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The Return of the Myth of the Mental
Hubert l. Dreyfus
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University of California, Berkeley, USA
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The Return of the Myth of the
Mental
*
HUBERT L. DREYFUS
University of California, Berkeley, USA
(Received 30 January 2007)
ABSTRACT McDowells claim that in mature human beings, embodied coping is
permeated with mindedness,
1
suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like
the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills,
when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is
non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic.
This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving
problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such monitoring is
invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance
to at best competence. On McDowells view, there is no way to account for such a
degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we
were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing.
McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any
foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable
Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the
case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same
footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations
our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of
propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree
with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and
describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on
which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based.
The battle of the myths continues. John McDowell claims that I, like Merleau-
Ponty, succumb to the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect. He notes that:
*As presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association,
Washington DC, December 29, 2006.
Correspondence Address: Hubert L. Dreyfus, Department of Philosophy, 314 Moses Hall 2390,
University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-2390, USA. Email: dreyfus@berkeley.edu
Inquiry,
Vol. 50, No. 4, 352365, August 2007
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/07/04035214 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740701489245
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This myth figures in Dreyfuss argument, in the shape of the idea that
conceptual rationality is detached from bodily life, characterizable in
abstraction from the specifics of the situations in which embodied
coping is called for.
2
As a critique of my view in my Presidential Address, this comment is well
taken. I did assume, accepting the traditional understanding, that McDowell
understood rationality and conceptuality as general. I should have known
better. Im sorry that I attributed to McDowell the view of rationality he
explicitly rejects in his papers on Aristotle.
Now, Im happy to hear that McDowell and I agree in our reading of
Aristotle on phronesis as a case of situation-specific skillful coping, and Imalso
pleased to learn that this is not a coincidence but that we both owe our reading
to Heidegger as mediated by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor.
Our agreement on phronesis suggests that there is a lot more we have in
common than I realized. And, indeed, I was also wrong to accuse McDowell
of succumbing to the dialectic of recoiling from the empiricist Myth of the
Given into the intellectualist Myth of the Mental. His doctrine of the
pervasiveness of mindedness does not imply that he holds, as current
Cognitivists do, that the mind organizes our experience. Rather, as you have
just heard, he holds that we are rational animals whose minds are directly
open to a world permeated with rationality, and he rightly asks me:
What is mythical about the claim that mind is pervasive in our perceptual
experience?
3
In response I will seek to show that mindedness is the enemy
of embodied copingthat, indeed, McDowells view that in mature human
beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness,
4
suggests a new
version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the
phenomenon.
I. The limits of mindedness
Where I differ from McDowell is that I hold that situation-specific
mindedness, far from being a pervasive and essential feature of human
being, is the result of a specific transformation of our pervasive mindless
absorbed coping. McDowell rightly sees that I claim that in so far as
embodiment means involvement in responding to a world of solicitations
the mindedness that marks me out as a thinking thing would have to be
absent from an accurate phenomenology of embodiment.
5
Let me elaborate our disagreement. Ironically, McDowell follows
Gadamer, who is supposedly following Heidegger, in making the move
that separates us. He notes:
For Gadamer, our embodied coping is not exhausted by its similarity
to the embodied coping of nonrational animals, as in Dreyfuss picture
The Return of the Myth of the Mental 353
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of a nonconceptual background. On the contrary, Gadamer argues
that language introduces a free, distanced orientation
6
towards what
would otherwise have been merely features of an environment.
7
(My
italics.)
I did in my Presidential Address stress the similarity of the coping of experts
and animals. Here, McDowell rightly pushes me to distinguish them. I agree
with McDowell that we have a freedom to step back and reflect that
nonhuman animals lack, but I dont think this is our most pervasive and
important kind of freedom. Such stepping back is intermittent in our lives
and, in so far as we take up such a free, distanced orientation, we are no
longer able to act in the world. I grant that, when we are absorbed in
everyday skillful coping, we have the capacity to step back and reflect but I
think it should be obvious that we cannot exercise that capacity without
disrupting our coping. Moreover, even when we step back and reflect,
involved coping is necessarily still going on in the background.
For an extreme case of the inverse relation of a free-distanced orientation
and involved skilled action, consider the case of Chuck Knoblauch. As
second baseman for the New York Yankees, Knoblauch was so successful
he was voted best infielder of the year, but one day, rather than simply
fielding a hit and throwing the ball to first base, it seems he stepped back
and took up a free, distanced orientation towards the ball and how he was
throwing itto the mechanics of it, as he put it. After that, he couldnt
recover his former absorption and oftenthough not alwaysthrew the
ball to first base erraticallyonce into the face of a spectator.
Interestingly, even after he seemed unable to resist stepping back and
being mindful, Knoblauch could still play brilliant baseball in difficult
situationscatching a hard-hit ground ball and throwing it to first faster
than thought. What he couldnt do was field an easy routine grounder
directly to second base, because that gave him time to think before throwing
to first. Im told that in some replays of such easy throws one could actually
see Knoblauch looking with puzzlement at his hand trying to figure out the
mechanics of throwing the ball.
8
There was nothing wrong with
Knoblauchs body; he could still exercise his skill as long as the situation
required that he act before he had time to think. In this case we can see
precisely that the enemy of expertise is thought.
They tried moving Knoblauch to the outfield, but that didnt help. He
couldnt resist exercising his capacity to reflect. Indeed, he became such a
full-time rational animal that he had to be dropped from the team, and he
never returned to baseball.
Happily, the rest of us are only part-time rational animals. We can, when
necessary, step back and put ourselves into a free-distanced relation to the
world. We can also monitor our activity while performing it. For solving
problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such
354 Hubert L. Dreyfus
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monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing
it, even when we dont get locked into a free, distanced orientation like
Knoblauch, leads to performance which is at best competent. When we are
following the advice of a coach, for example, our behavior regresses to mere
competence. It is only after much practice, and after abandoning monitoring
and letting ourselves be drawn back into full involvement in our activity,
that we can regain our expertise. The resulting expert coping returns to
being direct and unreflective, which I take to be the same as being
nonconceptual and nonminded.
Following Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I claim that the freedom
intermittently to step back and reflect presupposes a truly pervasive human
freedom. Unlike mere animals, we have a freedom not to exercise our
freedom to step back but rather to let ourselves be involved.
McDowell agrees with Gadamer that animals are unfree because they are
captivated by their environment while human beings are free solely because
they are able to step back from their environment and perceive and think
about the world. But McDowell, like Gadamer, overlooks Heideggers claim
that our free experience of a world differs from an animals unfree
experience of its environment in a way that is more basic than our capacity
to step back and emancipate ourselves from our involvement. Heidegger
sees as essential the fact that human beings are free to open themselves to
being bounda freedom that animals lack because they are constantly
captivated by their current activity and can never step back, and a freedom
Knoblauch lacks in so far as he has become irreversibly unbound. Our
involved freedom makes possible on some occasions finding ourselves
becoming detached and choosing a course of action which, like all willful
actions, we can perform at best competently, while on other occasions,
letting ourselves be drawn to reenter our involved expert coping.
Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point, albeit poorly, when in describing
perception he says:
In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves
thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body
which is better informed than we are about the world.
9
Understandably, this way of putting our freedom to let ourselves be bound
misleads McDowell into thinking Merleau-Ponty and I are victims of the
Myth of the Disembodied Intellect. That is, it might seem that we are
Platonists or Cartesians who hold that our rational capacity is our capacity
to distance ourselves from our bodily involvement and that, when we
become involved, we reenter our body from this self-sufficient disembodied
distance. But this is more like Gadamers and McDowells view than
Merleau-Pontys. It assumes that human beings are defined by their capacity
to distance themselves from their involved coping, and that, in so doing,
The Return of the Myth of the Mental 355
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they reveal themselves to be the self-sufficient rational agents they implicitly
were all along.
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, doesnt think of the mind as some sort of
disembodied capacity for rationality that, on occasion, can somehow
pervade what McDowell calls the bodys natural motivational tendencies.
For Merleau-Ponty, even when we are reflecting, the body is in the
background maintaining its grip on the world.
Merleau-Ponty refers to this body, describing it from outside as it were
because, when things are going wellwhen one is in flow as athletes say
there is no experience of this body as mine but simply the experience of on-
going coping. Of course, the coping going on is mine in the sense that the
coping can be interrupted at any moment by a transformation that results in
an experience of stepping back from the flow of current coping. I then
retroactively attach an I think to the coping and take responsibility for
my actions. But in the experience itself no I was present nor was there an
experience of my body as separate from the network of solicitations drawing
actions out of it. So, when I cease reflecting on some problem that blocks my
ongoing coping and return to my involved activity, I do indeed merge into
this body but only in the sense that I cease being an I think and open
myself to being reabsorbed in this bodys motor intentional activity.
II. The perceptual world isnt conceptual
But the fact that we are usually involved in coping in a mindless way doesnt
refute McDowells sweeping claim that the world is permeated with
conceptuality. He tells us:
We can see experience as directly taking in part of the world, because
the world, understood as everything that is the case, is not outside the
sphere of the conceptual.
10
At the outset, it is important to note that McDowells understanding of
world is very different from Heideggers and Merleau-Pontys (see
Figure 1). On McDowells view, we are directly open to facts or what is the
caseeven to affordances in so far as they are facts like that apples afford
eating. And in so far as we think of affordances as objective facts about
what affords what, as J. J. Gibson did, McDowell is right that openness to
affordances draws on the rationality of subjects who are open to the world
just as much as any other part of openness to the world does.
11
Facts about what affords what, however, are not what we are directly
open to according to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, on their
phenomenological account, what we are directly open to is not rational or
even conceptual; it is not part of the world at all as McDowell understands
world. Rather, instead of the affordance-facts that on McDowells view
356 Hubert L. Dreyfus
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we are directly open to, it is the affordances solicitationssuch as the
attraction of an apple when Im hungryto which I am directly open. Such
direct solicitations to act make up the world in Merleau-Pontys sense of the
term. The world is, then, the totality of interconnected solicitations that
attract or repulse us. Thus, the solicitations and the world they make up are
inseparable from our ability to be directly solicited.
Merleau-Ponty writes:
[I]n order to be able to assert a truth, the actual subject [i.e. the
embodied coper] must in the first place have a world or be in the
world, that is, sustain round about it a system of meanings whose
reciprocities, relationships and involvements do not require to be made
explicit in order to be exploited.
12
(My brackets)
In the light of Knoblauchs problem, Merleau-Ponty should have said cant
be made explicit if they are to be exploited, for, as we have seen, qua
solicitations they cannot be made explicit as features and data for then they
wouldnt draw us to act. In such a case, their motivating power would be
World
Characteristics of our
openness to the world
Level of skill
D
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e

(
M
c
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)
Totality of
affordance/
facts, what is
the case.
Propositional
structures.
Entertaining propositions
that such and such is the
case.
I do (subjects acting on
objects).
Capacity to step back and
criticize any particular
proposition about what is
the case and any reasons for
ones actions.
Competent:
Responding to the
general type of
situation, while
monitoring what I
am doing.
N
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m
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(
M
e
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l
e
a
u
-
P
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)
A web of
attractions and
repulsions.
Solicitations
to act (not
propositional
structures).
Responding to solicitations
to act in such and such a
way.
Capacity to let ourselves
be absorbed in the world
and to let ourselves respond
to some particular
constellation of attractions
and repulsions.
Expert:
In flow, totally
absorbed in
responding to the
unique shifting
situation.
Figure 1.
The Return of the Myth of the Mental 357
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lost. They can only be solicitations in so far as one is actually responding to
them.
Given this phenomenological understanding of the world as a network of
solicitations, it would make no sense to claim, as McDowell rightly does
concerning the world of facts, that openness to the world is our rationality
at work.
13
These solicitations have a systematic order that, as we shall see,
works in the background to make rationality possible, but the system of
solicitations is not itself rational.
McDowell notes that human beings can be absorbed in nonlinguistic
copingthat we neednt name things in order to take them in. But McDowell
follows Gadamer in holding that nameability (and so thinkability) is always
available in our experience of the world. As McDowell puts it:
We can equip ourselves with new conceptual capacities by isolating
and focusing onannexing bits of language toother aspects of the
[already] categorially unified content of experience, aspects that
were hitherto not within the scope of our capacities for explicit
thought.
14
But we rarely do just drop a name on an already-fully-determinate feature
implicit in the world. In our everyday skillful coping we are not focusing on
and naming fixed features, let alone reflecting on them, but rather gaining
more and more mastery by making finer and finer discriminations.
Although when we step back and contemplate them affordances can be
experienced as features of the world, when we respond to their solicitations
they arent figuring for a subject as features of the world.
15
When one is
bodily absorbed in responding to solicitations there is no thinking subject
and there are no features to be thought. According to Merleau-Ponty there
is just a tendency to maintain an optimal grip on the world. That is, if things
are going well there is just the solicitation to maintain my grip and, if things
are going badly, I experience a pull back towards the optimal.
If it seems that much of the time one doesnt experience any such pull,
Merleau-Ponty would no doubt respond that a sensitivity to deviation is
nonetheless guiding ones coping, just as an airport radio beacon doesnt
give a warning signal unless the plane strays off course. Then, let us suppose,
the plane gets a signal whose intensity corresponds to how far it is off
course, and the intensity diminishes as the plane approaches getting back on
course. Thus there is no experience of being on the beam. Rather, when the
pilot is on the beam there is no experience at all, but the silence that
accompanies being on course doesnt mean the beacon isnt continuing to
guide the plane. Likewise, in the case of perception, the absence of tension
doesnt mean the body isnt being constantly guided by the solicitations. On
the contrary, it means that, given past experience in this familiar domain,
everything is going exactly the way it should.
358 Hubert L. Dreyfus
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McDowell, following Gadamer, is led to think of the unarticulated
solicitations drawing the coper to make further discriminations as
features
16
or data
17
that are already present but in an implicit form
that could be made explicit by carving out an aspect of content from a
world disclosing experience in terms of annexing a bit of language to it.
18
Given McDowells understanding of world and world disclosing, but of
course not Heideggers or Merleau-Pontys, it makes sense for him to hold
that:
[W]hether or not a bit of experiential content is focused on and
brought within the reach of a vocabulary it is anyway present in the
content of a world-disclosing experience in a form in which it already
either actually is, or has the potential to be simply appropriated as, the
content of a conceptual capacity. That the content of an experience
has that form is part of what it is for the experience to be world
disclosing, categorially unified, apperceptive.
19
Clearly, for McDowell, if it is appropriated as the content of a conceptual
capacity, then it is done so as such (it is simply appropriated), not in a
newly articulated form.
This boils down to the assumption that what is always already given are
determinate, nameable, and thinkable facts structured through and through
so as to be directly graspable by minds. Merleau-Ponty calls this common
sense assumption the prejudice in favor of the objective world.
20
One could
also think of it as a new version of the myth of the mental. It seems plausible
to us, because, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, perception works like a crypto-
mechanism that retroactively covers up what he calls the positive
indeterminate.
21
He says:
Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see. There is
in natural intuition a sort of crypto-mechanism which we have to
break in order to reach phenomenal being or again a dialectic whereby
perception hides itself from itself.
22
When we break the crypto-mechanism, we see that the indeterminate is not
implicitly conceptual and simply waiting to be named. Our relation to the
world is more basic than our minds being open to apperceiving categorially
unified facts. According to Merleau-Ponty, at the most basic level of being
in the world, what does the grasping is not the mind but the body with its
nonconceptual coping skills, and what is grasped are not unified,
propositional structures that one can observe and entertain in thought,
but more or less indeterminate solicitations to act.
When McDowell asks: But why should we accept that embodied coping
skills are, just as such, nonconceptual?
23
, the existential phenomenologist
The Return of the Myth of the Mental 359
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answers that one has only to look at the phenomenon. McDowell says that
reflection just makes explicit the conceptual content one was already
implicitly acting on in coping (and the implicit I think attached to it). But
reflection must introduce some other sort of content. If it was the same sort
of content as before reflection, there would be no way to explain why
Knoblauch performs so well under one condition and so poorly in the other.
To review the phenomenon: Absorbed coping does not involve
conceptual intentional content in McDowells sense; instead it involves
motor intentional content, and no aspect of motor intentional content is
present in a form which is suitable to constitute the contents of
conceptual capacities. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we
are absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of content which is non-
conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational (even if rational means situa-
tion-specific,) and non-linguistic. To focus on the motor intentional content,
then, is not to make some implicit conceptual content explicitthats the
mythbut rather to transform the motor intentional content into
conceptual content, thereby making it available for rational analysis but
no longer capable of directly motivating action.
III. Does thinking of some phenomena as more basic than others already
distort the phenomena?
I can now sum up our differences: McDowell, following Kant and Sellars,
claims that our openness to the world is that of subjects, rational by
nature, directly open to an already determinate, rational, unified world.
These subjects can then focus on and make explicit the implicit data and
features their attention reveals.
Following Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I claim that affordances can
indeed be experienced as data or features in a world of facts permeated by
mindedness but that this objective world and its conceptual order
presupposes a preobjective/presubjective world. That world is opened up
by our bodys responses to solicitations drawing it to maintain and improve
its grip on what, on reflection, we take to be the determinate, unified,
namable, and thinkable, objective world. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:
[M]y body is geared onto the world when my perception presents me
with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and
when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they
expect from the world. This maximum sharpness of perception and
action points clearly to a perceptual ground a general setting in
which my body can co-exist with the world.
24
So absorbed bodily coping, its motor intentional content, and the worlds
interconnected solicitations to act provide the background on the basis of
360 Hubert L. Dreyfus
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which it becomes possible for the mind with its conceptual content to think
about and act upon a categorially unified world. McDowell however denies
this grounding claim. He says:
Openness to affordances is in a way basic in the picture of rational
openness to the world that I am urging, and this corresponds to
something Dreyfus claims. As I said, openness to the world, which is
rationality at work, is intelligible only in a context that includes
embodied coping skills. But on the view I am urging, the point is not,
as Dreyfus has it, that our embodied coping skills are independent of
any openness in which rationality figuresa ground-floor level,
supporting a distinct upper story at which openness involves
rationality.
25

Openness to affordances draws on the rationality of subjects who are

open to the world just as much as any other part of openness to the
world does.
26
But this openness, while true to our experience of affordances as facts, flies
in the face of the phenomenon of solicitations. (In my Presidential Address I
didnt clearly distinguish affordances from solicitations. Any confusion this
may have caused is certainly my fault.)
One way to put my point is that openness to objective affordances may
well draw on rationality but it doesnt draw anyone to do anything. A door
affords going in and out, and an observer can see that thats why a person
leaving the room goes out the door. But the involved coper does not act for
that reason as such. As Heidegger points out even more clearly in the case of
a doorknob, when I go out the door I neednt attend to the doorknob (be
mindful of it), see it as a doorknob, least of all see that it affords opening the
door. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty notes, and recent research confirms,
27
as I
approach the door my hand simply begins to take the shape of the doorknob
and when I reach the doorknob my hand just turns it. That is, from the
perspective of the skilled coper responding to the solicitation of a familiar
affordance, the affordance is transparent or, as Heidegger puts it,
withdraws.
Thus, embodied coping skills at their best, are not, as McDowell claims
they must be, permeated with conceptual mindedness. Paying attention to
the solicitation as I act on it can at best lead to competence. In general, at
the most basic level, if the expert coper is to remain in flow, he must respond
directly to the current solicitation without attending to the object doing the
soliciting. There is no place in the phenomenology of highly skillful action
for conceptual mindedness.
Openness also presupposes a kind of background content I have not yet
discussed. Granted, the person leaving the room responds directly to the to-
go-out, but not to the door or the doorknob, yet his coping must take
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account of the door as having a constant size, shape, solidity, weight, etc.
Maintaining these constants is the background work of what Merleau-Ponty
calls the body schema. It knows more about the world than does the
conscious coper, and it makes possible the copers encounter with a world of
stable affordances.
As active copers, our relation to the things we respond to changes as the
context changes, and yet we count on things retaining their fixed features
such as their size, shape, color, and so forth. The conceptualist/disjunctivist
needs to have an account of these perceptual constants. How is it possible
that things have a constant color even as lighting conditions and other
aspects of the context change, that we count on things staying the same size
as we approach them or they approach us, that we count on them keeping
the same shape as we change our angle of view, that the color of the light in
the room goes to neutral when we inhabit the room rather than looking at it
from outside? The Gestaltists studied these perceptual constants in detail,
and also argued convincingly that intellectualists and empiricists are unable
to account for them. But the Gestaltists failed to work out a general account
of what makes these constancies possible.
So, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty feels obliged to give
his own account of the relation of the McDowellian world of stable
affordances and the phenomenologists world of motor intentional coping
that responds to their solicitations. He proposes to lay out the conditions
of existence of perceptual stability in change. He asks: how does our
transparent involved coping take place on the background of stable
movement, depth, space, and things with determinate aspects?
Merleau-Pontys account of the perceptual constants calls into question
the claim that we are simply open to the world of facts. Rather, it shows that
our being directly open to the world of facts presupposes the bodys
background skill of maintaining and improving its grip on the world. In all
such cases, the embodied coper is like the pilot being guided by the radio
beacon: he is guided by a background sensitivity to any way the current
coping deviates from the optimum. The world of background perceptual
constants and foreground solicitations can then be legitimately understood
as the ground floor on the basis of which a higher-level world of determinate
objects and their properties and relations can be apperceived.
Given its structural similarity to empiricism, we need to make clear that
existential phenomenology does not assume an indubitable Given on which
to base empirical certainties. As with all forms of intentionality, solicitations
can be misleading and in responding to such solicitations one can be misled.
To take one of Merleau-Pontys examples, my active body can mistake a
patch of sunlight on the path ahead of me for a supportive rock soliciting
stepping on. When I reach the patch of light, the anticipated support with
which my body is already coping, will fail to support me. Then my already-
acted-upon anticipation of impending support will have to be retroactively
362 Hubert L. Dreyfus
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crossed off. Just as, once a perceptual puzzle has been solved, we cant even
remember how it looked when we couldnt see the concealed figure, we
wont even be able to picture how the patch of sunlight could have solicited
us to step on it.
McDowell makes clear that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it
has no truck with any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective
world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor
experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are
unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But once
one distinguishes involved motor intentionality and the preobjective/
presubjective world of interrelated solicitations our coping body is
intertwined with, from detached conceptual intentionality and the world
of propositional structures it opens onto, the existential phenomenologist
can agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, and yet
affirm and describe the special supporting role of motor intentionality.
Although not indubitable, the ground-floor level of everyday coping is
self-sufficient. In principle, given our body schema, which according to
Merleau-Ponty is always already attuned to the logic of the world, and given
our sense of our culture with its language and all its social demands such as
gender roles which we take over as second nature without having had to
notice them, we could go on coping in flowchanging from task to task
without ever facing a breakdown and having to step back and reflect,
although, unlike animals, we would always have the capacity to do so. Of
course, in fact there will always be problems and opportunities that require
reflection and, as already noted, attention has its advantages for learning,
problem solving, coaching, explaining, criticizing, etc. But we should be
careful not to take the crucial importance of attention and rational
reflection in our lives as an argument that we are animals whose essential
feature is our capacity to be mindful.
It is only on the basis of our everyday absorbed coping that we can notice
features and step back and reflect. And, if we are to have a stable world to
pay attention to, the absorbed coping must, in any case, continue in the
background. Only once our background coping has disclosed a world of
stable objects with constant properties, can conceptualism spell out the
conceptual content that enables our minds to open onto what, according to
Merleau-Ponty, we cant help but take to be a self-sufficient, rationally
structured world.
The world of solicitations, then, is not foundational in the sense that it is
indubitable and grounds our empirical claims, but it is the self-sufficient,
constant, and pervasive background that provides the basis for our
dependent, intermittent, activity of stepping back, subjecting our activity
to rational scrutiny, and spelling out the objective worlds rational structure.
(As already noted, introducing the notion of enduring and pervasive
conceptual capacities does not show that the activity of actually stepping
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back and the world it reveals was already implicitly pervasive, continuous,
and independent all along.)
Why, then, deny that there is a ground-floor level of preconceptual,
preobjective/presubjective, prelinguistic, coping? Why, in the light of the
phenomenon of motor intentionality directly drawn to respond to
solicitations, should we think that experience at the most basic level must
somehow be pervaded by mindedness? To insist that, if we are not mere
animals, we must, at the most basic level of experience, be minds that open
onto a categorially unified world that conforms to our capacity to think, is
to court the danger of succumbing to a new version of the myth of the
mental.
But the existential phenomenologist also has his problems. He owes an
account of how our absorbed, situated experience comes to be transformed
so that we experience context-free, self-sufficient substances with detachable
propertiesMcDowells world of facts, features, and data. Merleau-Ponty
promised an account of what he called the genesis of objective truth, but he
never produced one. In Being and Time Heidegger offers a brief sketch of the
transition from our direct openness to solicitations to our experience of
things with their situation-specific qualities, to objects with abstractable
features graspable by the mind but he never worked it out in detail.
28
It
seems that the conceptualists cant give an account of how we are absorbed
in the world, while the phenomenologists cant account for what makes it
possible for us to step back and observe it.
Where the philosophy of perception and action, of mind and world, goes
from here, depends upon which approach succeeds: whether those who
analyze the subjects openness to a world of propositional structures and the
rational relations between them can account for the perceptual constants
and our absorbed response to solicitations, or whether those who describe
our absorbed coping can describe how we come to take for granted a
determinate world of objects permeated by conceptuality and mindedness.
That the phenomenological approach accepts the challenge of relating the
preconceptual world to the conceptual world makes that approach, even
though it is reminiscent of foundationalism, seem to me the more attractive.
Notes
1. What Myth?, this issue, p. 339.
2. Ibid., 349.
3. Ibid., 339.
4. Ibid., 339.
5. Ibid., 350.
6. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1992) Truth and Method. Translation revised by Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad) 445.
7. What Myth?, p. 346.
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8. Ive read that the same disastrous result of having time to step back and reflect happened
in a well-known soccer game where a goalie, famous for his brilliant instant dives to
defend the goal, failed to defend it at a crucial moment in the game, because, as he
explained, he had time to think. The same phenomenon must occur in all high-speed,
skilled activities.
9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (Trans.) Colin Smith
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 238.
10. John McDowell (2006) Conceptual Capacities in Perception in Gu nter Abel (Ed.)
Kreativitat (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag) 106579.
11. What Myth?, p. 345.
12. Phenomenology of Perception 129.
13. What Myth?, p. 345.
14. Ibid., 347.
15. Ibid., 346.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 344.
18. Ibid., 347.
19. Ibid., 348. This might be taken to suggest a claim, similar to Charles Taylors, that we
are led to articulate the entities and situations we experience, where this means to bring
out their as yet unclear significance. But if McDowell holds that the world is everything
that is the case then everything we can isolate and focus on and name must be already
implicitly present. As he says, all its content must be already present in a form in which it
is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities.
. But Taylors account of articulation is not like Merleau-Pontys either, since for
Taylor we sometimes feel called to reflect on and articulate our experience in language,
whereas Merleau-Pontys kind of articulation is an aspect of perception that is constant
and need not involve reflection or language.
20. Phenomenology of Perception 6.
21. Ibid. 6. We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.
22. Phenomenology of Perception 58. Merleau-Ponty exploits many resources for uncovering
what has been covered up: Descriptions of breakdown cases of perception, the
experience of brain injured subjects, the painting of artists such as Cezanne interested in
how our perception moves from indeterminate to determinate.
23. What Myth?, 339.
24. Phenomenology of Perception 250.
25. What Myth?, 345.
26. What Myth?, 345.
27. See Sean Kelly (2000) Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive
Science of Skillful Action in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Eds.) Heidegger, Coping,
and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus Vol. II (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press) 161177.
28. See, Martin Heidegger (1962) Being and Time (Trans.) J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson
(New York: Harper & Row) 9899, 412. See also, Samuel Todes (2001) Body and World
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) 269277.
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