvious that there is only one way experience takes hold of the world so that all forms of human experience must be embraceable in thought.

Existential phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty point out that access to an independent thinkable world requires as its background a familiar graspable world that, so long as we are absorbed in it, is operative as a field of forces, but which vanishes when we try to think it.

In contrast, McDowell concludes:

To avoid making it unintelligible how the deliverances of sensibility can stand in grounding relations to paradigmatic exercises of the understanding such as judgments and beliefs … we must insist that the understanding is already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves.⁸

To understand empirical content in general, we need to see it in its dynamic place in a self-critical activity, the activity by which we aim to comprehend the world as it impinges on our senses.⁹

McDowell adds:

I use the word “transcendental,” in what I hope is sufficiently close to a Kantian way, to characterize this sort of concern with the very possibility of thought’s being directed at the objective world.¹⁰

The Myth of the Mental is just this transcendental claim that, in order for the mind to relate to the world at all, every way we relate to the world must be pervaded by self-critical conceptuality.

The nonconceptual world of absorbed coping

Merleau-Ponty describes a perspicuous example of the world of total absorption – a world pervaded not by critical conceptuality but by lines of force:

For the player in action the soccer field is not an “object.” It is pervaded by lines of force … and is articulated into sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries), which call for a certain mode of action. The field itself is not given; … the player becomes one with it (fait corps avec lui). … At this moment consciousness is nothing but the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by [i.e. called forth from] the player modifies the character of the field and establishes new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field.¹¹

Note that the field of forces is not given to the soccer player. He has no distance from it. Rather he becomes one with it, “fait corps avec lui.”

Merleau-Ponty’s description of the soccer player’s unmediated relation to the soccer “field” may seem an extreme case. Heidegger, however, describes our everyday activity as a similar sort of absorption in a familiar field of relevant affordances¹² directly soliciting our responses. He says:

[W]hat is first of all “given” is the “for writing,” the “for going in and out,” … “for sitting.” That is, writing, going-in-and-out, sitting, and the like are that wherein we a priori move. What we know when we “know our way around.”¹³

McDowell, like the existential phenomenologists, avoids the Cartesian Myth of the Given as an indubitable foundation for knowledge, but he still accepts the Cartesian separation between the world and the perceivers and agents to whom the world is given. He claims that human agents are “embodied” and “involved,” indeed, even “immersed” in the world, but, for McDowell, as minds we are always nonetheless distanced in the sense that we are never merged with the world. We always stand over against it bringing our subjective perspective to bear on an independent objective reality. As McDowell puts it: “[A] concept [is] what ensures that thoughts … have the necessary distance from what would determine them to be true.”¹⁴ For there to be knowledge, the propositional structures in the mind must correspond to the propositionally structured facts in the world. According to McDowell, all forms of involvement manifest this mind/world distance, and so must be mediated by conceptuality.

Existential phenomenologists contend, on the contrary, that the world we are drawn into when we are absorbed in coping does not stand over against us as a set of facts that can be captured in propositions but rather is directly lived by the absorbed coper as a shifting field of attractions and repulsions. Being drawn and responding to the draw are interdefined in one unitary phenomenon. In Heidegger’s terms, “Dasein [human being] … is nothing but … concerned absorption in the world.”¹⁵ Heidegger’s talk of “that wherein we a priori move” points to this always already “operative” absorption.

Heidegger calls the mode of awareness in which absorbed coping takes account of things without our apprehending them in thought, “circumspection.”¹⁶ He describes coming into the classroom as an example of this everyday “unthought” in which our skilled dispositions mesh with the field of familiar affordances:

The view in which the equipmental contexture stands at first, completely unobtrusive and unthought, is the view … of our practical everyday orientation. “Unthought” means that it is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things; instead, in circumspection, we find our bearings in regard to them. … When we enter here through the door, we do not apprehend the seats, and the same holds for the doorknob.¹⁷

To be true to the phenomenon we should add that when we are ready to leave a familiar room we not only do not need to think that the door affords going out. We need not even respond to the door as affording going out. Indeed, we needn’t apprehend the door at all. From the perspective of the skilled coper absorbed in the solicitation of a familiar affordance, the affording object, as Heidegger puts it, “withdraws.”¹⁸ We need not even be aware of the solicitations to go out as solicitations. Thanks to our background familiarity, when it is appropriate to leave, we are simply drawn to go out. In general, the absorbed coper is directly drawn by each solicitation in an appropriate way: the chairs draw him to sit on them, the floorboards to walk on them, the walls may draw him to hang pictures on them, the windows to open them, and the door may draw him to go out.

It might seem an argument for the pervasiveness of conceptuality that we often have to use concepts to find our way about in an unfamiliar situation. But, as in an unfamiliar city, we have to start to find our way by using concepts, but our situation gradually comes to make sense to us in a non-conceptual way as we learn our way around in it. Once our situation becomes familiar our skilled dispositions respond directly to the solicitations of the relevant affordances. Indeed, once a skill is acquired, concepts used in learning the skill need play no further role. It is not even necessary that to learn a practice one needs to have been aware of the relevant concepts. Our ability to act normally is usually picked up by imitating authorities without concepts playing any conscious role.

One could, of course, introduce a still weaker understanding of conceptuality to justify the claim that concepts are pervasive. One could hold that any sort of absorbed coping, no matter how learned, would count as conceptual as long as it had become second nature; that is, as long as it was a natural propensity that has been taken over and shaped by a culture. That is, one could call everyday background coping practices conceptual even if no conceptual awareness were involved in acquiring and practicing them. In any case, since such practices normally are unthought, even if we choose to declare our trained normative background practices conceptual, they clearly cannot play the role concepts normally play in grounding judgments and beliefs, i.e. in “adjusting thinking to experience.”¹⁹

It seems that, when a transcendental requirement runs up against phenomenological counterexamples, saving the pervasiveness claim requires weakening that claim until what remains of it need have nothing to do with the job – in this case justifying judgments – for which it was allegedly required.

But, although conceptuality is not pervasive, in that it does not characterize everyday absorbed background coping, there is, according to Heidegger, still a place for the conceptual. In Being and Time Heidegger describes a case of hammering where the hammer does not withdraw, but where the hammer shows up as too heavy. Heidegger’s focus on what he calls the unready-to-hand brings his account of action into proximity to McDowell’s. In the face of a disturbance, a distance opens up between the coper and what he is acting on which is bridged by a situation-specific concept. The coper can make the judgment that the hammer is too heavy.

Thus, like McDowell, Heidegger is interested in what makes the relation of mind and world possible. But he primarily wants to describe what makes the concepts necessary for relating mind and world themselves possible. To bring out how our nonconceptual background understanding is the basis of concepts, Heidegger describes the badly placed chalkboard he is writing on as he lectures.²⁰

To begin with, like McDowell, Heidegger notes, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I A battle of myths
• Part II From Kant to existential phenomenology
• Part III Intellectualism and understanding
• Part IV Experience, concepts, and nonconceptual content
• Part V Bodily skills, rationality, and self-consciousness
• Index