Dreyfus' article in APA proceedings
if you haven't yet had the chance to take a look at hubert dreyfus' presidential address in the latest apa proceedings, i'd encourage you to do so. it's a very interesting little piece on reconciliations in analytic and continental philosophy, largely by way of merleau-ponty. he deals there with the issue of "embodied coping" in the world, and particularly "master"-level coping.
in doing so, he actually has recourse to a text that some of us know from walter's "phenomgonlogy and the greek" (sic) class: heidegger's lecture course on plato's sophist, and the discussion of phronesis and the phronimos there. dreyfus' argument is that this coping is not conceptual in character, in fact not even unconsciously so. i.e. the master chess player doesn't act according to conceptual rules that have been made unconscious, or even really any rules at all -- instead, she has recourse to, as aristotle puts it in nic. ethics vi, a kind of perceptual nous, an intuitive grasping of the concrete situation we're in. so when the master tries to describe what made her act as she did, she can only reconstruct retroactively a kind of general account, not actually a set of formal rules.
anyway, he actually cites a couple of interesting empirical studies on this front, as well. his claim is that while analytics have (largely) been working on the "upper floors" of conceptuality (he has a nice version of merleau-ponty's critique of intellectualism that he calls the "Myth of the Mental," which he says preys like a vulture on the carcass of the "Myth of the Given,"), phenomenologists have (again, largely) been working on the lower floors of working out a notion of embodied coping. Both, he argues, would benefit from working out more clearly how the upper floors of conceptuality develop out of the lower floors, however.
i'd be curious to hear what some of you think about the article. i do tend to think that one thing he's missing is a more nuanced view of how language factors in to this embodied coping -- he seems to me to be treating this coping as not only a non-conceptual, but even a non-linguistic kind of thing. i think it would also be interesting to bring kant's account of the genius in the Critique of Judgment to bear on this account.
in doing so, he actually has recourse to a text that some of us know from walter's "phenomgonlogy and the greek" (sic) class: heidegger's lecture course on plato's sophist, and the discussion of phronesis and the phronimos there. dreyfus' argument is that this coping is not conceptual in character, in fact not even unconsciously so. i.e. the master chess player doesn't act according to conceptual rules that have been made unconscious, or even really any rules at all -- instead, she has recourse to, as aristotle puts it in nic. ethics vi, a kind of perceptual nous, an intuitive grasping of the concrete situation we're in. so when the master tries to describe what made her act as she did, she can only reconstruct retroactively a kind of general account, not actually a set of formal rules.
anyway, he actually cites a couple of interesting empirical studies on this front, as well. his claim is that while analytics have (largely) been working on the "upper floors" of conceptuality (he has a nice version of merleau-ponty's critique of intellectualism that he calls the "Myth of the Mental," which he says preys like a vulture on the carcass of the "Myth of the Given,"), phenomenologists have (again, largely) been working on the lower floors of working out a notion of embodied coping. Both, he argues, would benefit from working out more clearly how the upper floors of conceptuality develop out of the lower floors, however.
i'd be curious to hear what some of you think about the article. i do tend to think that one thing he's missing is a more nuanced view of how language factors in to this embodied coping -- he seems to me to be treating this coping as not only a non-conceptual, but even a non-linguistic kind of thing. i think it would also be interesting to bring kant's account of the genius in the Critique of Judgment to bear on this account.
Posted by John Whitmire on
Wednesday November 23, 2005 at 9:33am
I'll definitely have to check this out. One quick question about the address: is Dreyfus pushing (as I imagine he might), the claim that Heidegger privileges phronesis over sophia in the Sophist lectures? This claim is often made (I think it's often simply assumed that Heidegger would say that) --- but I think that the text actually bears out a re-affirmation of Aristotle's privileging of sophia, much to (even) Heidegger's puzzlement. . .
All this a long way of pushing the line that I wanted to push earlier in my exchange with Joe that analytics and continentals getting together by agreeing to jettison practical philosophy is about as desirable as Democrats and Republicans finding common ground in their mutual hatred of gay and abortion rights. . .
Am also curious about what you mean vis-a-vis genius in Critique of Judgment and language.
I will say, first off, that this is generally good work, and one has a lot to learn from it. Also, it is at the forefront of a kind of reconciliation between analytic and continental traditions that I think is a good thing. Nonetheless, I think there is something crucially(though subtly) wrong about Dreyfus's views, both as readings of Merleau-Ponty, and as general philosophical points.
First, I cannot make this point fully here (but I am in the midst of attempting to do so in two essays I am working on--one on holism and normativity in MP and one comparing MP and John McDowell), but I think Dreyfus and his ilk way overstate the case when marshalling MP against what they call "cognitivism." Basically, MP is, in my view, closer to rationalism than they think (I am trying to argue, for instance, that MP would be in favor of the spirit-though not the letter-of McDowell's main claims in Mind and World).
More later...
That is clearly a part of it, but they largely read out MP's discussions of "meaning" and the role that what we might call "cultural" content plays in our dealings with the world. So, for example, Dreyfus makes it sound like the "intentional arc" is, for MP, merely a way of talking about how the body "comes to grips" with the world, while it also includes things like sexuality, economics, etc.
This might sound a bit cryptic without further explanation, but I think they miss the fact much of MP's discussion should be taken as a discussion of a "semantic theory" rather than a theory of "perception" or even "action" if the latter two are two narrowly construed.
You have tapped a bit of a nerve with this post, and if left unchecked I could probably prattle on semi coherently for ages...
without having read the stuff you're talking about, it sounds as if this little address might represent an advance on the position you're criticizing, but i'll wait to see what you think about it. i think, though, that this is probably the case based on the way he deals with heidegger's interpretation of aristotle's notion of phronesis, which is clearly not just about the way the body gets around in the world, but rather about the way i, as a lived body, make my way around a world constituted linguistically, etc. as meaningful. (this is why i think it's strange he doesn't do more with language.) and although dreyfus doesn't mention this fact here, remember that heidegger's early lectures show that he was precisely translating "phronesis" as "Verstehen" or understanding. (dreyfus does dwell briefly on heidegger's notion of "Verstehen," though, which indicates to me that he clearly wants to make the intentional arc meaningful, though to what extent he would make it as ambiguously meaningful as m-p isn't clear based on this address.)
i have to say, though, dreyfus seems to be trying to address primarily the kind of response i got from julian young in auckland, when i tried to explain m-p's notion of a bodily intentionality. his response was, from what dreyfus argues, typical of what you would expect from a more analytically-oriented philosopher. that is: you follow conceptual rules until they become habitual or unconscious (top-down, intellectualist). so either driving a car, playing a piano, shaving, etc. are conscious, meaningful, rule-following activities, or they are meaningless, habitual activities. i could not convince him that there could be a kind of bodily intentionality that is meaningful, but not conceptual in the strict sense. (dreyfus has a cute metaphor about analytic types thinking that meaningfulness is concept-laden all the way down, like a building that is upper floors all the way down.)
it may be, then, that the best virtue of dreyfus' paper is in opening up more analytic types to this quasi-deconstruction (though of course he wouldn't call it that) of that opposition, which would at least allow for a more fruitful dialogue.
now, to ammon's question, dreyfus himself is just using heidegger, so he doesn't come down on that issue at all. but dreyfus clearly means to say that phronesis is a more primordial kind of (non-conceptual) "knowing" or, to use a bit of heideggerese, revealing the world in a meaningful way (in the sense of heidegger's interpretation of aristotle's aletheuein or "truth-ing" as an un-concealing).
and what i meant about the 3rd critique's "genius" is that the genius operates in an analogous sort of way, without techn(e)ical (conceptual) rules that could (he says here, "ever," doesn't he?) be precisely reconstructed, and the best a follower or mannerist can do is to try to copy the reconstructed, more general sorts of rules the teacher offers. but that's not the way the master herself works, and you're not going to become a master until you're able to throw away those rules and simply see/understand (the analogue to perceptual nous) how you're going to get a david out of this particular block of marble...
finally, ammon asked me in a conversation today about what kind of import this might have for more philosphical activity. i said that i didn't know for sure what dreyfus might say here, but you might make a kind of argument analogous to the chess one, that sometimes we have an intuition about an argument not being quite right, that we can later reconstructively work out the reasons for, but is perhaps not, in the first instance purely conceptual. but that would be pushing this argument more towards nietzsche than i think would be necessary.
First, the comment: I think it is funny that when Dreyfus calls people to put aside the C/A split, what he is really doing is calling people to think what he thinks, as if one could not combine C and A in a way that differs completely from his work.
Now, the criticism: I think Dreyfus probably commits a performative contradiction in the essay. As he notes, McDowell’s view does not require that all human action be instances of explicit, or even unconscious, rule-following. Rather, as Dreyfus states, “his [McDowell’s] view is much more subtle and plausible, namely, that, thanks to socialization, experts [like chess masters, the example Dreyfus is using] conform to reasons that can be retroactively reconstructed.” Dreyfus then goes on to give a phenomenological description that he thinks shows that the activity of the master or expert cannot even be retroactively reconstructed. I wonder, though— why is this phenomenology not a form of rational reconstruction? After all, Dreyfus makes explicit certain aspects of the master chess player’s activity. Consider the following passage:
“But all we have a right to conclude from our phenomenology of expertise is that there must be some detectable invariant features in what J. J. Gibson calls the ambient optic array and that human beings and animals can learn to respond to them…the speed of lightning chess suggests rather that the master isn’t following rules at all. She is able to directly discriminate perhaps hundreds of thousands of types of whole positions…these would have to be very high order invariants in the optic array detected by high level hidden nodes in our neural net, we, in principle, have no access to them except to see that a certain position solicits a certain move.”
What Dreyfus can be taken to have shown here is that the master, when in the middle of acting, does not, and cannot, cognitively represent rules of action, or represent all of the possible positions that could come into play. To this, one might rightly say, “so what?” As Dreyfus himself already said, McDowell (and any other neo-Hegelian of his ilk, like Brandom), never thought that the actor did so. Furthermore, Dreyfus does seem to have retroactively reconstructed the master’s activity—it is not like he is saying of the master’s actions that “shit just happens.” Rather, he gives a descriptions that makes sense of the act and places it within the space of reasons.
But one might balk, at this point, that I am obscuring the issue; sure Dreyfus is reconstructing much of the master’s activity, but what this reconstruction points out is that there is some content of experience that cannot be reconstructed. Thus the talk of “high order invariants in the optic array detected by high level hidden nodes in our neural net [that] we, in principle, have no access to.” But all Dreyfus can conclude from this is that the actor, at the time of acting, has no cognitive access to them (and again, this is something that few people pertinent to this discussion ever thought anyway). Obviously the reconstructive phenomenologist has some kind of access to them, or else he would not be able to talk about them.