Unbounded naturalism

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Jan, 2008 by Andrew Taggart

INTRODUCTION

John McDowell's explicit aim in his seminal work Mind and World is to provide a spirited defense of common sense realism. To go about this, McDowell takes seriously Kant's famous dictum on empirical judgments, 'Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind', in hopes of calling our attention to the inseparability of our conceptual deliverances in all sensible contents. (1) But Kant's fundamental insight, McDowell thinks, is obscured by his 'transcendental story', the story of Kant's concession to the pressure coming from a disenchanted natural world to split rationality off from the sense impressions we receive. (2) It is the story, in other words, of the 'transcendental' Kant's making room for freedom on one side and external constraint on our perceptual episodes on the other while only exacerbating the skeptic's worries concerning how our empirical thinking can have any purchase on external reality when it seeks to reach over the yawning gap now opened up between mind and world. In this context, McDowell's critique of Kant and a few comments he makes throughout the text with regard to the merits of Hegel--a brief statement in the acknowledgement section of the Preface about the work being a 'prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology' (MW, p. ix) and a footnote to the effect that Hegel 'completes' the Kantian critical project (MW, p. 111)--have raised questions over whether McDowell has an accurate view of Kant's transcendental idealism, Hegel's absolute idealism, and Hegel's relation to Kantian critical philosophy.

Yet the Kant-Hegel debate surrounding the publication of McDowell's John Locke lectures has had the unfortunate consequence of seeming to be carrying on a vigorous discussion of this important work while typically having the effect of 'triangulating' McDowell--for some Hegelians, McDowell becomes an ally; for most Kantians, he becomes a foe. (3) As a result, his work has been made, more often than not, into an occasion for a renewal of this exegetical and sometime antiquarian debate rather than being an opportunity for philosophers to tease out or to call into question McDowell's central claims about perceptual experience. One of McDowell's footnoted comments in response to sally Sedgwick's defense of his purported 'Hegelianism' seems to me very telling if taken at face value: 'Let me stress ... that my book does not purport to be a work of Kant scholarship, let alone of Hegel scholarship. I acknowledge in the preface that my Kant is Strawson's, and Strawson's Kant is no doubt not the real Kant. Hegel figures in my book only as an inspiring figure, largely off-stage'. (4) Instead, McDowell has in mind 'the best approach of Kant for us'. (5) This does not mean, of course, that even if the standard by which McDowell's book should be judged is whether he offers us an accurate view of perceptual experience or not, one may not reasonably consider his book in light of its explication of important figures in the philosophical tradition. Surely not. But it does mean, by my lights, that such considerations, which do not require McDowell's book as their starting point and which use the work only as an instrumental means for a broader end, are of secondary importance and so not philosophically interesting in relation to the book's primary purpose, its attempt to open us up to empirical reality while alleviating our skeptical, residually foundationalist anxieties about whether we can be put in touch with the world. Indeed, given the trenchancy of the Rortian-Davidsonian view that we should 'leave off talking about experience and should talk about language instead' because Rorty assumes that talking about experience commits one, in the final analysis, to some naive or sophisticated version of foundational representationalism (adequatio intellectus et res), McDowell's work represents a welcome plea on behalf of our deepest intuitions. (6) If this is right, then we would do well to regard his readings of Kant, Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, and others as if they were personas--the first a sometimes friend, the second and third strategic opponents--that aid him in bringing his conception of experience more sharply into view and not, therefore, as if they were philosophical figures which he is more or less concerned with 'getting right'. (7)

To make sense of McDowell's concept of experience, I wish to set out the connection between the latter and his concept of Bildung. This strategy has the advantage of keying us into whether the relationship between our empirical judgments and McDowell's claim that we have a 'standing obligation' (MW, p. 126) to reflect on our grip on the world can be sustained once we put pressure on his slim but suggestive version of the intellectual development (Bildung) necessary for the acquisition and use of our conceptual capacities.

In what follows, I argue that McDowell's concern to make a direct realism intelligible misses the mark insofar as it privileges conceptual possession and application (the faculty of the understanding) over the conceptual adjustments, extensions, and acquisition of new concepts (the faculty of reason), all of which are important ingredients in a more robust conception of experience. Firstly, I turn to his diagnosis of the problem that both underlies and sets in motion much of modern philosophy--namely, the Weberian thesis that modern science has disenchanted the natural world. Secondly, I lay out the main features of McDowell's view of empirical thinking. Thirdly, I discuss how Bildung acculturates us into the particular conceptual framework that we happen to have (what McDowell calls, after Aristotle, 'second nature') and, in so doing, leaves us with little room for critically reflecting on our takes on the world. Finally, I provide a revisionary account of McDowell's Mind and World along roughly Hegelian lines; specifically, I seek to establish that the disunity between mind and world bodying forth in modernity makes of philosophy a dialectical enterprise as much by virtue as by necessity.