Pried from Hegel's Cold, Dead Cake

Thom Brooks points out that today is Hegel's birthday (he is now 238, and still dead). He also links to a YouTube video about Hegel, narrated by Charleton Heston. Which is pretty darned amusing by itself.

Brooks does not mention that the video he links is part one of twenty-two. There's over two hours of Judah Ben Hur talking about German Idealism.

Right now, I am on part 6/22. It is not terrible, or at least not as bad as you might expect from "Charleton Heston Presents: Hegel". So far, he has at least avoided most of the common sorts of errors I expect to encounter in this sort of thing. It's certainly the best 22-part audio introduction to Hegel I've encountered.

Oh, hey, part 6 is "The end of side one." I am supposed to turn over my cassette now.

Dreyfus, Heidegger, McDowell, and Action

Dreyfus has written about McDowell again, this time explicitly focusing on McDowell's account of action. (Edit: HT: Enowning.) It's generally more of the same, though the specific ways in which Dreyfus modifies his errors to take account of McDowell's response to his last critical piece might be of interest to some. He now "gets" that McDowell doesn't link conceptuality with "generality" in the sense Dreyfus assumed in his earlier articles, but he still links "propositional structure" and "objective facts" to what could be grasped by "detached observers", and he's able to throw out phrases like "timeless, descriptive, propositional account" -- as if the three were synonyms. So, same song, different tune.

Dreyfus is still as pleasant to read as ever, thankfully, and he does bring up interesting ways that McDowell might be misunderstood. His criticism of McDowell's appeal to demonstratives ("this moment", "this shade", "this situation") reminds me of Heidegger's critcism of Hegel's conception of time at the end of "Being & Time" -- though I think it's worth noting that Heidegger credits Hegel with linking "time" and "spirit", and merely complains that he didn't get their communion right. (Heidegger's criticisms seem to me entirely justified, incidentally. Hegel's account of time is just too quick, for just the reasons Heidegger gives. His long footnote about Hegel & Aristotle was also quite enlightening. Contrariwise, Dreyfus's criticisms of McDowell seem to me misplaced, for McDowell does not have a narrow notion of what relationship "this moment" can stand in to other times & happenings & events.)*

This bit from a footnote struck me as particularly egregious:

To say that the world solicits a certain activity is to say that the agent feels immediately drawn to act a certain way. This is different from deciding to perform the activity, since in feeling immediately drawn to do something one experiences no act of will. Rather, one experiences the environment calling for a certain way of acting, and finds one’s body responding to the call. There is no experience of an object and so no object to bring under a concept. There is also no “I”. Involved in the flow, one’s body is just drawn to do what needs to be done.

Here Dreyfus appears to me to make a number of errors.

The one that leaps out at me most is the notion that in (e.g) expert action one "finds one's body responding", rather than responding oneself (it can't be oneself that responds, since there is no "I" and therefore no one performing the action). I can "find my body responding" by spasming when a nerve is pinched by pants that are too tight, or find my leg swinging up when my knee is struck; but when things go normally, I do not "find my body" at all. I simply act, without any opposition between "me" and "my body" (or "my body" and "my mind" or my "soul" or "spirit" or "I"). "My body" exists for me only when I abstract in reflection because of some particular problem with my body which makes its being an issue for me. And the same for the things which are supposed to be opposed to "body" (mind, soul, "I") -- they exist by themselves only as abstractions. (I take this to be a Heideggerian point. SuZ 117: "The "substance" of human being is not the spirit as the synthesis of body and soul, but existence." "Body" is as much to blame for phenomenological errors as "soul" (and other more clearly "Cartesian" or "dualist" terms). I know I have seen this point made explicitly (perhaps in Macquarrie's introduction?), and I thought it was in SuZ itself, but I'm not finding it.)(Incidentally, I find it amusing that Heidegger remarks that "coporeality" is not something he is going to discuss in SuZ 108 -- indeed, the term is barely in the book at all. This is not what you'd expect if you approached Heidegger solely by way of Dreyfus.)

Dreyfus appears to slip up here: "one experiences the environment calling for..." -- surely this is irrelevant to what I find "one's body" to be doing. If one experiences an object, then one (one's body?) is not coping absorbedly, and one cannot experience any environment without experiencing any of the objects in it. Hence in truly absorbed coping, Dreyfus should say that not one, but a body responds to a call that is not experienced, but merely felt by that body. (I suspect that Dreyfus's account of "motor intentionality" could be modified to remove this vestige of intentional language, "feels". Surely Dreyfus wants to say that a "motor-intentional" being is put into a state of disequilibrium by the causal impetus of some facet of its environment, and its "motor-intentional" system moves itself in such a way that it will be returned to equilibrium -- thus is everyday action explained without any need for "intellectualizing" notions like "action". Hence removing the phenomenology from Dreyfus is the proper way to develop his phenomenology.)

Incidentally, I ran across a Heidegger passage I liked while looking up index entries for "body" in SuZ, 47/48:

The person is not a thing, not a substance, not an object. Here Scheler emphasizes the same thing which Husserl is getting at when he requires for the unity of the person a constitution essentially different from that of things of nature. What Scheler says of the person, he applies to acts as well. "An act is never also an object, for it is the nature of the being of acts only to be experienced in the process itself and given in reflection." Acts are nonpsychical. Essentially the person exists only in carrying out intentional acts, and is thus essentially not an object. Every psychical objectification, and thus every comprehension of acts as something psychical, is identical with depersonalization. In any case, the person is given as the agent of intentional acts which are connected by the unity of a meaning. [I especially liked this sentence.] Thus psychical being has nothing to do with being a person. Acts are carried out, the person carries them out. But what is the ontological meaning of "carrying out," how is the kind of being of the person to be defined in an ontologically positive way? But the critical question cannot stop at this. The question is about the being of the whole human being, whom one is accustomed to understand as a bodily-soul-like-spiritual unity. Body, soul, spirit might designate areas of phenomena which are thematically seperable for the sake of determinate investigations; within certain limits their ontological indeterminacy might not be so important.

He then goes on to complain about a variety of dualistic conceptions of personhood (I laughed at his gloss of the "rational animal" as an animal life with "a higher endowment whose kind of being remains just as obscure as that of the being so pieced together").

And another short one: "Neither may Dasein's spatiality be interpreted as an imperfection which adheres to existence by reason of the fatal "linkage of the spirit to a body." On the contrary, because Dasein is "spiritual", and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal Thing." (SuZ 368) Only a "spiritual" being can see things as far away, nearby, too close, too far, in the area, "a stone's throw away", etc.

* Actually, looking at Dreyfus again, his criticism of McDowell's use of demonstratives is not similar to Heidegger's criticism of Hegel's "now" at all. But I wanted an excuse to mention that that part of Heidegger is especially good, so this paragraph is staying as is, and the truth is being hidden in a footnote. Dreyfus thinks that referring to "this situation just now" would be "an empty gesture". Surely it would, for a "detached observer", just like all the other descriptions he's considered. But why should it not be sufficient for the chessmaster? He saw that the situation on the board was that way at that moment, and made the right move without hesitation, manifesting his chessplaying virtue. Seeing the same board wasn't sufficient for the detached observer, but that's because the detached oberver can't play chess (if he could, he would not be detached).

some links to things

Graham Priest's "The Closing of the Mind: How the Particular Quantifier became Existentially Loaded Behind Our Backs" is entirely dedicated to the history of logic, which is where Priest is the most fun to read. I have no idea how long the issue it's printed in will remain free online; I'd expect indefinitely, but one can never tell with this sort of thing.

On the topic of being free online, someone has scanned in the Cerf & Harris translation of Hegel's "Faith and Knowledge", which is convenient since the book is a bit hard to come by -- it's long been out of print, and Amazon only has two used copies, the cheapest of which is $89. They appear to have not scanned in Harris's lengthy introduction; it's worth hunting down a paper copy just to read that. (Cerf's introduction is fine, but less remarkable because not fifty pages long.) [Link to download is dead; e-mail me if you care about the book.]

On a possibly unrelated note, I've read the first three chapters of Paul Redding's "Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought", and it's excellent so far. The later chapters promise to expand on some cryptic remarks about Hegel's logic as a combination of Aristotelian term logic and Kantian propositional (judgement-centered) logic, with an eye to explaining Hegel's notorious claim that "All things are contradictory". It will certainly be interesting to see how/if Redding cashes out his promissory notes.

A non sequitur: For some reason I had something called "The Revolutionary... 'IF'" in my bookmarks. I don't know when or how I came across it; I vaguely remember being amused by it very late one night as an undergrad. Some of the linked papers are certainly not without interest, and Dudman is pleasant to read. I recall a Language Log post from not-too-long-back mentioning that English does not have a "future tense", but rather uses a variety of idioms to refer to future events & states. It was interesting to see someone making that point do philosophical work. (In addition to making grammar do work for us in other areas -- I'm not sure what I think of "Antecedents and Consequents", but it was certainly a stimulating read.)

Oh hey, a bit of synchronicity: A footnote in Dudman's "On a Point of Logic" notes that the article grew out of correspondence with Isaac Levi. I still have no idea why I had been to "The Revolutionary... 'IF'" before, but it is neat that Isaac Levi seems relevant to the neat things there.

A note of McDowell Trivia

I have been listening to Conant's "Varieties of Skepticism" lectures lately. In his second lecture on Putnam's "Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses" (which was published as the first part of "The Threefold Cord"), he notes that McDowell often works up material for lecturing ("because he needs a lecture") that he only agrees to publish some years later. Conant's example is McDowell's piece from "the Davidson Fechtschrift", which he says was written about twelve years earlier, and was "the seed out of which Mind and World grew". Presumably, this is "Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism", from the "Library of Living Philosophers" volume on Davidson, which was published in 1999.

I found it interesting to learn that SCD&E was earlier than M&W, at least.

(Incidentally, there's a used copy of the Fechtschrift on Amazon for $72; that's a good hundred bucks less than the last one I saw on there, and for a long time there'd been none at all. Though the book is not too hard to find, if you don't mind not getting it on paper. I don't know why the book hasn't had a paperback reprinting yet; I guess it did not sell as well as the Hintikka volume.)

PS: There is stuff to read in the comments of my most recent McDowell posts, for those who are not sick of "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" already.

edit: It would probably make sense to say a little something about the Conant lectures, since I'm halfway through them now. So: The class-lectures suffer from being class-lectures; if you listen to them back-to-back-to-back there is a lot of repetition of material, and some of the student questions are... not so great. Most of the stuff about "Kantian" and "Cartesian" skeptical problems is more straightforwardly presented in "John McDowell's Kant". There is some interesting discussion of C.I. Lewis's continuing relevance in the earlier lectures, but it's not really fleshed out much -- though it does make me want to read "Mind and the World Order" some more.

The "Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses" lectures are good, though; it's no surprise that Conant has interesting things to say about Putnam. Hopefully the early lectures were just throat-clearing, and the second half will be as good as the Putnam lectures were.

In Which a Problem remains for McDowell, but I satisfy Myself that McDowell's older Position can Avoid the Difficulty

Looking at my blog now, there is way too much text. My last two McDowell posts are pretty much just two dense walls of obscure prose. To try to improve matters, I'm sticking this post behind an animated gif of Yuyuko eating rice. It's a follow-up post for my follow-up post on my earlier post on "Avoiding The Myth of the Given". Yuyuko is a video game character, and the rice is from Hidamari Sketch. Hitting the "Escape" key will stop gifs from looping in Firefox. (It's actually the same as hitting "Stop"; it's just that Firefox defaults to graying out the stop icon on pages that are fully loaded.)



Oh, and incidentally, "The Dark Knight" is still fantastic on a second viewing, and on a third. It's also worth seeing in IMAX if you can manage it; the city-shots are gorgeous.

In my last McDowell post, I encountered a dilemma: Even if one does not follow McDowell in limiting the conceptual capacities which can be involved in the content of an intuition to "common and proper sensibles", but allows that any conceptual capacities a thinker has might be involved in the content of an intuition given to that thinker, there seemed to be a problem about noninferential judgements based on recollected intuitional content. "I might see a pink ice cube on Tuesday, learn to recognize what ice cubes look like on Wednesday, and then, on Thursday, noninferentially gain knowledge that the thing I saw on Tuesday was made of ice (because I remember what it looked like, and I now have the ability to recognize cubes made of ice as being made of ice when I see them)."

I think that my problem was that I was working with a false picture of how "intuitional content" can be "recollected". Memory is not like a strip of film; remembering how something looked is not a matter of re-inspecting an image which was gained when the object was initially seen. Memory has more of a constructive element to it than that sort of picture allows. When I recollect something, I do not simply "re-present" how things were given to me; I re-construct them. Remembering how something looked involves the imagination. (This is why "false memories" can be such a problem -- the imagination cannot simply be excluded from the faculty of memory, so having accurate memories is a matter of having a disciplined imagination, and not simply "not imagining things".)

(It is worth noting that the sort of memory I am concerned with here is only one way in which we use memory-talk. If I remember my PIN number, this is just to say that I know what my PIN number is. I do not have to imagine the numbers to remember my PIN number; here, "remembering" is just knowing at various moments in a stretch of time. And the same holds for determinate (propositional) bits of memory, such as "I remember that the Washington Monument is white." This analysis won't do as a way of describing what it is to remember how something looked, in the sense that concerns me; that sort of memory is not just knowledge mentioned idiomatically. For if I remember how the cube looked, then this memory can provide a noninferential grounding for my judgement that the cube was made of ice. But if remembering how the cube looked was just a matter of knowing various things about the cube, then the grounding it provided would have to be an inferential one. But the knowledge that the cube was made of ice is not gained through inference: I simply am able to recognize ice cubes as being made of ice when I have them in clear view. It is not that I am able to gain knowledge of a thing's being made of ice when I have certain other bits of knowledge about it, such as might be made explicit as premises in an argument whose conclusion is that the thing is made of ice. If pressed for why I think the cube was made of ice, I might only be able to say that it looked like it was made of ice. But looks-talk can't provide inferential grounds for is-talk, as Sellars showed. This is all by way of preliminary throat-clearing.)

So, on the picture I was puzzled by, the dilemma was that the content of an intuition given to me can't involve the activity of conceptual capacities which I don't possess, and yet it seemed that this same intuition's content had to involve concepts which I gained later. For I might be unable to recognize things as made of ice when I have an ice cube in view, yet my having had a clear view of the ice cube might allow me to know that it was made of ice when I "look back on it" later, once I have gained the capacity to recognize things as made of ice. I think my problem was that I thought that memory must involve the re-presentation of the same intuitions which were my original having-in-view of the ice cube, such that limits on my conceptual capacities at the time of the original viewing would limit what concepts could be in play in the content of the recollection of the cube. But if the image which I call to mind when I remember what the cube looked like is a product of my imagination, then whatever conceptual capacities I have presently might be drawn upon in the construction of the image presented to me in recollection. (I'm worried about tripping up on my language here, since recalling how something looked has to be something I do, and not merely something that happens to me (as is the case with vision), yet I still want to draw on McDowell's language of conceptual capacities being passively drawn on in the content of what is "seen" (here, metaphorically, in a "mental image", rather than an actual one). My conceptual capacities are passively drawn on in my active attempt to recall how something looked, as opposed to being actively drawn on in an active attempt to produce an image (which is what is generally called "imagining something").)

Now, I can easily see a worry here: If the first time a conceptual capacity is drawn on is in imagining how things are (as an element of attempting to remember how things are), then why should the result be capable of providing a justification for a judgement as to how things are? For the product of the imagination might seem a mere subjective fancy. I think that there is a valid worry in this: trying to gain noninferential knowledge from how I recollect things to have been is not as reliable as trying to gain noninferential knowledge from how things appear to me in experience. In memory, it is more common to dream things up that never happened than it is in waking life.

But, this sort of being mislead by a faulty memory is intelligibly erring. For the problem is that what I took to be part of the content of what I had seen was not actually part of the way things were. That which was supposed to justify my noninferential judgement turned out to not be adequate for the task demanded of it. But this shows that adding the imagination to the picture is sufficient to dissolve the dilemma I faced earlier: If I can be misled by the contributions of my imagination, then I can also be lead to licit conclusions by them, as with my ice cube example. They are the sort of thing that is a candidate for being a reason for judging that things are thus-and-such. Having bad reasons for a belief is not simply having exculpatory excuses for having the belief; it is a case of reasoning badly rather than appealing to something outside of the space of reasons.

And so I am able to again hold the opinion that if one does not limit the conceptual capacities which can be involved in experience, as McDowell didn't used to, then one can avoid a problem which McDowell's most recent position has to face.

"The Dark Knight" is awesome

I saw it at midnight last night. I'm considering going to see it again tomorrow (tickets are cheap before noon on weekends, here, otherwise I'd be considering seeing it again tonight). There was pretty much no moment in the movie at which I was not totally enjoying myself.

All of the praise you've heard for Heath Ledger as the Joker is totally justified. Absolutely phenomenal performance.

About the only criticism that comes to mind is that the movie is too exciting; I found myself exhausted at the end of it. Take a powerbar or something to prevent fatigue, I guess; I had to down a soda due to lightheadedness after the fourth or fifth Totally Awesome Event.

Go see it!

A More Serious Problem for McDowell

On McDowell's new view, any particular bit of intuitional content can be brought to consciousness -- can be recognized, made explicit, articulated -- by merely the addition of the "I think" -- so to speak, by willing it into consciousness.

This would not be the case if intuitional content were rich enough to include whatever a recognitive capacity might allow one to gain knowledge of via a particular experience, as I had suggested in my previous post. For then the articulation of the content of an intuition might require the exercise of recognitional capacities which were not already in play in having an intuition with a particular content (since intuitions with the same content can be had by thinkers with different recognitive capacities).

I suspect that McDowell holds that the concepts of "common and proper sensibles" are in some sense necessary for one to be able to have experiences at all. In the first appendix to Mind and World McDowell suggests that "interesting" analytic judgements can be maintained through reference to "necessary" aspects of any possible view of the world (he apparently takes this view over from Jonathan Lear). So there's reason to think McDowell finds this sort of talk plausible (whereas I do not). If he does think that the concepts of "common and proper sensibles" are a priori (in the sense of being necessarily had by any thinker, by anyone with a "view of the world"), then the exercise of such conceptual capacities as would be needed to articulate an intuitional content can plausibly be said to not involve any special recognitive capacities, since all of the concepts involved are "in the mind a priori" and don't need special education to acquire. I still think that the conceptual capacities involved in articulating an intuitional content have to be recognitive capacities, since being able to articulate a particular content requires being able to recognize it as the same content as might occur elsewhere (in things with the same shape, size, etc.). Being able to articulate an intuitional content is being able to recognize that content, even if the particular content articulated is one that the thinker has not encountered before. If I only recognize an octagon on one occasion, and do not recognize it as being the same shape as other octagonal things I encounter on other occasions, then I can't be said to have recognized the shape of the octagon.

I don't think is how McDowell uses "recognition"-talk; he seems to reserve it for what I called above "special recognitive capacities". I don't see how they can really be so opposed, though. All of my recognitive capacities are capacities to recognize something when it is sensibly present to me in experience (as with McDowell's cardinal); that is what makes them "recognitive". So all recognitive capacities involve (in some sense) recognizing what I am given in experience, and so knowledge gained by such capacities can't be simply opposed to knowledge gained by articulating intuitional content, on the grounds that the latter is knowledge gained by bringing to consciousness what is given in experience. For both sorts of knowledge are the bringing to consciousness of something presented to me in experience. (The one as part of an intuitional content, the other as... I don't know what McDowell says here. My complaint about "exculpation" in the previous post stands.)

So, this is why McDowell doesn't think that intuitional content involves more than a scant number of concepts: it is able to be articulated by the mere addition of the 'I think". No recognitive capacities are required, apart from those already "passively actualized" in having an intuition with a particular content.

In a footnote, McDowell notes that intuitional content can be remembered without having been made discursive (though it's easier to remember if it has been so articulated, as a fact about our psychology). I suppose the idea is that if I've seen an object with a particular shape, I can call up the shape in memory and make explicit just how it looked. "It had... eight corners, and three of them were bent like this, and the rest were right angles." This seems plausible enough. And for thinkers who lack such numerical concepts as "eight" and "right angle", it seems plausible that they might still be able to draw a picture of the object, or sculpt it, or at least recognize it as the same shape if they saw it again. But then I'd think it would also apply to aspects of objects which do not involve common and proper sensibles: "The thing I saw was made of... oh, I have it, it was made of ice, and was sort of a pinkish-red." So however the mass of our noninferential judgements get their justification, they can be related to memory in the same way as judgements justified by their articulating intuitional content. If I don't consciously note that something is made of ice when it's in view, I can recognize it as made of ice by examining it in memory, later on.

Given this latter capacity, exemplified in my ability to recognize that the object I saw the other day was made of ice (though I hadn't articulated this fact at the time the object was present to me), it seems that my recognitive capacities cannot be limited by the concepts which were "passively actualized" in having an intuition with a particular content. For I might see a pink ice cube on Tuesday, learn to recognize what ice cubes look like on Wednesday, and then, on Thursday, noninferentially gain knowledge that the thing I saw on Tuesday was made of ice (because I remember what it looked like, and I now have the ability to recognize cubes made of ice as being made of ice when I see them).

So, I am able to gain noninferential knowledge from being given an intuition with a particular content without the having of that intuition having involved the actualization of all the concepts involved in the noninferential knowledge which it entitles me to. For I can noninferentially know that what I saw on Tuesday was ice, yet it was not possible for my having been given that intuition to have been an actualization of my conceptual capacity to recognize ice, for I had no such capacity at the time I saw the ice cube. (To sharpen the picture, suppose the ice cube I saw on Tuesday was the first time I had ever encountered ice of any sort, and then Wednesday was spent (by coincidence, since I don't think of Tuesday's cube again until Thursday) encountering a great deal of ice, learning about it, practicing distinguishing it from glass and transparent plastic, etc. So on Tuesday I had no concept of "ice", and by the end of Wednesday I had become proficient in handling encounters with ice knowingly, and on Thursday I gain a bit of noninferential knowledge about what I saw on Tuesday.)

So, if all knowledge gained noninferentially on the basis of experience involves recognitive capacities similar to the capacity involved in my recognizing ice, then it might seem that intuition does not involve an actualization of conceptual capacities at all. For an intuition might entitle me to noninferential knowledge despite such knowledge involving concepts which were not possessed by me at the time of my having the intuition. But if intuition did not involve the actualization of any conceptual capacities, then it's hard to see how such entitlement could be anything but the Mythical Given. For nothing outside the "space of reasons" has import within that space, and the space of reasons is thoroughgoingly conceptual; justifying and being able to justify is a linguistic affair. But it's not clear to me how McDowell's current position on noninferential knowledge gained apart from the articulation of intuitional content isn't similar Mythically Given. For if the articulated content of an intuition is something like "There is a cube at rest in front of me", then how can this justify my noninferential knowledge that "There is a pinkish-red cube made of ice at rest in front of me"? It doesn't help if the cube is (in fact) pinkish-red and made of ice, since these aspects of the ice cube are not things which were made visible to me in the content of the intuition I was given, which is the only means by which I have a view of the ice cube. (It also doesn't help that the intuitional content is infinitely richer than "There is a cube in front of me", since, for all its richness, it involves only concepts of proper and common sensibles.)

So: We must make it clear how noninferential knowledge can be gained on the basis of an intuition the having of which did not involve the actualization of conceptual capacities the possession of which is a necessary condition for being able to gain said noninferential knowledge. This puzzle seems to stand regardless of whether or not we follow McDowell in his recent limitation of the concepts which are involved in intuitional content.

For, if the concepts involved in the having of an intuition are not limited to those of "common and proper sensibles", they still must be limited by the conceptual capacities of the thinker who has a particular intuition. For capacities that are not present can't be actualized, passively or no. And yet, since intuitional content may be recollected, an intuition may entitle a thinker to noninferential knowledge which he could not have gained at the time of the intuition. The content of an intuition thus seems to be both limited by the conceptual capacities a thinker has and not limited by the conceptual capacities a thinker has. McDowell's current position is available to avoid this, by narrowing the concepts involved in the content of an intuition, but this still leaves the justificatory problem. Where I previously thought I saw a way out of this difficulty, I now see that my "solution" was a chimera.