Moral Foundations Of Philosophy Of Mind 3030184919, 9783030184919, 3030184927, 9783030184926

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 5
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
1: Introduction......Page 12
1. A Strange Confusion—And a Suggestion......Page 13
2. The Attractions of Value Freedom and Technoscience......Page 15
3. The Moral Life of the Mind......Page 20
4. Mind, Nature and the Nature of Ethics......Page 24
5. Farewell to The Philosophy of Mind?......Page 28
6. The ‘Unity’ and Structure of the Volume......Page 30
References......Page 36
Part I: Questioning Philosophy of Mind......Page 39
1. Introduction......Page 40
2. A Research Programme......Page 41
3. Learning from Jaegwon Kim......Page 43
4. Learning from John McDowell......Page 55
5. Evading Naturalism vs. Evading the Evasion of Naturalism......Page 60
6. Learning from Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle and Daniel Dennett......Page 63
7. Beyond Both Problem-Solving and Problem-Dissolving Philosophy......Page 65
8. The Invincibility of Naturalism and of Anti-Naturalism......Page 71
9. Responsibility and Philosophy......Page 75
10. Conclusion......Page 78
References......Page 89
1. The Human Sciences and Their Paths......Page 93
2. A Genealogy of Psychopathology......Page 94
3. The Logic of Analogy......Page 97
4. The Human Sciences and the Sciences of the Spirit......Page 100
5. The Hardest Problem......Page 103
References......Page 107
Part II: Ethical Critiques of Reductive Naturalism......Page 108
4: The Missing ‘E’: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Ecological Psychology and the Place of Ethics in Our Responsiveness to the Lifeworld......Page 109
1. Cartesian Representationalism......Page 111
2. Challenges to Representationalism: Rejecting Internalism......Page 112
2.1. A Radical Contextualist Challenge to Content Internalism and Representationalism......Page 113
2.2. The Question of Process Internalism......Page 117
2.3. Rejecting ‘Process’ Internalism: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty......Page 118
2.4. Empirically-Discerned Philosophical Objections to Representationalism......Page 120
2.5. Paradigm in Crisis or Pre-Paradigm Stage?......Page 121
3. Two Philosophical Traditions: Aristotelianism and Cartesianism......Page 122
4. Ecological Psychology and the Theory of Affordances......Page 124
5. The Missing ‘E’—Ethical Affordance, Evaluative Perception, Concepts and Affordances as Rhetoric......Page 126
6. Conclusion......Page 129
References......Page 131
5: All Souls: Wittgenstein and ‘eine Einstellung zur Seele’......Page 134
1. The Depth of Attitudes......Page 135
2. Attitudes and Opinions Reconfigured......Page 139
3. The Soul: The Dialectic of Loss and Vindication......Page 146
4. Anti-Dialectic: Recollecting the Soul......Page 152
References......Page 162
1. Other Minds......Page 164
2. The Problem......Page 165
3. Attitudes and Opinions......Page 168
4. Getting a Grip......Page 170
5. An Attitude Towards a Soul......Page 173
6. Belief......Page 176
7. The Mind and Consciousness......Page 178
References......Page 182
1. The Place of the Moral in Scientific and Relaxed Forms of Naturalism......Page 183
2. The Standard Model of Psychological Self-Ascriptions......Page 187
3. Challenging the Standard Model......Page 189
4. Expressing the Inner......Page 192
5. Finding the Right Expression: The Moral Stage Setting......Page 193
6. The Moral Dimension of the Authority of Psychological Self-Ascriptions......Page 197
7. The Example of Sultan......Page 201
8. Conclusion: Back to Scientific and Relaxed Naturalism......Page 202
References......Page 204
1. Introduction......Page 207
2. False Prophets?......Page 210
3. Turning to the Ordinary......Page 214
4. Speaking with Depth......Page 217
5. Having Love......Page 221
6. Bearing Witness......Page 224
7. Conclusion......Page 225
References......Page 229
Part III: The Second Person and the Hidden Moral Dynamics of Philosophy......Page 232
9: Philosophy of Mind and/as the Repression of Interpersonal Understanding......Page 233
1. The Openness Between ‘I’ and ‘You’......Page 235
2. Understanding Others: The Inconceivability of Inferentialism......Page 238
3. Misunderstandings, the Idea of ‘Context’ and the Engaged Nature of Understanding......Page 243
4. Compassionate Torments: The Relation to the Other and the Moral Life of the Soul......Page 249
5. The Fear of Openness: From Polite Distancing to Brutal Repression......Page 254
6. Lived Confusion, Philosophical Mystification......Page 259
References......Page 264
1. Introduction......Page 269
2. The Structure of the Chapter......Page 270
3.1. What is the Naturalist Mind-Body Problem?......Page 271
3.2. Conditions for Our Existential Split: Rewriting the Naturalist Mind-Body Problem......Page 275
4.1. The Augustinian Picture of Language......Page 279
4.2. Lacan and the Phantasmatic Nature of the ‘Real’......Page 283
4.3. Can the Lacanian Real Be the Source of the Inner-Outer Split?......Page 286
5.1. Private Language and the Desire for Open Expressiveness......Page 288
5.2. The Primary Split and Its Justification......Page 292
6.1. The Imposition of Identity......Page 294
6.2. The Desire for Social Identities......Page 299
6.3. The Desire for the Authority of Law and the Denial of Moral Understanding......Page 301
7. Final Remarks......Page 303
References......Page 307
1. Introduction......Page 311
2. Are We Sure We Want to Be Understood?......Page 313
3. Love, Social Self-Consciousness, and the Desire for Affirmation......Page 314
4. Potential for Obstruction and Distortion......Page 317
5. We Do Not Know What We Want......Page 320
6. The Shine of Truth and the Question of Personal Identity......Page 323
7. The Existential Challenge of Self-Understanding......Page 325
References......Page 328
1. Introduction......Page 330
2. The Consequences of Denial......Page 333
3. The Necessity of Non-understanding......Page 338
4. The Object......Page 346
5. The Herd......Page 351
6. Conclusion......Page 355
References......Page 361
1.......Page 364
2.......Page 368
3.......Page 377
4.......Page 382
References......Page 389
Author Index......Page 392

Citation preview

Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind Edited by Joel Backström · Hannes Nykänen Niklas Toivakainen · Thomas Wallgren

Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind

Joel Backström  •  Hannes Nykänen Niklas Toivakainen  •  Thomas Wallgren Editors

Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind

Editors Joel Backström University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

Hannes Nykänen University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

Niklas Toivakainen University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

Thomas Wallgren University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISBN 978-3-030-18491-9    ISBN 978-3-030-18492-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen, Niklas Toivakainen, and Thomas Wallgren

Part I Questioning Philosophy of Mind  29 2 Mind and Moral Matter 31 Thomas Wallgren 3 The Jaspers Case and the Paradox of the ‘Human’ Sciences 85 Federico Leoni

Part II Ethical Critiques of Reductive Naturalism 101 4 The Missing ‘E’: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Ecological Psychology and the Place of Ethics in Our Responsiveness to the Lifeworld103 Phil Hutchinson v

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5 All Souls: Wittgenstein and ‘eine Einstellung zur Seele’129 David R. Cerbone 6 An Attitude Towards a Soul: Wittgenstein, Other Minds and the Mind159 Edmund Dain 7 Wittgenstein, Psychological Self-­Ascriptions and the Moral Dimension of Our Inner Lives179 Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen 8 ‘Speak to us of love’: Some Difficulties in the Philosophical and Scientific Study of Love203 Camilla Kronqvist

Part III The Second Person and the Hidden Moral Dynamics of Philosophy 229 9 Philosophy of Mind and/as the Repression of Interpersonal Understanding231 Joel Backström 10 So Much Fuss About Nothing: The Moral Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem267 Niklas Toivakainen 11 Who Wants to Be Understood? The Desire for Social Affirmation and the Existential Challenge of Self-­ Understanding309 Fredrik Westerlund

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12 This Thing with Philosophy329 Hannes Nykänen 13 ‘Private Language’ and the Second Person: Wittgenstein and Løgstrup ‘Versus’ Levinas?363 Rupert Read Author Index391

Notes on Contributors

Joel  Backström teaches philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. He is the author of The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality (2007) and of articles and book-chapters on ethics, on Wittgenstein and on the philosophical dimensions of Freud’s thought, including contributions to the Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (2011) and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2018). David R. Cerbone  is Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University, USA. He is the author of Understanding Phenomenology (2006), Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008), and Existentialism: All That Matters (2015), as well as numerous articles on Heidegger, Wittgenstein and the phenomenological tradition. He is also a co-editor (along with Søren Overgaard and Komarine Romdenh-Romluc) of the Routledge Research in Phenomenology series. Anne-Marie  Søndergaard  Christensen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Denmark. Her main research interests are Wittgensteinian ethics and virtue ethics, and she has published many articles within these areas in journals such as The Journal of Value Inquiry and Journal of Applied Philosophy. She is working on contextual ethics, ethics and literature and finishing a monograph on the relation ix

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between moral philosophy, ethical theory and moral life. She is director of The Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Education and Media at her university and the former president of The Nordic Wittgenstein Society. Edmund  Dain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Providence College in Rhode Island, USA.  His research focuses primarily on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its application to contemporary problems in ethics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, among other areas. His publications include ‘Eliminating Ethics’ (Philosophical Topics, 2014), ‘Remarks on Perception and Other Minds’ (Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2017) and Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, co-edited with Reshef Agam-Segal (2018). Phil Hutchinson  is Senior Lecturer in Applied Philosophical Psychology, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health, Psychology and Social Care, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. He is pursuing three related research projects. 1. Shame, Stigma and Healthcare. This project builds upon work begun in his 2008 book Shame and Philosophy. 2. The Placebo Response. This project seeks to understand and explain the placebo response as a  medically significant meaning response, offering an alternative to the conditioned-response (behavioural) and expectancy-response (cognitive) explanations of placebo. 3. Non-representational approaches to mind and cognition. This project provides the philosophical framework for projects 1 and 2. Camilla  Kronqvist  serves as University teacher in Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests focus on questions concerning the intersection of philosophy of psychology and moral philosophy, in particular in the philosophy of emotions and the philosophy of love. Her articles on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the relation of his philosophy to investigations of love and intimate relationships, moral relativism and evolutionary explanations of morality, as well as the role of emotion in humanist research have appeared in many publications. Federico Leoni  teaches Philosophical Anthropology at the University of Verona, Italy. He is co-editor of the international journal Chiasmi.

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Trilingual Publication around Merleau-Ponty’s Thought and of Lettera. Rivista dell’Associazione Lacaniana Italiana. He contributed several articles in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. His latest books are Habeas corpus. Sei genealogie del corpo occidentale (2008), L’idiota e la lettera. Quattro saggi sul Flaubert di Sartre (2013) and Jacques Lacan, l’economia dell’assoluto (2016). Hannes  Nykänen  teaches Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of The ’I’, the ’you’, and the Soul. An Ethics of Conscience (2002), Öppningar och labyrinter (2005) and Samvetet och det dolda: Om kärlek och kollektivitet (2009). His articles on conscience, repression, collectivity and the ethical centrality of the I-you or second-­ person perspective have appeared in many publications. Rupert Read  is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, and a former head of department there. He studied principally at Oxford and Rutgers and was Cora Diamond’s student at Princeton. His books include Kuhn (2002), Philosophy for Life (2007), There is No such Thing as a Social Science (2008) and Wittgenstein among the Sciences (2012). He is perhaps best known in philosophy for having brought together (along with Alice Crary) the school around Cora Diamond and James Conant, in The New Wittgenstein (2000). Niklas Toivakainen  is pursuing the final stage of his doctoral studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and will submit his thesis on the moral dynamics of the mind-body problem during summer 2019. Alongside his research on the classical mind-body problem, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and psychoanalysis, and ethics, Toivakainen has published, lectured and given public talks on the philosophy of technology and AI/robotics. Toivakainen is also a contributor to A Companion to Wittgenstein and Education (Springer 2017). He lectures by the hour at the University of Helsinki. Thomas Wallgren  is Professor of Philosophy and director of The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

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He is the author of Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy (2006). Wallgren is interested in the theory and practice of democracy, just transition, satygraha, buen vivir and sceptical enlightenment. Fredrik Westerlund  is a senior researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and he currently works in a research project funded by the Academy of Finland. Westerlund also teaches philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include phenomenology, moral psychology, ethics, understanding and knowledge, emotions, shame, and love. He is the author of Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena (forthcoming 2020).

1 Introduction Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen, Niklas Toivakainen, and Thomas Wallgren

It is widely thought today that by bringing the study of the human mind into the orbit of objective, empirical investigation, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have taken us to the brink of an epochal scientific breakthrough comparable to those pioneered by Galileo in early modern times and Darwin in the nineteenth century. A loud minority position holds, by contrast, that there are principled limits to the ‘naturalisation’ of the study of the mind, and that it is the task of philosophy to define and police those limits. The contributors to this volume are critical of scientism in the philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, the book as a whole is not just one more humanistic or conservative critique of scientism, nor does it invoke the supposed authority of philosophy or ordinary language to once and for all put science in its proper place. Rather, it aims to uncover and unsettle certain key assumptions, which underlie and give shape to much of contemporary discourse on naturalism and the mind: assumptions that J. Backström (*) • H. Nykänen • N. Toivakainen • T. Wallgren University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_1

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­ reclude a clear understanding of the mind by obscuring the role and p significance moral issues have in our lives. The essays are not united by a common position. Rather, the unity of the book comes from a certain constellation of questions and interests that reappears, with differing emphases, in all the contributions. In their various ways, the essays investigate the relationship between the problems of mind and moral life. In many of the essays, the character and aims of philosophical questioning itself are also in question. In what follows, we will first provide a more robust description of the constellation of concerns that gives the book its unity. The contents of the individual contributions are described at the end of the Introduction.

1. A Strange Confusion—And a Suggestion Naturalism becomes an issue because of the felt need that philosophers since Descartes have time and again been transfixed by, namely of ‘finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally and essentially physical’ (Kim, 1998, pp. 4–5), or, of solving what David Chalmers and others have called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ or, more generally, of fitting our notions of meaning, soul and life into a universe conceived as basically mechanistic and meaningless. There is, however, no consensus on the status of the problem. Some think it has already been solved by science, others believe it will, or may, soon be solved, while yet others consider the problem real but insoluble in principle; finally, some think there never was a problem to solve, only conceptual confusion giving rise to a pseudo-problem (for examples of these positions, see Shear, 1997). Whatever the case, in grappling with the problem philosophers have come up with wildly speculative suggestions, ranging from those who in effect deny that there is mind in nature at all and claim that we are built out of ‘mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, nonrobotic ingredients at all’ (Dennett, 2006, p. 3), to ‘panpsychists’ who hold that nature is nothing but mind (cf. Skrbina, 2009), with most philosophers trying to keep both ‘mind’ and ‘nature’ in play as different but somehow related aspects or realms of reality. There are also many, however, who wonder if it makes any difference whether (we say that) there is or there

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is not mind; thus, a favourite philosophical thought experiment concerns zombies or living dead that are, supposedly, in every respect indistinguishable from living, conscious human beings, except for the small detail that zombies experience and feel nothing at all. Why is it that the contemporary discourse of mind gives rise to such wayward suggestions, where the very difference between life and death seems to come undone? And why are the expectations concerning this ‘last mystery of science’ so high? What are we supposed to gain if the riddle—what riddle exactly?—is solved? There are of course legitimate questions about what medical and other practical benefits we might gain from neuroscientific research. But the great excitement around the discourse of mind is not generated by them. Sometimes one gets the impression that the enthusiasm is due to a sense that we are at the brink of uncovering The Truth about the mind. Alas, it is completely unclear what this ‘truth’ is supposed to be about and what it would be like to reach it. Indeed, as we noted, there is not only no consensus about how to settle the issue; there is disagreement about whether there is any issue to be settled. At stake, then, is not only a disagreement about how to understand a certain concept or how to interpret a given set of data but also the radical questions whether the phenomenon discussed, ‘the mind’, exists at all, and what sense, if any, we can make of the idea of a theory, or theories, of mind. We might think that we have two options: either those accepting the ‘hard problem’ have simply confabulated a story about an imaginary entity, or those who reject it deny the existence of an entity that must be of the highest importance to us. We are, after all, supposed to be discussing the very being also of our own mind, or soul, or spirit! If the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness were solved, whatever that would mean, it would thus lead to a situation where many philosophers and scientists who have expressed opinions on the matter would turn out to have committed a simply outrageous oversight and to have fallen prey to a most serious delusion. It comes as no surprise then, that in the ongoing debates we find distinguished philosophers accusing each other of pursuing illusions or, alternatively, of overlooking the most important aspects of being human. The fervour that accompanies the disagreements in the philosophy of mind should give us pause. Nothing like it occurs in debates about

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merely intellectual matters. However, such nervous and troubled disagreement is typical in connection with moral and existential issues. We suggest that progress in the debates about the philosophy of mind may not be possible as long as the ethical dimension of the problems is ignored. This dimension informs the debates and so constantly crops up between the lines, so to speak. By ‘ethics’, we do not mean an external perspective one could impose as an afterthought on a separate field of expert debate identified as ‘philosophy of mind’. Rather, we suggest that moral and theoretical questions about the mind are best seen as intertwined aspects of our understanding of human reality. The central idea of this book, then, is that the problems raised in and by the philosophy of mind are themselves, from the very beginning, articulated within a field that is morally—or ethically or existentially; no distinction is intended—charged.

 . The Attractions of Value Freedom 2 and Technoscience The idea that moral matters are at play at the most basic level of investigation is bound to seem strange, indeed perverse, as long as one accepts the standard notion that scientific and philosophical method demands that any object, the mind included, should be studied in a way that remains neutral with respect to any moral commitments. A main theme of this book is precisely to show the limits of this approach in philosophical discussions of the mind. As many of the essays bring out, moralistic and ideological distorting influences are pervasive in philosophy and the sciences of mind. Sometimes, such influences are open to view, as when certain views are explicitly declared inadmissible because of their supposedly insidious moral implications, the attitude being: ‘This idea must not be explored, because it would be too terrible if it turned out to be true’. More often, however, the ideological distortions remain implicit, even as ideological commitments are in one sense loudly proclaimed. Thus, many participants in contemporary debates take pride in declaring themselves ‘hard’ naturalists, while others stress that their own stance commits them

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only to a ‘soft’ or ‘liberal’ form of naturalism, and both sides make their announcements long before it is clear what either position really involves, and indeed whether any coherent position can be formulated. If one had to choose between ‘value free’ inquiry into how things are or moralistic sermonising and ideological blinkers of this kind, perhaps value freedom, whatever that is supposed to mean, would be the better option. But, as many essays here argue, these are not the real alternatives. Rather, the authors suggest that getting clear about what the issues are in the philosophy of mind is itself a moral task; that is, one that demands ceaseless struggle against wishful and fearful fantasising and other forms of moral confusion. If so, the pretence to ‘value freedom’, far from solving the problem, would be a self-deceptive illusion; the confused idea of being able to set aside moral difficulties by fiat, by simply declaring that one will not take controversial positions but only speak the truth. This, we suggest, would be like presuming to guarantee the humorousness of one’s jokes by declaring that they will be funny. And in fact, as many of our essays bring out, moralistic or ideological distortions tend to proliferate most perniciously precisely where people would deny making any value judgements at all, for instance, when they claim that they are merely reporting scientific findings. Looking back, most people would agree that in the past the theorising of scientists and philosophers has not been immune to the spectres of wishful thinking and self-deception that distort and corrupt so many other practices too. On the contrary, it seems trivial to say that distorting tendencies have often entered already before theorising officially started, as it were, and have formed and deformed the whole intellectual-­ emotional-­social background from which explicit theorising arises. As one instance of this, consider how racist and sexist prejudice shaped the theoretical agenda in philosophy, psychology and in the social and biological sciences in the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries at least until WWII. Scientific progress as such does nothing to address this problem, for while we may now see that racist and sexist science was indeed bad science, at the time it was generally seen as wholly respectable, even cutting-­edge work. The equality of the sexes and races was not, and could not have been, a scientific discovery; rather, moral misconceptions concerning sex and race produced a plethora of fraudulent justifications and

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evasions dressed up as science. The distorting influence of sexism and racism on science in that time is easy for us to see because we do not share, at least not officially, precisely those prejudices. Surely, no one wants to claim that today we have completely freed ourselves of all prejudice. Is it not strange that we would all admit this, and yet pay so little attention to the moral prejudices that, as we may suspect, we are susceptible to now? One objective of this book is to advance self-reflection on these lines. In investigating this kind of question, some of the essays focus on how philosophical and scientific theorising of the mind only gets going on the basis of more or less inchoate and unacknowledged pictures of the ‘mind’, which is delimited as an object of study in the first place through these very pictures. The very labelling of the ‘object’ of investigation is not a neutral issue; thus, to speak of the ‘mind’, or of ‘consciousness’, tends to push the investigation in rather different directions than speaking of the soul, or of being human. We speak of ‘soul music’ but ‘mind music’ or, for that matter, ‘brain music’ would have rather different connotations. In other cases, the implications of the choice of words are more directly of practical consequence. Taking a pill will be of no help if you fear losing your soul, while it might perhaps help someone who is not in his or her right mind. Similarly, speaking of a ‘science of the soul’ engenders a tension, a sense of paradox and absurdity, which easily gets lost when we talk of ‘sciences of the mind’ or a ‘science of consciousness’—but which we perhaps ought not to lose. What is the exact philosophical import of the fact that the very words we use, with their associations, affect the quality of our attention, that they have the power to incline our investigations in particular directions, and so have substantial consequences? And what kind of fact is it? One suggestion is that when philosophical conceptualisations are tied to fantasies of a morally problematic kind, the fantasies are typically collective fantasies of a cultural-ideological nature, part of the ‘spirit of the times’. Consider the picture of the mind as a computer, so pervasive in recent popular debate as well as in academic contributions to the philosophy of mind. The felt self-evidence of the comparison is connected to the mythologies of our scientific and scientistic culture, where technology-­ based ‘progress’ is seen as a natural and legitimate social goal. The

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a­ ttraction of this cultural formation lies, arguably, not only in what technology allows us to do, but also in the way a focus on the amazing things we can do with the aid of new technologies—measure, predict, manipulate, organise, design—allows us to shove aside questions of a political, moral and existential kind, as though everything could be turned into a technical problem, into something doable. Five hundred years ago many people might have found it natural to say that God or the wind speaks to them, but few people would have said that the abacus they used for calculating transactions at the market place counts or thinks. Today it is common parlance to say that computers calculate and we may ask what else computers can do, but to ask whether they suffer, or long for their user to return, or feel pangs of bad conscience, seems nonsensical. One suspicion here is that the computer is such a tempting metaphor for the mind because, not despite the fact that, it excludes or neutralises the moral weight that questions about mind, suffering, belonging, loss and attachment otherwise have. And when this suspicion is acknowledged, perhaps we should also look back critically at the notion that computers calculate, process algorithms, store data, do anything at all. It might be objected that as computers and robots get more sophisticated, the question whether they have emotional and moral life does arise; think of films like Spike Jonze’s Her and of how people speak about and care for robots.1 That suggestion raises deep questions about what it means to have an emotional and moral life at all. The confidence that the future might well (and many would say: will certainly) see computers with moral and emotional lives merely expresses—but does nothing at all to prove the truth or even the coherence of—the instinctive cultural conviction that a skilled engineer can in principle build anything: feelings and morality no less than microscopes and satellites. Although the amazing advances of science and technology may seem to authorise this view, they do not do so. One open issue is the intelligibility of the idea that emotional and moral life is the kind of thing that technology could even try to produce. Many today would say that we know how to produce robotic simulations of emotional and moral responses that human beings relate to as if they were, say, the voice of a person expressing concern. Must we therefore also say that we are really robots or that robots really feel concern for us? How is this and other similar questions about new

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technologies related to the fact that one might be frightened by a doll with an angry face that one mistook for a human being? If we did not in older times take that fact about our reaction to dolls to show that we are really only dolls or that dolls can be angry, what follows for discussions today about computers and robots?—The questions are real. One suggestion is that philosophers and scientists might profitably study the dynamics of need, longing for and fear of intimacy, projection and so on that make various simulations of human contact so attractive to us, from children’s dolls and virtual reality games up to the fascination philosophers show with the computer-metaphor of the mind. But then, precisely the difficulties that much of contemporary philosophy of mind has seemed determined to avoid would move into focus. Returning to the main discussion, our suggestion is not that, in studying the mind, one ‘must’ make certain moral ‘value commitments’. The point is rather that the reality one is trying to understand is itself always already morally articulated in a way that forms the background of intelligibility for any commitments one may or may not make. This is not to suggest that we should go back to some pre-modern idea of a teleologically structured ‘moral world order’, a ‘great chain of being’ in which everything has its ‘proper, natural, place’. Putting it that way represents our relation to the ethical in a falsely external and intellectual light; as though some ideological ‘grand narrative’ or ‘world-view’ were needed for us to keep, or get, our mattering to each other into view. We need, rather, to reflect on the contested understanding which, whether acknowledged or not, is revealed and perhaps transformed in our discourse of the mind or the soul, both in everyday life and in philosophy. Furthermore, we suggest that such reflection may reveal that the intertwining of the moral with what at first sight might seem morally neutral turns out to be ineliminable and deep. As should be obvious, the characterisation ‘moral’ we have been using is not to be taken in any narrowly moralistic sense, having to do with particular ideals or norms of conduct. The moral dimension we are pointing to is rather concerned with how we matter to each other, as manifested in our interpersonal responses, in the good and evil to which we are alive, when we are warmed by another’s smile, or chilled by the callousness in their voice, or sickened by the cruelty visited on them, and in

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other cases. But just as important are the difficulties we have with, as it were, accepting that others matter in the seemingly inescapable and overwhelming way they do; a difficulty that may be expressed for instance in one’s hardening oneself in callousness, or ecstatically giving oneself over to cruelty. Furthermore, the moral problematic is not limited to the private sphere of intimate relations; on the contrary, as our brief remarks on collective fantasies indicated, it forms and deforms cultural, social and political life too. In any case, the suggestion under discussion cannot be understood by taking any current conceptualisation of the moral as given, and then applying it to the questions of mind. Rather, seeing the way we speak about mind as a morally charged and contested terrain unsettles standard conceptions of ‘morality’ no less than of ‘mindedness’. For instance, the debate over whether ‘it’, morality, is hard-wired into our brains by evolution, as many now claim, or is rather a result of enculturation, will lose much of its charm insofar as we suspect that both sides operate with a misguided notion of what ‘it’ is.

3. The Moral Life of the Mind In modern and contemporary philosophy of mind, the defining philosophical question has been taken to be how the mind (in the singular) relates to the world and how this mind is related to the brain in which it is taken to ‘arise’; one asks how the mind’s mental states get their world-­ directed ‘content’, how consciousness and ‘qualia’ arise in the brain, and so on. The possibility that a human mind might be a mind only in relation to other minds is typically not considered. In the fairly recent Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, for example, only one of the 45 essays (Avramides, 2009) is devoted to discussing the relations between minds, and then only in the form of the so-called problem of other minds. Ethics is, unsurprisingly, not even mentioned. There is, of course, lively contemporary interest in the abilities supposedly enabling one mind to ‘read’ others based on the ‘information’ gleaned from observing their bodily movements. However, these theorisations take for granted precisely the idea that ‘the’ mind (singular) stands over against external ‘objects’, including the bodies of others which it infers ‘house’ minds roughly like

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itself. By contrast, one suggestion of this book is that the relation to others is not a result of some inferential, simulating or other activity performed by an independently constituted individual mind, but is rather itself part of what it is to have a mind. Readers versed in contemporary analytical philosophy may get the impression that our suggestion is old news by now, given the ‘E-turn’ in the philosophy of mind, with its critique of the overemphasis on the mind-brain problematic and its amenability to ‘intersubjective’ perspectives (see, e.g., Coliva, Moyal-Sharrock, & Munz, 2015; Hutto & Myin, 2012, Menary, 2010, Newen, Gallagher, & de Bruin, 2018). We will explain why we do not share this assessment in endnote 3. Let us now try to make the suggestion that a relation to others is constitutive of the mind more concrete by considering the notion of having something to say. Our thoughts, and so our minds, are centrally articulated and expressed through our words. Moreover, a crucial part of regarding others as having a human mind is regarding them as having something to say. For instance, one might ask for their testimony, for their response to things, for what they think and how they feel, or for their word (‘So you will come?’). If you said of someone: ‘She has a mind, all right, she just never has anything to say’, you would probably mean that the person is so unthinkingly conventional, or so cowed and terrified of expressing any thought of their own, that there is no point in talking to them, you get no real response. They have a mind, but out of fear or complacency, they refuse to use it. A dog, by contrast, does not have a mind in precisely this sense. It does not face the same tasks that humans face of using and developing their mind: of finding their voice, speaking their mind. This task—one’s responsibility for what one thinks and how one responds—is not imposed on one somehow from without, but part of what it means to have a mind at all. This means, conversely, that having a mind is not a simply given condition but, precisely, an inescapable and never-ending task. We may fail the task by behaving in more or less irresponsible, mindless ways. Then the meaning of our words gets perverted. Think, for instance, of the manipulative attitude to language found in the world of advertising, in political demagoguery, in intimate relations and other contexts—which might, alas, come to characterise a person’s general attitude to their words. Where this happens, the problem is that this

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person abandons herself/himself to irresponsible manipulation. If it was literally true that she did not care at all, that she had no conception of being in any way answerable for what she says, the words she utters would not be her words at all and would express no thoughts. The very idea of expressing a genuine thought or judgement—or, for that matter, a genuine feeling—seems to be morally determined or inflected, then, insofar as such expression implies a sense of answerability to the other and to oneself to get the expression right; a sense that it matters that one gets it right. This answerability is not simply one of ‘thought to the world’ or ‘word to object’; that answerability—which philosophers have tended to focus on and have indeed often seemed obsessed by to the exclusion of everything else—is certainly important, but, arguably, it makes sense only as an aspect of its mattering that, and how, you answer the other(s), and that they answer you. How such answerability is more particularly to be understood—including whether ‘answerability’ might in some respects be a misleading word to use here—is a large question; our suggestion is simply that it is the kind of question philosophers of mind should be asking. When we turn to it, we may find that how one goes on to articulate this dimension of answerability more precisely is itself both a philosophical and a moral matter, one through the other. Many of the essays in this book elaborate this notion, as have, in their different ways, many philosophers before, from Socrates to Hegel and Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas—philosophers whose work tends, perhaps not coincidentally, to be largely neglected in contemporary philosophy of mind.2 Pointing to the fundamental role of answerability is not the end of the matter but only the beginning. Words are spoken within a relationship between interlocutors which can, many of the essays suggest, only be described and understood in a moral vocabulary, using concepts such as openness, concern, trust, truthfulness, responsibility, betrayal, shame, embarrassment and so on. The life of the mind, to use that expression, involves not only our longing to express ourselves and make ourselves known to each other, but also the difficulties we have in doing so, as when we find it difficult even to try, out of a fear of being misunderstood—but perhaps also of actually being understood, of standing revealed, as it were naked, before the other.3

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It is important to underline precisely the difficulties we have with daring to address others openly and to answer their address. Answerability is not just a fact; it is a persistent problem, a terrifying prospect. In general, seeing morality as basic in the way many of the essays suggest does not mean painting a rosy picture of human goodness, or erecting some lofty ideal. Our moral responsibility is something we would often wish to get rid of. In the spirit of this insight, some of the essays explicate the notion that the moral attraction of naturalism—that is, what people find tempting in it—is due precisely to its declared ‘amoralism’. This might be found tempting insofar as there is a desire to externalise one’s responsibility. For instance, the idea that evolutionary psychologists can explain our inclination towards violence and lust for power can easily—and conveniently— obscure the question of how it is that we ourselves, in actual moments of life, stand in relationship to the other against whom we might turn violent or oppressive. Of course, such self-deceptive externalisation of responsibility can take many other forms as well, along lines of social constructivism, pscyhodynamics, class analysis, discourse analysis and so on. Here, as so often in philosophy, perspectives that present themselves as diametrically opposed turn out to share the most important starting-point and to fulfil the same problematic function in the moral economy of our thinking. Moreover, the avoidance of moral clarity is clearly not something that only or primarily happens in philosophical or scientific theorising. The everyday relations between ethnic groups, classes and the sexes, for instance, are replete with ideas, more or less inchoate or explicit, instinctive or worked out, about the ‘nature’ of people from different groups, and about the limitations and necessities that these supposed natures impose on the relations between them. Women cannot do this or men always do that; men cannot understand women because they behave like that, and so on. Thus, the question of, and the responsibility for, how I and you, these particular persons, are to relate to each other, is as it were taken out of our hands; instead of being something we are answerable for, our range of possibilities come to seem determined for us externally, by the ‘natures’ of ‘men’ and ‘women’. The general point is that one root of our moral difficulties is our tendency to misrepresent our involvement in life and the responsibility that

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comes with it. An important implication is that claims about evolutionary design or socio-cultural construction of the mind as well as the conceptual distinctions and charts that guide us in any discourse of the mind need to be subjected to philosophical reflection in order to clarify, for instance, to what extent they involve moral externalisation that may be tempting and hence difficult to acknowledge.

4. Mind, Nature and the Nature of Ethics Most philosophers today understand themselves as naturalists of one kind or other. Yet there is little reflection on the philosophical meaning and investment of the concepts of the ‘natural’ and of ‘naturalism’. Why is it important to claim, or deny—what is one speaking for or guarding against in claiming (or denying)—that conceptual capacities or the moral life, say, are ‘natural’? We suggest that until there is serious reflection on this question, declarations pro or contra naturalism and debates over whether this or that phenomenon can be ‘naturalised’, or again, whether naturalism should be of a ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ variety, will tend to produce confusion rather than clarity. If moral questions are, as the essays in this book in various ways suggest, inseparable from questions concerning the mind, the way we struggle with the former will inevitably influence the way we conceive of the latter. Insofar as this is the case, there is no way to side-step the internal relationship between the mind and morality in order to investigate the mind in a morally neutral way, and the concepts of ‘facts’ or ‘nature’ cannot offer such a route either. The wildly divergent ideas about the mind reflect wildly divergent ideas about morality, and if the concept of ‘nature’ is introduced into this problematic, it too will be drawn into this morally charged field. Moreover, ‘nature’ being one of the most mythologically loaded concepts not only in the Western cultural tradition,4 some conceptions of nature may themselves covertly contribute to this moral charge. In underlining the inescapable role of moral attention, the essays in this book do not only raise doubts about reductively empirical conceptions of the human mind; they also question the more general philosophical tendency to misconstrue and marginalise the role of ethics.

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Thus, while one may rightly point out different problems with a reductive naturalism, for instance by showing the richness and contested nature of the concept of nature, which contrasts with the often thoughtless and narrow notion of the ‘natural’ employed by hard naturalists, one must be alert so that, in doing this, one does not smuggle in unexamined ideas about ethics: ideas perhaps driven by an unacknowledged wish to reduce the ‘disturbing’ aspects of moral life to a more ‘manageable’ level. On this issue, as on others, there is some difference of opinion between the authors of the present volume. Some of the essays are sympathetic to the idea of soft naturalism while others regard this notion as no less problematic than the notion of hard naturalism to which it presents itself as an alternative. But whatever differences of view the contributors to this volume may have here, they question the idea that some morally neutral conception of nature could be used to set investigations of the mind on a morally unbiased and in this sense ‘scientific’ ground. To illustrate the point, consider the difficulties involved in giving a good account of love, difficulties that arise whether the account purports to be scientific, naturalistic or something else. Love is something we struggle with, something we long for, something we are afraid of, something we try to open up ourselves to, something we fear losing, something we fake in order to get something we want, something we sentimentalise, something we dramatise, something we deceive ourselves about and so on. But how should we understand this significance of love? How can we account for it? Attraction, self-concern, security, lust, desire for being affirmed as a person, bodily inclination, a transcendental orientation to goodness—there are many candidates for our attention. Whatever we want to think about these, the issues we are dealing with are also moral. Arguably, to learn to understand them better is not something that can be done as a merely intellectual project but is rather a life-long task. The idea of a purely scientific investigation of the mind is then, we suggest, as unthinkable as a purely scientific investigation of ethics and love. All this obviously goes for the objects of neurological study too. What is a neutral science to make of the brain-scan images of a brutal and insensitive person who, calling her inclination ‘love’, is inclined to dominate everyone in her proximity? What would it mean if scientists claimed

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that they can by means of neutral scientific methods read off the hypocrisy or shallowness of understanding of their experimental subject, let alone the truthfulness of their own understanding of the phenomenon they presume to investigate, from their data? This is not to say that data collected by neuroscientists or evolutionary psychologist are useless. What we want to underline is that there is, in cases like this, an intrinsic relation between what we take to be data about factual matters and how we understand ethics and love. It is because the scientist can make distinctions in what she sees that she can make use of her data. She may for instance be interested in the phenomenon that a subject’s relation to a third person seems to be characterised more by a wish to be loved by the other than by love of that person. There is a whole world of possible specifications and complications in connection to love, and it is her understanding of these things that makes it possible for the scientist to make distinctions that can guide her empirical work. But understanding such things about love and ethics is not itself an instance of scientific understanding. One aim of the chapters in this book is to show the importance of this theme and to shed light on different aspects of it.5 Some critics of hard naturalism suggest that the source of our conceptual confusions in the philosophy of mind, in philosophising about love, and elsewhere lies in the very structure of our language, the reason for our bewilderment being that, as Wittgenstein suggested, we lack a ‘perspicuous representation’ of the ‘uses of our words’ (1988, §122). On this philosophical self-understanding, the main task of philosophy is conceptual analysis in the form of the study of the uses of words found in different language games. Moreover, on this view philosophy must insist, in direct opposition to hard naturalism, on a strict differentiation between conceptual and empirical (and more generally experiential) questions. While many of the chapters in the present volume could be characterised as, among other things, Wittgensteinian in inspiration, they suggest a somewhat different understanding. The overall suggestion is that our conceptual confusions regarding ‘love’, for instance, are directly connected with the (moral) difficulty of loving—or, to put it even more strongly, that our conceptual confusions regarding ‘love’ are our confusions regarding all that loving implies. While reflection on such confusions can certainly be characterised as a conceptual intervention, achieving clarity is not a

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b­ usiness of merely analysing uses of words. Rather, it is, to use another phrase from Wittgenstein, a ‘work on oneself ’ (1999, p. 161). Moreover, such working on oneself is not an egocentric business but is concerned with how one understands and relates to other people, and how one sees oneself in these respects. In other words, the business of looking at ordinary language with understanding is fraught with the same problems as looking at brain-­ scans with understanding. The effort to become clear about the sense of our language is inseparable from efforts to come to grips with the moral dynamics of our norms and conventions. Our concepts thus have a certain openness to them and in philosophical work we are constantly challenged not only to clarify what rules and criteria determine our concepts—as if we were observing language from the outside, detached from our own person and our moral difficulties—but also to clarify in what particular ways we may be confused and what meaning we are able and willing to assign to our words. Returning to our earlier example, it is not that we first learn (intellectually, referentially, behaviourally) what ‘love’ is/means (the ‘rules’ that determine the correct use of the concept) and are only then able to love (and hate). Rather we learn the meaning of love—not once and for all, but all through life—by exploring and searching for how deeply, truthfully, relentlessly, openly and so on we are able to love and what inclinations and aspirations that seek to tame, restrict, control, pervert or distort love. Such morally involved conceptual investigation is not empirical in the scientific or hard naturalist sense, but neither is it ‘merely conceptual’. What we are dealing with here are our very lives, how we understand them and how we wish and hope to live. The confusions we may find inherent in our ordinary conceptions of ourselves and others are not ‘errors’ in the sense that Paul Churchland and other hard naturalists claim to have in mind when they suggest that our conceptual self-understanding is to be corrected with the help of neuro- and other empirical sciences (e.g., Churchland, 1995, p.  206). Unless the champions of neuroscience pay attention to the moral dynamics of our concepts, including their possible repressive, morally falsifying aspects, they are likely to simply produce new forms of illusions and misconceptions; illusions and misconceptions that may be unusually damaging because part of the illusion consists in the belief that these views are

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underpinned by neutral, scientific truth. On the other hand, if the moral problematic is taken seriously, this may open fruitful new avenues for the neurosciences too.

5. Farewell to The Philosophy of Mind? One more way in which the essays of the present volume contribute a radical challenge to the contemporary discourse in the philosophy and the sciences of mind needs to be foregrounded here: namely, their questioning of the conception of philosophy as a theoretical endeavour that can be divided into different sub-disciplines with their own subject matters and specialists. One source of the standard conception may be the notion that there are ontological categories that can serve as a guide to the division of labour in philosophy. Thus, much of the contemporary discourse on mind seems to presuppose that ‘mind’ can be seen as a natural kind, or as a ready-made category of things or phenomena. But does that make sense? If we look for an example of what we can mean when we speak of natural kinds, the brain is a good candidate. In studies of the brain, there may be disputes about where the brain begins and some other part of the nervous system ends or what tissue inside the skull belongs or does not belong to the brain. But these considerations will not obscure what we mean when we talk about the brain, they will normally not involve questions of the form; when you study this, are you sure that it is the brain you study? Clearly, ‘the mind’ is not in any similar sense a natural kind and conceptually legitimate as such—as the wild disagreements among philosophers of mind that we remarked on at the beginning of this Introduction strikingly illustrate. This notwithstanding, during the past decades we have got rather used to accepting the concepts of ‘mind’ and ‘philosophy of mind’ as powerful classificatory devices to guide our investigations. Typically today, once we accept ‘philosophy of mind’ as a legitimate concept, we will also accept that at least the following phenomena: sensations, perceptions, experiences, feelings, intentions, desires, emotions, memories, volitions and thoughts, have the important common characteristic that they are all ‘of ’ or ‘in’ the mind. Whatever we take that

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assumption to mean and imply, and no matter how seriously we subscribe to it, the consequence is that we accept some idea of unity and that we will therefore easily be willing to look for underlying similarities between the phenomena just listed. Our classificatory approach invites us to invent ways of justifying the scheme: ways of explaining what is common to the ‘mind-objects’ that we have first decided to group together, no matter how artificially or thoughtlessly. We may look, for instance, for the areas in the brain where particular mind-objects are ‘processed’ or where particular powers or functions of the mind are located. We have invented a new conceptual hammer, the hammer of ‘the mind’, and we see mind-nails everywhere. But it is, we propose, an open question and a question of some urgency, to take stock of how much of this new hammering we need and what the ubiquitous mind-hammering of all the mind-nails, arguably very different between them, does to our understanding and hence to us. The purpose of the remarks just made is neither to object to, nor to agree with, the elevation of ‘mind’ into its current, central role in the classificatory hierarchy of philosophy. Rather, and to repeat, we wish to question the very idea of philosophy as a theoretical endeavour that can be divided according to subject matters with a set order, and conducted in a way where theoretical rigour has no need for moral judgement. In suggesting that the concepts now included in the ‘mind’-family are intrinsically moral, that is, that their analysis has a moral dimension, we are not proposing a contrast between concepts that are intrinsically moral and others that are not. Our point about the relation between philosophy and morality is perfectly general, in the following way. The understanding we have of our words guides our lives. Hence, when a concept is problematic, when we have problems with what our words mean, these are problems about how to live. Thus, the difficulty of understanding our concepts is internally related to the difficulties we have of making sense of our life together, and to analyse a concept—pain, for instance—is a matter of trying to understand what pain means, that is, the ways in which we react and respond to others in pain, and to our own pain. And this connects, among other things, to questions of compassion, cruelty, and worry about pain in case for instance of a child’s fear of the dentist or possible over-use of pain-killers in terminal care. If the analysis loses its c­ onnection

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to, and its power to illuminate, our multifarious trouble with pain and responses to pain, there will no longer be any limit to what we may claim in our analysis and hence, no way to determine whether what we provide is an analysis of pain, or of something else, or of nothing at all. Are our difficulties with pain, or with the analysis of the concept pain, or generally with the kinds of questions taken to touch on issues relevant to the philosophy of mind, always only moral problems? This is not our claim. Our point is rather that we cannot start our inquiry with the presumption that we know how to delimit ‘the moral’, and could thus declare what is and is not a moral problem; the task is precisely to become clear about the way conceptual and moral issues are intertwined, for instance, the ways in which we self-deceptively avoid and misrepresent the character of our involvement in situations and relationships. In this kind of investigation, ‘the mind’ and ‘moral life’ are not separable by decree.

6. The ‘Unity’ and Structure of the Volume We have emphasised certain general outlooks on philosophy of mind, and philosophy in general, that are shared by the contributors to this volume. However, some readers might still think that it is unclear what constitutes the ‘unity’ of the volume: what views the contributors agree about and try to promote. It seems important to say a few words about this question. It is not clear how the concept of unity should be understood with respect to a philosophical anthology. Unity could be taken to mean that the contributors largely share a given basic philosophical outlook or, if not that, at least that they address a theme that they all see as distinct enough to be addressed. In the former case, one dissident who rejects the whole problem is often included in order to lessen, in the name of scientific rigour, the impression of doctrinal consensus. But if doctrinal consensus is problematic, one could also ask how a common theme could unify approaches if they have completely different ideas about how the issues should be investigated. What is the unity between, say, an empirically based psychological view on emotions and rationality and a Kantian account of the same subject? Since both would insist on the importance

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of the method employed, it is hard to see how the subject could confer unity to their contributions. One could say that what unites the authors of the present volume is not anything of the kind just mentioned, but rather a shared concern that moral life has not been given due attention in philosophy in general and in philosophy of mind in particular. Is what they seek the good old ‘eternal truth’? Again, the authors would probably have different things to say about this, but most of them would be likely to reject the suggestion that the choice is between a metaphysical idea about truth and a postmodern or neopragmatist ‘modest’ and historically relative truth. All of the essays point in their different ways to the serious limitations of construing problems concerning the human mind as merely rational puzzles, but they do so not by appealing to a ‘human perspective’, to particular moral ideas or, in general, to something like ‘soft values’. Instead, they appeal to a form of understanding that is not in any ordinary sense rational—nor of course irrational—but must rather be conceived of in terms of the way human beings understand each other morally. Seeing connections and differences is a central, philosophical task— not something that can be established in advance as a matter of fact. Thus, what emerges from the present anthology will partly be a result of the different ways in which its readers approach the connections developed by the authors. Nevertheless, the philosophical connections that are elaborated in the book spring from the shared concern that without bringing in moral philosophy into the centre court of philosophy we will not be able to formulate philosophical problems concerning the mind (nor any other ones) in a way that makes contact with what really troubles us in them. It may seem that we have over-emphasised the differences between the perspective opened up in this book and certain trends in contemporary philosophy of mind alluded to above, which we are, it might be said, rather continuing than challenging. Judgements of this kind are problematic, however—in part because of the particular difficulty in philosophy of avoiding both the Skylla of assimilating to one’s own view new accounts that strike one as fruitful, even if they are actually quite unrelated, and the Charybdis of rejecting out of hand accounts that appear problematic, even if they are in fact unrecognised aspects of one’s own

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thinking. This is one of the reasons that makes discussion of agreement and disagreement so confusing in philosophy. The book is divided into three sections: a division that is, as such divisions are bound to be, partly arbitrary. The first section, Questioning philosophy of mind, starts with a chapter by Thomas Wallgren, who subjects the philosophical self-understanding of some contemporary classics of philosophy of mind—Jaegwon Kim, John McDowell, John Searle, Daniel Dennett and Peter Hacker—to immanent criticism, and finds that their apparently diverse and mutually opposing contributions all end in embarrassment on their own terms. In particular, ‘a pained dialectic between proud commitment to reason and despondent abandonment of reason emerges’. Wallgren locates the source of this predicament in a failure to acknowledge how issues seen as ‘internal and central to the philosophy of mind, are intrinsically linked to controversial aspects of our moral and political self-understanding’. He goes on to suggest that progress in the philosophy of mind may be achieved through a sceptical reconsideration of what progress in this area may be like. Federico Leoni, taking a longer historical perspective—from Nicholas of Cusa, over Karl Jaspers to today—diagnoses the ‘subject’ today called ‘philosophy of mind’ as having been ridden by a strange paradox from the start, in that precisely ‘that thing’ which, supposedly, constitutes the very essence of the human soul, seems to escape the philosophical and, later, psychiatric discourse. When the life of the soul is ‘captured’ in these discourses, the life, the ‘soul’ that was the very object of scrutiny, has vanished. In the contributions in the second section, Ethical critiques of reductive naturalism, this same paradox—that the soul eludes representation, so to speak—shows itself again and again from different angles. Thus, Phil Hutchinson shows how contemporary forms of enactivism or 4E cognition, in their avowed efforts to escape, through an appropriation of Gibson’s influential theory of affordances, the problem that arises with every form of representation, nonetheless fail—just like the representationalists they criticise—to solve the problem of ‘capturing’ the life of the mind, and specifically ‘the central role of normativity and evaluation in our responsiveness to loci of significance in the lifeworld’. The same problem is seen from an even more pointedly moral perspective in the chapters by David R. Cerbone and Edmund Dain. Starting out from the

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Wittgensteinian notion of ‘an attitude towards a soul’, they in their different ways—Cerbone largely through a critical discussion or Dennett’s ‘heterophenomenology’, Dain through questioning the intelligibility of ‘the problem of other minds’—show how the tendency to leave out the moral perspective when accounting for the human mind will in fact depict human beings in a way where they are no longer recognisable as human. Taking up the question of psychological self-ascription, Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen shows that such ascriptions cannot be understood in terms of ‘the standard model of observation and descriptions’, since they are always (also) ‘ways of situating ourselves morally in relations to others’. A different aspect of this moral dimension of speaking— to others, or of and to oneself, in thought—is discussed by Camilla Kronqvist, who questions the way philosophy and science approach the concept of love. By contrasting their objectivising language with poetic language, she shows how philosophy and science, in their attempt to remain neutral and to bypass ‘the existential dimensions and moral difficulties [that] are there to be seen in the significance that different people are prepared to assign to different uses of “love”’, lose sight of what it is about love that is of such crucial importance to us, and so fail to speak to us. The chapters in the final section of the book, The second person and the hidden moral dynamics of philosophy, focus on two intertwined themes that these contributions suggest form the background to the problems identified in earlier chapters. In different ways, they argue that a major source of philosophical problems is that philosophy has tended to choose a first/third-personal, subjectivising/objectivising perspective over the second-personal I-you-perspective constitutive of interpersonal understanding. Secondly, they try to show that this very tendency, and the paradoxes and difficulties of understanding that it spawns (canvassed throughout this book), can be seen as symptoms of unacknowledged moral-existential difficulties arising in, and concerning, precisely the I-you-relationship. Joel Backström shows the impossibility of conceiving our understanding of others inferentially, and more generally epistemically (with a subject relating to an object of knowledge). Our understanding of others and ourselves is immediate and engaged in a way which we cannot eliminate

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but can—and in our life together constantly do—try to repress, because of the challenges it brings. Philosophy’s way of conceptualising ‘the mind’ as split from the body and from other minds is, Backström suggests, one instance of this very repression. Similarly, Niklas Toivakainen argues that the idea that minds are in some fundamental sense invisible and inaccessible to each other is, in strictly intellectual terms, nonsensical, but has great force as an essentially ambivalent fantasy—one that, he shows, underpins both naturalist philosophy of mind and Lacan’s theory of the subject—where open contact with the other is simultaneously longed for and fearfully defended against. Toivakainen connects this ambivalence with a basic conflict in our life between love and narcissism. Picking up from this, Fredrik Westerlund points out that the idea, generally taken for granted in philosophy of mind, that it is hard or even impossible to know another’s mind or be known by them, assumes that we would want to be known—but this precisely is not the case in any unqualified sense. Rather, we want to be seen as we would wish to be (seen), given our narcissistic urge for social affirmation—as distinct from our longing for love’s truthful openness. The basic problem is not intellectual, but, moral: a fear and refusal to know/be known. Hannes Nykänen radicalises this thought in his contention that philosophical reasoning point by point follows the same logic as that of a person who denies her conscience and defends her evil acting, that is, who refuses to be in understanding with the other; hence, the ‘problem’ of other minds is analogous to, and homologous with, a moral problem where openness with the other is unbearable. In the final chapter, Rupert Read explores a ‘relational ethics’. While affirming the second-personal view of the mind and the diagnosis of the subject/object-perspective as the basic problem, he wishes to broaden this perspective to include relations between collectives of humans and living beings generally from what, in critical dialogue with Wittgenstein, Løgstrup, Levinas and three contributors to the present volume, he argues is too narrow a focus on the singular I-you-relation. Thus, the book ends on a note of apparent agreement and disagreement, and one could find many other points of such disagreement-in-­ agreement among its contributors. This state of things should neither be lamented nor blandly accepted, but vigorously explored. In general, we

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conceive the book’s contribution to the philosophy of mind to lie in opening up a new kind of question, rather than settling for a new answer.6

Notes 1. Sherry Turkle (2011) provides a wealth of interesting examples of how computers and robots enter and shape everyday life and the ways we talk. 2. There are, of course, exceptions to this neglect, some of which explicitly address the question which the present book seeks to give more sustained attention, of the intermeshing of the human mind or soul—and its philosophical treatment—with the ethical. The Hegel-inspired work of Charles Taylor (1985) and the Wittgenstein-inspired work of Stanley Cavell (1999) are notable examples; the Wittgenstein-inspired writings of, for example, Cockburn (1990), Dilman (2005), and Overgaard (2007), should also be mentioned. By contrast, in a recent edited collection devoted to Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind (Ellis & Guevara, 2012), the ethical is conspicuous by its absence. 3. There is a growing literature across various fields (philosophy, cognitive science, developmental psychology) and traditions arguing for an intersubjective or ‘second-personal’ perspective on the mind. However, while these contributions, many of which can be classed as part of the ‘E-turn’ in philosophy of mind, are often interesting in other respects, they tend to assume the kind of morally disengaged framework that the present volume calls into question, approaching the issues either in a morally (apparently) neutral way—for example, Foolen et  al. (2012), Satne and Roepstorff (2015), Szanto and Moran (2016), Thompson (2001), Zlatev Racine, Sinha, and Itkonen (2008)—or else giving a far too restricted moral significance to the I-you perspective and other aspects of the moral dynamics in the field (e.g., Darwall, 2009). Tellingly, the recent 900-page Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Newen et al., 2018) includes just one page on ‘moral normativity’, and one on ‘the ethical dimension of intersubjectivity’; for the rest, there appears to be no explicit thematisation of the ethical, or of the way in which the moral charge of discourses on the mind may problematise the supposed ‘neutrality’ of the philosopher/scientist studying it, as we have suggested. The latter lacuna also shows in the growing literature explicitly coupling investigations of the mind/brain and of morality—for example, Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group (2010), Liao

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(2016), Sinnott-Armstrong (2008)—which tends to assume that (supposedly) morally neutral research on the mind in neuroscience and related disciplines has implications for our understanding of morality. By contrast, we principally urge reflection in the opposite direction, as it were, on the unacknowledged ethical presuppositions driving, and the difficulties with moral understanding hampering theories and research is philosophy and in the sciences of mind. In contemporary debates, ethics may be brought into the discussion for various reasons: because human thought is supposed to intervene in the events of the quantum-physical world (e.g., Stapp, 2015); because ethics is thought to place limits to research, or because it is assumed to enter more loosely as a ‘human world of experience’ not completely accessible to ‘hard’ science. Sometimes, ethics is brought in only to be squeezed into the standard mill of scientific rationality (e.g., Churchland, 2015); sometimes, it is addressed on the basis of a standard set of assumptions and methods derived from philosophical logic, grammar or phenomenology. What is not acknowledged in these approaches is how moral issues are intrinsic to the discourse of mind and how attention to this dimension of the discourse transforms our understanding of both the method and object of study. 4. Kant reminds us of this when he writes: ‘Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or any thought more sublimely expressed, than in the inscription over the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no mortal has removed”’ (Kant, 2000, p. 194). 5. The same problem arises, ironically enough, in philosophical ethics itself, where moral questions are regularly discussed as though they were logical or intellectual problems—that is, as though our relationship to them was basically the same as towards such problems. 6. We are grateful to the Academy of Finland for supporting the research project that has made this volume possible.

References Avramides, A. (2009). Other Minds. In B.  McLaughlin, A.  Beckermann, & S. Walter (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1999). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Churchland, P. (1995). The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Churchland, P. M. (2015). Rules: The Basis of Morality…? In T. Mezinger & J.  M. Windt (Eds.), Open MIND. Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg-­ Universität Mainz. Cockburn, D. (1990). Other Human Beings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Coliva, A., Moyal-Sharrock, D., & Munz, V. (Eds.). (2015). Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Darwall, S. (2009). The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dennett, D. (2006). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dilman, I. (2005). The Self, the Soul and the Psychology of Good and Evil. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Doris, J.  M., & The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.). (2010). The Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, J., & Guevara, D. (Eds.). (2012). Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foolen, A., et al. (Eds.). (2012). Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hutto, D., & Myin, E. (Eds.). (2012). Radicalising Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment (P. Guyer, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, J. (1998). The Mind-Body Problem After Fifty Years. In A. O’Hear (Ed.), Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liao, S. M. (Ed.). (2016). Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menary, R. (2010). The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Newen, A., Gallagher, S., & de Bruin, L. (Eds.). (2018). The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Overgaard, S. (2007). Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. New  York and London: Routledge.

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Satne, G., & Roepstorff, A. (2015). Introduction: From Interacting Agents to Engaging Persons. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22, 9–23. [and see the whole special issue of the journal]. Shear, J. (Ed.). (1997). Explaining Consciousness: The ‘Hard Problem’. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (Ed.). 2008. Moral Psychology (3 vols.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Skrbina, D. (Ed.). (2009). Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stapp, H. P. (2015). Quantum Theory and Free Will. Cham: Springer. Szanto, T., & Moran, D. (Eds.). (2016). The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. New York: Routledge. Taylor, C. (1985). Philosophical Papers, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E. (Ed.). (2001). Between Ourselves: Second Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together. New York: Basic Books. Wittgenstein, L. (1988). Philosophical Investigations. London: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1999). Philosophical Occasions (J.  Klagge & A.  Nordmann, Ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Zlatev, J., Racine, T.  P., Sinha, C., & Itkonen, E. (Eds.). (2008). The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Part I Questioning Philosophy of Mind

2 Mind and Moral Matter Thomas Wallgren

1. Introduction I first present what I call the research programme in contemporary analytical philosophy of mind and subject core elements of some classical contributions to it, by Jaegwon Kim, John McDowell, John Searle, Daniel Dennett and Peter Hacker to immanent criticism (Sects. 2, 3, 4, and 6). My criticism will be sharp. Nevertheless, the authors are not discussed because of their weakness but rather because of their prominence. They have all been at the forefront in articulating views and arguments which many philosophers, including the present author, are powerfully attracted by. My focus will be exclusively on foundational issues. I will not try to do justice to other aspects of the contributions I discuss. Two major concerns will appear. Firstly, the contributions I have selected end in embarrassment on their own terms. In particular, a pained dialectic between proud commitment to reason and despondent abandonment of reason emerges. Secondly, we learn that the employment of T. Wallgren (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_2

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Wittgensteinian, ‘grammatical’ and ‘therapeutic’ tools for ‘dissolving’ the problems in the philosophy of mind, as developed by Peter Hacker and John McDowell, lead to basically the same impasse as the pursuit of ‘solutions’ by means of constructive argument as we find in the contributions by Kim, Searle and Dennett. To the extent that the authors mentioned are exemplary of the current state of affair in the philosophy of mind the findings suggest the following: There is in current philosophy of mind a widespread habit of overlooking the fact that some issues, which are routinely and explicitly treated as internal and central to the philosophy of mind, are intrinsically linked to controversial aspects of our moral and political self-understanding, which are routinely but implicitly judged to be external to the philosophy of mind. Arguably, progress in the philosophy of mind can only be achieved if we stop imagining that we can get things right as long as we think that in the philosophy of mind there are metaphysical and semantic issues which need to be addressed first and which are separable from moral and political issues, or vice versa.1 So, my leading suggestion is that in order to get things right in the philosophy of mind we need to get right the idea of getting things right in the philosophy of mind. One way to move forward is to inquire into the truth and the falsity, or meaning, of both ideas: of the idea that there is a mind-­ body problem and of the idea that there is no such problem. In the second part of my essay (Sects. 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10) I discuss these issues with special attention to some aspects of the later Wittgenstein’s treatment of them.

2. A Research Programme Many scholars who see themselves as contributing to the philosophy of mind are in broad agreement that they share a set of well-defined problems. Here is one breakdown of the problems we discuss. P1. How, if at all, can we account for the existence of mind or mental phenomena in a world that is physical? Or: Is there mind? This we may call the metaphysical problem in the philosophy of mind.

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P2. How, if at all, can thoughts be about something? Or: How can we account for the capacity of mind to be in touch with the world? This we may call the problems of reference and intentionality in philosophy of mind. Or we may frame it as the problem of normativity in a natural world and ask how (or whether) perception, judgements, beliefs, fear, desire and other aspects of mind can be answerable to the world in a way that involves norms, and hence reason. P3. How can we account for the phenomenal quality of mental phenomena? Or: What can in an objective theory be a correct account of the subjective aspect of experience? This we may call the phenomenological problem in philosophy of mind or the problem of qualia. P4. Is there a legitimate distinction between events and action? Or: Is causal closure true? Is causal closure even a coherent concept? This we may call the problem of freedom in the philosophy of mind. P5. How we can know that (other) people have mind or mental states, for instance that they feel pain? This we may call the epistemological problem in the philosophy of mind. P6. When we say that someone has pain, plans to do something, is able to read, knows herself well, or is out of her mind, what is the correct analysis of the concepts we use? This we may call the problem of semantic analysis, or of meaning, in the philosophy of mind. I call this set of problems the research programme in contemporary philosophy of mind or RPPM.2 Although vague at the boundaries, and possibly, as we shall soon see, bankrupt at its core, such philosophy of mind has been one lively form of “normal science” in Kuhn’s sense from the 1960s to the early 2000s.3 Historically, the emergence of RPPM as normal science depends on the gradual establishment of anti-dualism, materialism and naturalism as the metaphysical orthodoxy of the modern, scientific world-view. In particular, analytical philosophy of mind is informed by the rise of physicalism as the base-line of metaphysics after the second world war.4 During the last decades “externalism” and “enactivism” have emerged as new conceptual nodes alongside “emergentism” and “supervenience” in the philosophy of mind. This ‘E-turn’ and the rise of interest in the ‘4Es’ has added complexity to the field, but does not, it appears to me,

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shift the perspective on the foundational issues that I want to focus on here.5 I will therefore discuss RPPM in the ‘classical’ form as defined by P1–P6. In order to avoid undue generalisation I will focus on key elements of select, eminent and widely read contributions, which appear to me representative of RPPM.  I first highlight some aspects of Jaegwon Kim’s short book Mind in a Physical World (Kim, 1998). I will find reason to say that intellectual embarrassment haunts his work at its core. The reader is reminded that the finding, provocative as it may seem, interests us here more as a finding about ourself and our times than as a finding about Kim. To the extent that our interest turns from a purely theoretical discussion to discussion of dead-ends and pathologies of the intellect, mind and self, our investigation is carried out in the hope that lessons for diagnosis and cure may be taken home.

3. Learning from Jaegwon Kim Jaegwon Kim wrote in a book published some twenty years ago: Q1: “the shared project of the majority of those who have worked on the mind-body problem over the past decades has been to find a way to accommodate the mental within a principled physicalist scheme”.

To work on this problem, or project, is to work on problems described by Kim as Q2: ‘a mainstream metaphysical Problematik of analytical philosophy,’ Q3: ‘robustly metaphysical,’ Q4: ‘systematic philosophical problems’

Kim also wrote: Q5: “Through the 1970s and 1980s and down to this day, the mind-body problem—our mind-body problem—has been that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical.”6

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and so forth. Kim goes on to propose, in the bulk of his short book, views on items P1, P2, P3 and P4 in the research programme in the philosophy of mind RPPM with a focus on items P1 and P4. At the end of his book he sums up his findings. Five aspects are important for us. One is when Kim writes: Q6: ‘To think that one can be a serious physicalist and at the same time enjoy the company of things and phenomena that are nonphysical, I believe, is an idle dream.’

The second is when he writes: Q7: ‘Reductive physicalism’ [the self-description Kim endorses] ‘saves the mental but only as a part of the physical.’

The third, building directly on the second, is this: Q8: ‘ … physicalism, as an overarching metaphysical doctrine about all of reality, exacts a steep price’

and a few lines later again: Q9: ‘Physicalism cannot be had on the cheap.’

Fourthly: Q10: ‘It will be premature, however, to conclude that an all-out dualism offers a more realistic chance of saving the mental. For most of us, dualism is an uncharted territory, and we have little knowledge of what possibilities and dangers lurk in this dark cavern.’

Fifthly, let us note this: Q11: ‘I don’t know how to convince you of this, but it seems clear to me that preserving the mental as part of the physical world is far better than epiphenomenalism or outright eliminativism.’7

I wish, now, to make the following observations.

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O1: In defining his problem area Kim introduces, as we saw, the following words and phrases as startingpoints for the philosophical work that he is about to embark upon: ‘the mind’, ‘a world that is fundamentally physical’, ‘the mental’, ‘physicalist scheme’, ‘robustly metaphysical’ and ‘metaphysics of mind’. These words and phrases are not introduced as a reason to pause for questions, comments or reflection. Kim is at ease with using them without question. O2: Kim is equally at ease, it seems at first, with forming a particular community to which he claims membership and which he wishes to address. The constitution of community is made explicit, quite economically, through the remarkable use of italics in Q5. The community’s distinguishing mark is not, as one might have expected, a shared interest in ‘the mindbody problem’ but, as Kim stresses, in ‘our mind-body problem’. But what is the intellectual content of this distinction between the problem and our problem, what is its justification and what is the moral significance of it? These questions are not raised in Kim’s work. In my further observations, Observations 3–6, I will try to clarify the salience of these first observations, O1 and O2, for understanding core aspects of Kim’s contribution. O3: One aspect of Kim’s work is that the words and phrases which we see that he employs in Q1–Q4 all come before Q5, that is, before the constitution of community is made explicit. The ‘we’ thus formed has then, it seems, as a specific conditions for membership the shared, uncritical acceptance of not having problems with the words and phrases in Q1– Q4. It is when these identity-conditions have first been put in place, by default as it were, that the problems that I listed as constitutive of the research programme RPPM invite themselves. This is, as I now propose, a key aspect of how the mind-body problem of Kim’s particular community is distinct from the mind-body problem other communities may have.

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O4: A conspicuous feature of the discourse in the kind of philosophy of mind that I discuss is what we might call its naturalistic horizon or its naturalist constellation. (Kim uses the term ‘physicalism’. For present purposes the distinction between naturalism and physicalism, which may be useful in other contexts, is irrelevant.) I want to define it—what I will henceforth refer to as the naturalist constellation in the philosophy of mind—as follows: Practitioners in the field share, as it may seem, views of this kind: The world is natural, material or physical; modern science studies this world; such scientific study is an exemplary form of the practice of reason; the results of science make the world intelligible. Moreover, there seems to be a shared view that there is also the thing, or phenomenon, or subject mind (or mental or cognition) and that it is an interesting, important and difficult problem how, or even whether, we can account for mind (the mental, cognition) within the naturalist horizon.

It is a remarkable feature of contemporary philosophy of mind that the views that go into the naturalist horizon go into it in the way they do. They do not go into it as problems or issues to be discussed. They go into it as non-problematic elements, perhaps as prejudices in Gadamer’s sense. Or so it seems. Later in this paper we shall have reason to qualify this characterisation of the naturalist constellation. Should we accept the naturalist constellation? The question is obscure.—At this point of our study we are only beginning to collect some material that may allow us to address it later. The observations that I have contributed so far to my quotes from Kim show that his answer to our question is by implication affirmative, at least to begin with. It is against the backdrop of his assumption that affirmation of the naturalist constellation as just defined can be expected from others as well that Kim’s constitution of community is possible. The question whether we have already at this point of our study met an insufficiently examined but ineliminable core of contemporary philosophy of mind—the spectre at the centre of its rational ambition—is an important one but it is too early to address it here. I will come back to it later.

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O5: The community that Kim constitutes when he juxtaposes the mind-­ body problem and our mind-body problem is entangled in a remarkable intellectual and moral dialectic. The first rung on the dialectic ladder is the implied claim to intellectual excellence at play in Kim’s italicised use of ‘our’.8 The second rung is more conspicuous and it is also essential to Kim’s entire narrative. Kim readily accepts, that within the community to which he belongs, members will differ in what they want to say about the problem they share. Some members may, as we see in Q11, be epiphenomenalists, others may be outright eliminativists. These others, the ‘yous’ among Kim’s ‘wes’ are understood as those who share his problem but remain unconvinced by his arguments. It seems that Kim expects that conversation with them should go on. Standing in conversation is what membership in Kim’s community is. It is interesting, though, that Kim is at a loss about how the conversation could continue. Kim seems to think: If what I have said so far does not convince you, what could do so? How else are we to make sense of the rather mysterious opening words of Q11: ‘I don’t know how to convince you … ‘ We can, it seems to me, in Q11, sense a dim awareness of a problem, as unexpected as troubling, to Kim’s self-­understanding of his community. The problem is that even though Kim’s community as a community of philosophers engaged in the study of their mind-body problem is a community kept together by the idea that its members share in an endeavour to study and perhaps solve their problem on the basis of argument, the community is haunted by the suspicion that its endeavour may come to nothing. The suspicion is rarely acknowledged upfront, but awareness of it comes to the fore, dimly, as I said, in places such as my Q11 from Kim, and more evidently in what philosophers of mind maximally claim. My favourite example is when John Searle suggests that the problem of mind and world is a rare example of a philosophical problem that will be solved scientifically.9 The charm of Searle’s boastful appearance rests with the fact that neither he nor any of his peers would claim that the problems of RPPM have been solved. They trade in what Popper calls ‘promissory materialism’10: they claim certainty that the problems will be solved one day while admitting defeat today. As soon as the issue

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is made explicit, as I do here, it invites the sceptical response: Well, may it not equally well turn out that RPPM will be not be crowned with success, or that it will be defeated, or implode or be transformed in unrecognisable ways.11 This is where Kim takes recourse to a third rung on his dialectical ladder. In Q10 Kim notes, with some anxiety, that some members of his community, in their desire to save the mental may become attracted by ‘all-out dualism’. To see rightly what is at stake here we must note that this particular desire, the desire to ‘save the mental’, is one Kim himself acknowledges. Otherwise it would be difficult to understand why he would profess that his reductive physicalism is both distinct from eliminative physicalism and has some advantage over it.12 My claim is then, that it is precisely the access to an idea of ‘the mental’ as both robustly physical, but at the same time something special (‘distinct’), and hence, a moral advantage that Kim thinks of as his trump in his debate with eliminative materialists.13 If the moral nerve of Kim’s positioning is somewhat hidden in his debate with those peers who stand for eliminativism it is explicit at the other end of the table. Kim elaborates in the last pages of his book the many ‘bad news’ he brings for those in his community who wish, like he does, to save the mental rather than embrace eliminitavism. Having done so his voice suddenly becomes shrill. There, in Q8–Q10, he speaks of the ‘steep price’ that physicalism exacts, adding that physicalism ‘cannot be had on the cheap’. In the last paragraph of the book it seems to dawn on Kim that he cannot be sure that all members of his community will remain unmoved by cheap attractions. It is to these weaklings in his own family that his last address goes when he writes that dualism is not only ‘uncharted territory’ but also a ‘dark cavern.’ But should we not be surprised at the moral fervour that comes in here? Let me go back to the passage that I have not commented on. I cite it, Q6, here again: ‘To think that one can be a serious physicalist and at the same time enjoy the company of things and phenomena that are nonphysical, I believe, is an idle dream.’ I find the passage rather impenetrable. I am tempted to think that we can clarify it by rephrasing it, perhaps like this: ‘One cannot be a physicalist and at the same time maintain that there are things and phenomena that are nonphysical.’ Or: ‘One cannot be a physicalist and a non-physicalist at the same time.’ That seems pretty much like a truism.

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Have we now lost something of Q6? That depends on what work is done, if any, by the words we have eliminated, most notably the words ‘serious’, ‘idle’ and ‘dream’. Do they do moral work? Some other work? Or are those words only a rhetorical ornament? The question is real but it is difficult to answer in the light of the meagre material Kim provides. Luckily the issues I raised can be illuminated and, as I will suggest, answered by indirect means, but still on strictly text-immanent grounds. O6: I claimed, in O3, that Kim constitutes a community of those who accept certain words and phrases as good money in their transactions. I have suggested that it is defining of this particular community that such acceptance is taken for granted without justification. Now, I want to suggest that the root of Kim’s moral trouble lies already here. Western philosophy has since Parmenides seen itself as distinguished by its uncompromising commitment to reason. Since Socrates, the exoteric nature of philosophy has often been emphasised, especially since Kant published his first critique. Kim agrees, it seems, with the idea of philosophy as ambitious in this sense when he writes; Q12: ‘as philosophers we should regard pretty much everything ultimately negotiable.’

But if that is so, if it is our ambition in philosophy to ‘regard pretty much everything negotiable’, what is, then, the root of the problem we have just noted. I mean the problems, which leave Kim at a loss, crying out, as we saw in Q11, rather helplessly, ‘I don’t know how to convince you of this, but it seems clear to me that … ‘ Similarly, if we think of philosophy as radically answerable to public reason how can we explain the difficulties Kim faces in trying to move on from the suspected truisms and moralism of Q6 to conceptual clarification and theoretical argument? Kim provides all textual evidence we need for an answer when he writes: Q13: … it was the papers by J.J.Smart [‘Sensations and Brain Processes’ 1959] and [Herbert] Feigl [‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’, 1958] that

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reintroduced the mind-body problem as a mainstream metaphysical Problematik of analytical philosophy, and launched the debate that has continued to this day. True, Ryle’s The Concept of Mind was out in 1948, and there were of course Wittgenstein’s much debated remarks on mentality and mental language … But Ryle’s and Wittgenstein’s primary concerns were directed at the “logic” of mental discourse rather than the metaphysical problem of explaining how our mentality is related to our physical nature, and moreover Ryle and Wittgenstein, each for different reasons would have denounced the metaphysical mind-body problem as a piece of philosophical nonsense. (Kim, 1998, p. 1)

Two things in Q13 call for attention in the present context. One is about Kim, about what he writes. In a move that for the obligation of philosophy to be answerable to reason—for it to keep everything negotiable— might strike us as astonishing Kim makes clear four things. First, that there has ‘of course’ been a philosophical discussion about the mind happening before the debate that we recognise as our debate got its contours. Second, that philosophers of those earlier days would have ‘denounced’ the problems that are debated in the research programme in contemporary philosophy of mind. Third, that these philosophers of a bygone age had, or might have had— Kim’s use of ‘would have denounced’ rather than some other, more reason-inviting expression, such as ‘argued’ or ‘showed’ puts us on slippery ground here—reasons for their denouncement. The fourth point transpires to the reader when he has read Kim’s book to its end: The reader will then have learnt that Kim will nowhere in his book discuss or explain what those reasons might have been on the basis of which Ryle and Wittgenstein ‘would have’ as Kim (wrongly, it seems to me) suggests, ‘denounced the metaphysical mind-body problem as a piece of philosophical nonsense.’ This fourth point is, of course, a killer point: Kim in effect admits two things. He admits that he is aware that reasons have been given for being suspicious of the notion that the problems in the research programme in contemporary philosophy of mind that he and others discuss make good

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sense. He also admits that he dismisses those reasons without argument. We learn then, it seems, that what Kim early in his book refers to as the “introduction” of a “mainstream Problematik” never had anything to do with reason, argument or learning. The entire edifice is a groundless affair. How can it be the case that these three things are true about Jaegwon Kim: + that he is a philosopher whose contributions to the philosophy of mind are built on thin air and + that he explicitly admits this: that his edifice is built on nothing but air and + that he is a widely read, influential and respected philosopher?

Can we find our way to a generous reading of Kim that dissolves the mystery? Can we, that is, read out from Kim’s text, or from the context in which he works, indications that Wittgenstein’s worries, which Kim sets aside, have, after all, been set aside with reason? Well. It certainly speaks against Kim that his work on the metaphysical problem ends in the impasse we have seen. But can Kim, with some right, trust that to be dismissal of what he calls Wittgenstein’s ‘denouncement’ of metaphysics as nonsense is legitimate. Clearly not. Kim takes for granted that Wittgenstein ‘denounced’ metaphysics as nonsense. Such a perception of Wittgenstein is, I believe, not uncommon but it is inadequate. Wittgenstein often expressed his respect for classical metaphysical ­philosophy.14 Anyone who takes seriously the notion that the Philosophical Investigations is the key source to what Wittgenstein thought was his finest achievement will find it difficult to agree that Witttgenstein denounced metaphysics. The very assumption that it is philosophically innocent to assume that ‘the “logic” of mental discourse’ and metaphysical problems are separable shows ignorance about the enormous work done by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations on exactly this topic. For instance, all discussion there of the so called Private Language Argument is immediately relevant for our understanding of in what sense ‘metaphysical’ questions about, for instance, pain, may also always be ‘logical’ questions. The sheer fact that there is this remark, remark 371 of the

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Philosophical Investigations, ‘Essence is expressed by grammar,’ should alert us to the insufficiency of the claim that Wittgenstein ‘denounced’ metaphysics.15 (I will come back to this issue and this quote below.) We can certainly decide not to pay any attention to Wittgenstein’s work. But Kim’s reaction is not that. It is much more interesting. By doing two things together, mentioning Wittgenstein and claiming something about him which may seem relevant but is quite off the mark, Kim creates, it seems to me, the impression that he has not only registered but also responsibly dealt with the challenge from Wittgenstein to RPPM, when in fact nothing like it has happened. Such manoeuvring cannot easily be avoided in philosophy. We certainly cannot take on every work by all authors. But when it happens that the basis of our own edifice is unveiled as problematic we may want to rethink our base and look again at authors and traditions we dismissed. O7: My contention is that the helplessness in Kim’s book is not due to any singular shortcoming of his. I have commented on his work precisely because I believe it is as fine as typical, influential and respected contributions to RPPM get. Insofar as that is true, we learn that it is typical for RPPM that it is a discourse of unclear problems on unclear grounds ending in intellectual and moral embarrassment. Such a harsh statement can easily be misunderstood. We should recognise the helplessness with which Kim’s book ends as a symptom of larger problems, of what we may call a cultural disease. One aspect of this disease is that in our contemporary culture—a culture, which likes to think of itself as ‘enlightened ‘and ‘scientific’—Kim and others get away with the happy formation of a community of philosophers who accept intellectual lobotomy at the heart of their discipline as the condition of their solidarity. How does this come about? If the intrinsic credentials of RPPM are so very weak why is RPPM attractive? It is easy to point to a-rational factors, such as the intellectual pleasures of RPPM and the seductive promise of paid jobs and social status that become available to anyone who acquires fine enough skills to publish on RPPM in the fora that count. But there is, arguably, another pull-factor

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at work as well. It has the form of an intellectual habit that gives us a pre-­ reflective ground for what we say and also sets limits to what we think it is alright to say. We see this factor at work when philosophers say things like this: It is not the fact that all operations of the human mind [Geist] are dependent on organic substrates that is controversial. The controversy is about the right way of naturalising the mind. (Habermas, 2005, p.  7. My translation) [Francis] Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy, or popular, but ‘to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism.’ (Sheldrake, 2013, p. 212) The effects of material processes, one is inclined to say, can only be material processes; and movement, being a material phenomenon, can only be affected by some other material phenomenon. To think otherwise is ‘animism’ and irreconcilable with a ‘scientific view of the world.’ (von Wright, 1998, pp. 125f ) It would be crazy to regret the idea that natural science reveals a special kind of intelligibility … To discard that part of our intellectual inheritance would be to return to mediaeval superstition. (McDowell, 1996, p. 109)16

Let us first observe the familiarity of the material. We—a ‘we’ to which I believe most people in the modern world in some way belong—are in the habit of taking for granted the unspecified notions that the world is material and that science is a primary form of reason. (The word ‘material’ is here exchangeable for ‘natural’ or ‘physical.’) Many of us are also in the habit of insisting that we are naturalists. The two habits are closely connected, The quotes I have just provided from Habermas, Sheldrake (when he speaks of Sir Francis Crick), von Wright and McDowell bring testimony to this interconnectedness. We should note also that these habits involve a moral and political aspect. People who do not subscribe to those notions are excluded, but not in a morally neutral way. They are excluded confidently, but in a

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fighting spirit. The fighting spirit will seem odd as long as we think of the contemporary research programme in analytical philosophy of mind as an endeavour that is, or would want to be, purely intellectual and morally neutral. But the impression that something odd is at issue goes away as soon as we discard the notion that the programme is morally neutral and the proponents of it self-confident and realise that the programme is imbued with moral aspiration and that it is an anxious programme.17 Naturalism in the philosophy of mind is anxious in two directions. It is anxious, as we have seen very clearly, in Kim’s case, about how to explain itself to itself. But it is also anxious about its enemies. The enemies are many and they have names. The cited authors identify them as animism, vitalism, (medieval) superstition, and in Kim’s case, ‘all-out dualism’. These labels stand for what the authors do not want to be associated with and perhaps also for what they do not even want to think about. (They seem to be naming something that functions almost like bad spirits in fairy tales, like taboo objects, which have the magical power that as soon as they are mentioned they become alive, full of danger.)—The picture we have in front of us now seems to be something like the following: Naturalism is what we know (or think we know) and have (or think we have) and it is also what we want to have, in some form. Animism, ­vitalism etc. is another thing we know (or think we know) and it is something we don’t want, in any form. We can now refine our idea of the naturalist constellation. It is important that it is not only characterised by what naturalists say, by the prejudice they share, but also by what naturalists want to say and what they feel, in a characteristically anxious way, obliged to say. The naturalist constellation is in place as a force that shapes the life journeys of individuals and a whole range of discourses and practices that are typical of our culture. One effect of this constellation is that RPPM, with what we called P1 (the metaphysical problem) as its pinnacle, invites itself. RPPM is interesting, perhaps even great, precisely because it serves the anxious project of naturalism. But why is this anxious project attractive? The official ground would have to be: Because it has reason on its side! But now we find ourselves in a vicious circle. We wanted to stand up for naturalism because we want to be rational and naturalism promises to be rational. Our commitment to RPPM was informed by the notion that mind pres-

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ents a formidable challenge to naturalism and by the hope that when we contribute to RPPM we vindicate naturalism also in this challenging field. But now we have found that RPPM is of no help in this regard. On the contrary, this research programme, RPPM, can only be faithful to naturalism by accepting problem-blindness, raw ungrounded assertion and avoidance of argument at its base. So instead of helping naturalism to its triumph RPPM undermines the belief that naturalism has reason on its side. Let us pause for some reflections. In our discussion we have generalised from select aspects of one short book by Kim to overall claims about RPPM. Can such generalisation be defended? It would certainly not be possible to analyse all relevant positions within the field of RPPM in one essay or one book. But if problems similar enough to those we have found in Kim’s work can be identified in the work of McDowell, Hacker and Dennett then the suggestion that Kim’s problems are typical would already seem more plausible than it does at present. Moreover, McDowell’s, Hacker’s and Dennett’s contributions have the advantage in our context that they all differ from Kim’s proposal in taking the encounter with Wittgenstein seriously. I turn first to McDowell.

4. Learning from John McDowell McDowell’s book Mind and World contributes to RPPM and is distinguished within the field by the prominence McDowell gives to a distinction, inspired by Sellars, between ‘the logical space of reason’ and ‘the logical space of law.’18 McDowell uses this distinction as a resource to place what we in the panorama exposition of RPPM above have called P2 (the problem of normativity), not P1 (the metaphysical problem), at the centre of attention. On this basis McDowell offers the prospect that a way out of the embarrassment we found at the heart of Kim’s work might be achieved if we refigure the conceptual landscape that seems to create problems for RPPM. A further, important reason to turn from Kim to McDowell in the present essay is that McDowell also elaborates on the what we may call the ‘getting it right’ question, which is central to our

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discussion, i.e. on the question what kind of results we should ask for in the philosophy of mind. McDowell’s famous leading idea, in his endeavour to save the respectability of the notions of mind, thought and freedom in a natural world, is to separate two distinctions which are easily collapsed into each other. One is the distinction between ‘natural-scientific intelligibility’ that is achieved when phenomena are assigned a place in what McDowell calls ‘the realm of law’ and ‘the kind of intelligibility something acquires when we situate it in the logical space of reasons’ (also called the realm of reason).19 The other is the distinction between two kinds of nature, the kind that is made intelligible when seen as belonging in the realm of law and another kind of nature, the second nature of human beings which involves ‘exercises of spontaneity’ and is therefore made intelligible when seen as belonging in the realm of reason.20 With these distinctions in hand McDowell manages, as he thinks, and as Kim also wanted to, to pull the rabbit of mind out of the hat of nature without falling into ‘dualism’ (Kim’s word) or ‘supernaturalism’ (McDowell’s word21). Our primary interest here is in McDowell’s notion of the philosophical status of his leading idea. In the Introduction to the second edition of Mind and World McDowell goes out of his way to say that he has only two aims: One is to provide an account that presents to us the depth of the roots that make the stark choice between bald naturalism and supernaturalism seem inevitable. The account seeks do justice to the sense we may have that the choice presents itself as philosophically obligatory and that the obligation fosters anxiety. McDowell says that his book, as it takes on this first task, has a ‘diagnostic spirit’. The second task McDowell acknowledges is that he wants to provide an ‘explanation’ that can ‘enable us to unmask the appearance [of the philosophical obligation he has diagnosed] as illusion’. In view of his professed second task McDowell says he has also wanted to ‘point towards a cure.’22 The problem I want to zoom on in is the tension between the tasks McDowell acknowledges, involving only diagnoses and the unmasking of illusion but not the task of taking positions on the one hand and the very many places in his book where McDowell takes a stand on issues on the other hand.

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Here is one example of McDowell taking a stand on an issue that is controversial within contemporary philosophy of mind: ‘According to the picture I have been recommending, our sensibility yields states and occurrences with conceptual content. … I have urged that conceptual capacities, capacities for the kind of understanding whose correlative is the kind of intelligibility that is proper to meaning, are operative also in our perception of the world apart from human beings.’ (McDowell, 1996, p. 72)23 Places such as these would not be anomalous with respect to McDowells professed aims were they stepping stones towards his diagnosis and cure. But that is not their function. The sentences I have quoted, and many more, are essential elements in an endeavour of some different kind. Of what kind? That is not very clear. McDowell is right, it seems to me, that his endeavour does not boil down to a traditional or ordinary kind of constructive philosophy in which the point is to present arguments for a theory that the author thinks all rational interlocutors ought to accept. He is not a Kim, or Searle, or Dennett, or Tye, or Churchland, who offers a theory about the mind-body problem that suggests itself as the true theory. One difference between McDowell and such theorising is that McDowell is explicitly open to the notion that what he offers in his book is only ‘one way’ of resolving the tension that gives rise to the anxious sense that we are ­philosophically obliged to choose between bald naturalism and supernaturalism. McDowell is at ease with the notion that there may also be other ways of resolving the tension. (McDowell, 1996, p. xviii) We may say that one achievement that is claimed, even if not announced as an aim, in McDowell’s book is that he provides an example of a doctrine which has a peculiar, non-exclusive claim to truth. We could call such doctrines ‘weak’ or ‘liberal’ philosophical doctrines.24 Keeping in view, still, the tension between what McDowell says that he aims at and what he claims to achieve I will next present in a nutshell a line of argument that is fundamental in Mind and World. As we have recorded McDowell is upfront that he ‘rejects … the dualism of reason and nature’ that is ‘the real source of problems of traditional empiricism’ because it implies that if humans are partly a-rational or ‘mere animals’ and intelligible in this part only as belonging to the realm

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of law and if humans also have reason and are hence intelligible in this part only as belonging to the realm of reason then it follows that humans are ‘metaphysically split’. (McDowell, 1996, pp. 155, 115 and 108) He is also upfront that he endorses the view that ‘exercises of spontaneity’ (in the Kantian sense that involves conceptual normativity, and hence reason) belong to the ‘mode of living’ of humans (or of ‘normal human organisms’ or ‘human animals’ as he sometimes says). (McDowell, 1996, pp. 78 and 84) Let me call the elements presented so far the first part of the argument. In what I call the second part McDowell, building now on Gadamer, claims that ‘human infants are mere animals’ and that they acquire their second nature as thinkers and intentional agents by being initiated into ‘natural language’ which ‘serves as a repository of tradition.’ Finally, McDowell claims in the third part of his argument that a ‘standing obligation to engage in critical reflection’ is part of the traditions we inherit (McDowell, 1996, pp. 123f. and 126). The structure of the first part of the argument is interesting for us. McDowell does not work from argument to the conclusion that we ought to reject dualism. Nor does McDowell work from argument to the conclusion that we ought to accept his endorsements. McDowell goes out of his way to make it clear that his appeal is to a completely different kind of evidence, or perhaps not to evidence at all, but to some other kind of rational backing. There are three steps. One is the claim that if we reject what McDowell rejects and endorse what he endorses than there is no problem left with pulling the rabbit out of the hat. The second step consists in argument to the effect that such pulling will meet insurmountable difficulties unless we reject what McDowell rejects and endorse what he endorses.25 In other words, the claim is that if we do not follow McDowell we will be left with an inevitable, stark choice between two equally unattractive philosophical positions: ‘bald naturalism’, effectively denying the reality of the realm of reason, and ‘supernaturalism’, claiming that mind is not part of the world. The third step is the invitation to ask yourself: Now what do you prefer, the position that leads to the stark choice or the position that leads you to liberation from the felt need to choose between the two? We see that McDowell is not true to his two-part programme of diagnosis (of why and how anxiety comes about) and cure (showing that the

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anxiety was due to illusion). What he does is something different. He presents two conceptual vistas and he recommends the latter above the former. The reason for the recommendation is not, as we might have expected in view of McDowell’s explicit programme, that the other options are based on illusion. All options are in equal measure based on choice, on what we reject and what we endorse. No option has the privilege of stronger intellectual merit than the other. The only reason why McDowell favours his choices over the alternatives is that the alternatives lead to an anxiety that does not, as McDowell suggests, follow from the conceptual canvas he proposes. So, McDowell recommends his ideas in view of a new kind of achievement which is different from his declared aims of diagnosis and liberation from illusion. The new element is the prospect of freely chosen liberation from anxiety. We should observe that this element introduces two distinct novelties to the discussion. One is that we now have the word ‘anxiety’ in the place of the argument where we first had ‘illusion’. The other novelty is that McDowell’s ambition is transformed. What started out as a cool search for unmasking intellectual illusion—a thing McDowell promised to us as the product of uncommitted philosophy, or pure reason—has become a programme which recommends itself as a moral or existential opening, not on mere theoretical grounds: If I realise that something is an illusion no exercise of will, no choice, is needed to get rid of it. But McDowell invites us to choose his platform, not to see through the illusory nature of the alternatives. If we follow him McDowell promises liberation from anxiety, but to what? That is explained in the third part of the argument in which McDowell explicates the idea that critical reflection is part of the tradition we inherit with our ‘second nature.’ In short, McDowell there offers us an existential choice, or a Kierkegaardian leap, from an anxious life to life in the world of free thinkers who exercise their freedom in reflective and critical modification of tradition.26 In the end McDowell emerges as a moral and political philosopher whose business is to produce weak doctrines, which he claims, have the power, if we accept them, to liberate us from anxieties to a life-form concomitant with Gadamer’s vision of enlightened tradition and the Socratic idea of philosopher’s paradise.27 Some complications deserve mention. How are we to tell, to use McDowells idiom, ‘crazy’ modification of tradition from modification

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that is not crazy?28 That is the first complication. And what do we want to say, after all, about McDowell’s ‘rejection’ of the dualism of reason and nature that propels bald naturalism? That is the second open question. The third is this: What can we make of the fact that McDowell announces an aim that he does not achieve and achieves aims he does not announce? The second complication has its root in the fact that when McDowell rejects the dualism that bald naturalism thrives on the very gesture of rejection shows that he remains, with Kim and others who work within RPPM, in the grip of seeing this dualism as making sense. We might have expected McDowell to work towards the unmasking of the idea that there is something there to understand in bald naturalism, or more broadly, in the naturalist constellation. But no, McDowell rejects one premise, which bald naturalism needs to explain itself, namely, the axiom that there is a metaphysical gulf between nature and reason, only to replace it with another metaphysical premise, namely, the axiom that there is second nature. He does so on purely moral grounds. Doing so he can, he seems to think, earn a place among respectable naturalists and also ‘save mind.’ So, we end with McDowell, as with Kim, with this: • The notice that at the end of the day, moral conviction and persuasion, not theoretical argument, appear as the lender of last resort in the work of the philosopher. • The notice, also, that McDowell’s argument, like Kim’s, gravitates, against the self-understanding McDowell announces in the Introduction to his book, around the sensed need to respond to the first of the problems in our overview of RPPM. So, we see here again, in the case of McDowell as we saw in the case of Kim, the secret operations of the naturalist constellation.29

 . Evading Naturalism vs. Evading the Evasion 5 of Naturalism Let us define evasion in philosophy as follows: evasion occurs when an author announces that she subscribes to the view or doctrine X (for instance ‘naturalism’) and does not support some other view or doctrine

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(for instance ‘dualism’, ‘animism’ or ‘supernaturalism’) and she does not give grounds for the announcement nor does she explain her concepts. Habermas, von Wright, McDowell and Kim are our examples of philosophers who evade naturalism. Should we in the same sense of philosophical evasion, evade the evasion of naturalism? So, when Kim says that as philosophers we should regard pretty much everything ultimately negotiable, implying a distinction between ‘everything’ and ‘pretty much everything’ should naturalism, or the evasion of it, fall outside the range of our interest in ‘pretty much everything’? The question is difficult: What is the right level of reflexivity and the right kind of reflexive concern in philosophy. Does reflection come to an end where we reach bedrock?—And where is that? Where all agree? Or: Where nonsense begins?—My suggestion at this point of our inquiry is that these questions may not allow for general answers, but that they can be addressed fruitfully case by case.30 So, in the case of RPPM under scrutiny here, we may ask: In my approach to what Kim and McDowell offer us, am I blind to the pressing reasons we have to face squarely problem 1 (P1, the metaphysical problem) in RPPM? And do I propagate animism and superstition against the scientific world-view? These questions are fundamental to our discussion. The discussion so far may give the impression that we are evading them. But in fact we are searching for ways of addressing these fundamental questions that would be more rationally responsible, less evading, than anything we can achieve as long as we assume what we can respond to them rationally without removing RPPM, as we have it today, from the centre of our attention in the philosophy of mind. Here are some half-­ way comments. We have no quarrel with people who are interested in what happens in the brain when a person takes a certain drug or goes for a morning walk and who turn to neuroscience for answers. We also have no quarrel with people who look at correlations between taking this kind of drug or morning walks and suicide rates. They will be happy with the empirical findings whatever they are. But if people say that scientific study of the brain will tell us something interesting and important about suicide and that if we want to decrease the rate of suicide in the population we should invest hope and money in neuroscientific R & D that is where we ask:

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Are we sure that we understand this interest, where it comes from, what place it occupies in our lives? We have above found reason to be suspicious of people, including philosophers, who think they have a clear idea of what kind of question is the question: ‘When I raise my arm, what is the relation between the neural and muscular activity (body, matter) and my action (soul, mental phenomena, freedom)?’31—Does this suspicion mean that I am against reason? If someone asks me: Do you understand that ‘our intellectual climate is irreversibly shaped by the pressure to such dualisms as the dualisms between reason and the more evidently ‘natural’ aspects of character?’32 I would say: ‘I think we may have more freedom and greater responsibility for our freedom than is suggested by this question.’—What can I say if someone asks whether I am questioning, denying or undermining the truth of what Habermas writes here: ‘[We should not allow ourselves to forget] the undeniable historical steps of progress, which exist in all the dimensions in which people may learn’ (Habermas, 2012b, p.  98. My translation),33 and when he connects this statement to the assumption that only a naturalised idea of ‘Geist’ is reasonable today (Habermas, 2012a, pp. 34 ff.).34 One possible way in which the conversation could go on from here is if we ask: What concepts of progress and learning, and of naturalisation, does Habermas assume here?35 Neuroscientific research can tell us what happens in a person’s brain during the first three minutes after the suppression of the flow of blood to it. But can we also learn through neuroscience whether a person is alive? In some sense, yes. Our ways of arriving at a point when we stop caring for someone and start preparing for care of their corpse have a variation and science plays a role in debates about the matter.36 But can we learn that there is not life, or, no morally significant distinction between live and dead matter? We may bury our dog. (Gaita, 2000, pp. 194f.)37 But what about our car, robot or garbage?—What ideas do we have of how to solve, resolve or dissolve, of how to address, scientifically or philosophically, the dispute between people who say that they are naturalists and panpsychists versus others who say that they are naturalists and eliminative materialists versus others still who say that they are naturalists and eliminative materialists and panpsychists?

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I would say to both McDowell and to Habermas: ‘If I have to choose between radical commitment to reason, truth and learning and radical commitment to progress, science, liberal society and the modern way of life, as Rorty perhaps thought we must do, everything in the present essay may be read as a testimony to preference for the former commitment over the latter.’ And parts of it are intended as criticism of the idea, assumed implicitly as it seems to me, by McDowell and Habermas in the quotes provided, and explicitly I believe, at times by Rorty, that commitment to the former will follow automatically from commitment to the latter.38 So, the question how to understand science, and more generally the dialectic of enlightenment, and how to put these topics and our responses to them rationally in their proper place, is a motive that underlies my interest in RPPM.

 . Learning from Maxwell Bennett, Peter 6 Hacker, John Searle and Daniel Dennett The exchange between Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker (writing jointly and expressing a shared view) on one side and John Searle and Daniel Dennett on the other side in a book published in 2007 now offers itself to us for two reasons (Bennett M. ed.). It places the sixth problem, P6, the problem of meaning, in our overview of RPPM at the centre of attention. McDowell’s problematic aim, the idea that in philosophy of mind the aim is to unmask illusion, is also a key theme. For present purposes it is sufficient that we record one aspect of the exchange. Crucially for us, Searle and Dennett follow Bennett and Hacker in zooming in on this particular passage by Wittgenstein: It comes to this: Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.39

Searle, Dennett and Bennett and Hacker make very different things with the remark. Bennett and Hacker bring in the passage as witness and expression of their own stance, which we may for present purposes summarise as fol-

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lows. Bennett and Hacker notice that neuroscientists today often say that ‘the brain has experiences, believes things, interprets clues on the basis of information made available to it and makes guesses.’ They then famously claim that such ‘application of psychological predicates to the brain makes no sense.’ The mistake arises from what the authors call the ‘mereological fallacy’ of saying of parts of human beings what can only, with right, be said about the whole. The fallacy leads, Bennett and Hacker contend, to grammatical error. On their view it is, for instance, a grammatical error to attribute consciousness to a brain or its parts. To say this is, they claim, to make a conceptual point (Bennett & Hacker, 2007a. Quotes from pp. 16, 21, 22, and 21, in this order).40 Here is Searle: Searle writes that ‘behaviour provides not just inductive grounds for the presence of mental phenomena, but logical criteria.’ So far, Searle seeks agreement with Bennett and Hacker and with Wittgenstein as Searle understands him. Then, choosing a different path, Searle makes a distinction between the (behavioural) grounds for attributing mental phenomena and the fact that is attributed. He says that even if behaviour may be criterial for the application of mental concepts, and even if grammar tells us what we can say literally and what we can only say metaphorically, it does not follow that mental phenomena could not exist in the brain. ‘All that could follow,’ he writes, is that ‘if we are to talk about mental states in the brain then the brain must be part of a causal mechanism capable of producing behavior.’ Unsurprisingly, on this basis, and after some further, nice analytical footwork Searle, arrives at conclusions Bennett and Hacker object to, such as this: ‘all conscious states exist in the brain’ (Searle, 2007, pp.  101, 105f. and 116) and are available to neuroscientific study. Searle’s point, we may say, is to give privilege to questions about what is the case over questions about grammatical criteria. It is on this basis that Searle announces that he has hope that the mind-body problem will become one of those rare philosophical problems that has admitted of ‘a solution in the natural sciences.’ (Searle, 2007, p. 123). Here is Dennett: Dennett agrees with Searle that Bennett’s and Hacker’s wholesale rejection of the attribution of mental properties to the brain is mistaken. But where Searle wants to shift the ground of the debate from grammar to facts Dennett’s strategy is to challenge Bennett

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and Hacker at their own, ‘Wittgensteinian’ terrain. Drawing still on the remark all discussants refer to, remark 281 of the Philosophical Investigations, Dennett agrees with Bennett and Hacker against Searle, that we can only say of what resembles persons that they have sensations. But he says that we have two levels of explanation ‘when the subject matter is human minds and action’. One is the ‘personal level’ and the other is ‘subpersonal’. Once we agree about this we confront the task of relating the two levels. Dennett’s decisive turn is the idea of ‘parts’ that resemble human beings. Brains and their parts can, in Dennett’s terminology, be regarded as ‘subpersonal’ and (therefore) as ‘personlike agents’. On this basis Dennett holds that we can say of brains and their parts, as well as of robots and computers, that they resemble human beings and that ‘this resemblance is sufficient to warrant an adjusted use of psychological vocabulary to characterize that behavior’ (Dennett, 2007, pp. 78, 78f., 88 and 78, in this order). With this divergence between distinguished philosophers, what to do? Can we, perhaps, try to sort out which view is right? Or should we look for yet another, correct view? Do these questions define, now, the philosophical task? Is this our responsibility, as philosophers, whose goal is truth?—What is it that we need to get right? And what is it like to get right what we can in this context consider as getting it right? The remaining sections will provide some glosses on these topics.

 . Beyond Both Problem-Solving and Problem-­ 7 Dissolving Philosophy It seems to me that lessons of some importance for how we place Wittgenstein in the philosophy of mind can now be drawn. When McDowell articulates the aims of his Mind and World he mentions unmasking of illusion as one aim. According to a significant line of scholarship drawing on Wittgenstein the attainment of this aim has nothing to do with the establishment of doctrines or true thesis. The idea is that when we realise that something that we thought made sense does not make sense it is not like realising that there is this thought and this thought is nonsensical. Instead it is like realising that there is not now

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and there never was a thought there at all, there was only the illusion that there is a thought.41 This is one explication of the idea that the goal of Wittgensteinian therapeutic philosophy is the dissolution of philosophical problems, not their solution. Dissolution is achieved when illusions of sense are overcome and purported philosophical obligations are unmasked as unreal. How different is work that aims at the dissolution of problems from work that aims at the solution of problems?—We ask: Is there mind in the physical world? And we go on to (A): to prove that there is (not) mind. We again ask: Is there mind in the physical world? And we go on to (B): to unmask as an illusion the notion that the question ‘Is there mind in the physical world?’ is a real question, that it makes sense.—Are (A) and (B) distinct alternatives? I suspect that both alternatives look clearer than they are, that the idea that we might choose between them is therefore also not very clear and that clinging to one or the other of the alternatives is unhelpful and even detrimental to some real needs in the philosophy of mind. Let us now ask: Are there interesting similarities between work that aims at the dissolution of problems and work that aims at the solution of problems? And let us look again at (A) and (B).—What similarities may we notice? One is this. Both pursuits are modelled upon binary oppositions. (I invoke, not without risk, Derrida).42 In (A) the opposition is between propositions, theses, theories and doctrines that are true and those that are false. In (B) the opposition is between propositions, theses, theories and doctrines which make sense and combinations of words which do not figure in thought, which do not make sense. When we keep this similarity between (A) and (B) in mind we may say also the following. In (A) as well as in (B) the task of philosophy is to get things right in that special way of getting things right which consists in establishing clear alternatives and then identifying one as true (correct, right) and the other as false (incorrect, wrong). In (A) we get things right when we establish where truth is and where falsity is. In (B) we get things right when we establish where there is sense and where there is not sense. A lot of ink has been spilled over the question how the ‘grammatical’ understanding of Wittgensteinian dissolution of philosophical problems differs from the ‘therapeutic’ understanding of the same. My suggestion

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is that those differences are for present purposes irrelevant while the similarity I noted is highly relevant: the most relevant similarity is the promise that when philosophy reaches its goal our philosophical problem will have gone way. This promise is, I think, suspicious. Another similarity between grammatical and therapeutic Wittgenstein of some importance here is the other-directedness of both pursuits. I mean with this the idea that in grammatical and therapeutic philosophy the writer addresses the reader from the position of one who knows and can bring others over from ignorance to understanding.43 This may be contrasted with the notion of philosophy as work on oneself, on how one sees things. (Cf. Wittgenstein, Nyman, Winch, & von Wright, 1980, p. 24) We should, I believe, read Wittgenstein, with Socrates and Sextus Empiricus, as a ‘sceptical’ philosopher, understood as one who does not think that anything goes wrong in philosophy if the search does not come to an end. Such ‘unending’ sceptical philosophy can be seen as a search and caring for community, for the conceptual conditions that shape the lives we share. I think we should read the later Wittgenstein as inviting us to this kind of search for self and care for community. To illustrate this idea and show how it can be productive let us look again at some of our earlier findings. Have I not been suggesting the following? It is a mistake, a bad thing in philosophy, when Kim and his likes form community by way of the assumption that philosophy progressed when it moved from a stage during which the idea that there is a metaphysical problem about the relation between mind and body had been denounced as nonsensical to a new stage during which that same idea was embraced as a fundamental problem. And did I not suggest also that in order to move on towards truth we need to take a stand on the dispute between what Hacker and Bennett, Searle and Dennett about what to learn from the Philosophical Investigations 281? The first point to make is to look back at my discussion of Kim. I registered a fair deal of irritation and disappointment. But I have not contended that Kim is mistaken. Something far more important than intellectual mistake is at stake.—That is one way of offering the idea that we may learn more if we stop thinking that in the philosophy of mind answers to our questions about progress are answers to questions of the

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form: Which view is right?, and ask instead what difference the differences we have noted makes. The issue, we might say, is about the quality of our attention. To get some flesh on this bare bone, let us look first at the distinctions between factual (empirical) questions and conceptual (grammatical) questions and between sense and nonsense and their relation.44 We have seen that the difference between Bennett and Hacker and Searle turns around the former and the difference between Bennett and Hacker and Dennett around the latter distinction. But what about correctness here? About who is right in these debates? As soon as we give up the idea that this is the question we need to answer it becomes easy to see that these questions lead to an impasse in both cases. We may now ask, with respect to Hacker versus Searle: Do we have an idea of what it would be like to find out whether it is either factually correct (or incorrect) or conceptually confused (or not confused) to say that pain is located in the brain? And we may ask with respect to Hacker versus Dennett: Do we have an idea of what it would be like to find out whether it either makes sense or does not make sense to say that parts of the brain are like human beings and that we can ascribe pain to them?— Hacker, Searle and Dennett do of course give their different, definite answers to these questions. But we know that they disagree and anyone familiar with their polemic will suspect that they are not on a path towards agreement. The reason is, as I submit, that it is not clear what agreement would amount to. More interesting than finding out which side in these debates is right is to consider what it is like to think that one or the other option suggested in these polemics is true or makes sense (or, gets the question of sense and nonsense right). Let us call ‘St. Ludwig’ (Dennett) as our witness. On which side is he in these debates when he says: And now this is one way in which the problem may be stated further: Would your attitude towards your friend or towards anyone remain the same if when he lies to you, you could have observed the course of electrical impulses over a period of five minutes in slow motion as they culminated in his speaking. Would you still be inclined to blame him? Now imagine that your friend is only a cog or a certain part of a grand electrical system, Schopenhauer’s Will, then would not you contemplate that with horror? [ … ] W. said, I think, that the problem is crucial. (Bouwsma, 1986, p. 16)

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The quote is from Bouwsma’s notes from conversations with Wittgenstein which took place in August 1949. I am at loss with the reference to Schopenhauer and will not comment on it. The hermeneutical questions about the authority of the Bouwsma notes in discussion of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy are complex. I will here assume that the passage is compatible with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially as we have it in the so called first part of the Philosophical Investigations, and that it allows insight into how Wittgenstein himself understood the notion of philosophical reason and, generally, of what it is to be as ambitious as possible in our use of reason, including also specifically, in discussions of human mind and soul. I proceed to some staccato observations and proposals. In his conversation with Bouwsma Wittgenstein is not, so to say, on the way to a rejection of the picture he presents as mistaken or senseless. This picture is not one against which Wittgenstein wants to offer a cure, it is a picture that brings to light problems we have, with lies, betrayal, disappointment. This observation is fundamental in our context. It is fundamental for us partly because of the light it sheds on the disputes between Hacker, McDowell, Kim, Searle and Dennett. It is easy to think that in our dealing with these disputes our task is to take side on the basis of a rational evaluation of their respective arguments. But Wittgenstein suggests another possibility and he does so, it seems to me, without giving up on reason. Wittgenstein does not enter a debate about naturalism and dualism nor does he marshal the distinctions factual/empirical and sense/nonsense to fight against the picture he proposes or to show that there is something wrong in it. His attitude is more like this. He says: this picture is there, in our life. Now what can we say? Who am I who has this idea entering my thoughts? What does it mean to me? How can I place it and how, if I offer it to you, in this conversation, can you help me in placing it?—If we take Bouwsma’s note to be wholly compatible with Wittgenstein’s mature conception of philosophy, then, I take it as an indication that contrary to a popular opinion, his contribution to the philosophy of mind does not serve the purpose of liberating us from illusions of sense or meaningless questions.45 On the contrary, if we think that Wittgenstein wanted to show that the mind-body problem and other classical problems in philosophy are mere illusions of problems we get no closer to what he was after then we get if we read him, with Searle,

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Dennett and many others, as a fountain of ideas for a theory of mind that is compatible with naturalism and a scientific world view. Now, it may seem that all this is far too abstract. Could not problem-­ dissolving Wittgensteinians, like McDowell, Bennett and Hacker, and constructive theorists working within RPPM, like Kim, Dennett and Searle, easily agree that philosophy, in the Bouwsma note, in the Philosophical Investigations, as well as in the Socratic dialogues, is about our confusion, about our difficulties with understanding what or thoughts are and what our words mean. Someone says: The value of eliminative materialism is precisely in how resolutely it takes us out of the illusion that there is life and mind. In this sense eliminative materialism achieves perfectly the liberation from illusion that McDowell and Hacker rightly see as the task of philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein to achieve.—Are Wittgenstein’s aims, when they are interpreted in this way any different from those of eliminative materialism and are they any better?—Let us keep this question in mind and return to our earlier, abstract claim that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, like all radically Socratic, sceptical philosophy is not in the business of getting it right if getting it right is understood as involving either the idea, or the promise, of resulting in a true theory or in liberation from illusion. On both these accounts (on the true theory account and the truth about meaning account) the promise of philosophy resides in its power to take us out of confusion. But look, now, at the Bouwsma report: Wittgenstein is not raising warnings against a false or confused way of looking at human life. He is taking a close look at a picture that comes naturally to us, that invites itself. He does not make it go away nor do we get the impression that he encourages that we should overcome it. The task he undertakes is to stare the picture in the face. In recognising this picture as one that seems natural to us we may learn something about who we are and what we think of others, how we live with them. Whether we like it or not, it is part of our condition that we think of ourselves and others as automatons, fallen devils, robots, zombies—creatures who are helpless, inculpable, soulless; creatures whom we must forgive because they do not know what they do.46 It is one thing if in philosophy we see these thoughts as thoughts that need to be understood, made intelligible, lived with and perhaps fought and another if we try to explain them away.—One of Wittgenstein’s themes

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in his notes on Frazer (scientific man) is that Frazer seems to him ‘much more primitive than most of his savages’ exactly insofar as Frazer thinks that he sees things as they are while the savages (superstitious man) live under illusion and are confused. But Wittgenstein did not write these remarks on Frazer in the spirit of showing that Frazer went wrong because of some theoretical or intellectual mistake (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 131). So this is I my suggestion. The business of Wittgensteinian, Socratic, sceptical philosophy, in the philosophy of mind and in other fields of philosophy, is progress and truth. It is to get it right but in the right way.

 . The Invincibility of Naturalism 8 and of Anti-Naturalism In Sect. 3 we found that close to the heart of the realm of reason—in analytical philosophy of mind—we find naked unreason. We have then tabled the proposal that in the realm of reason inhabited by analytical philosophers progress may take new forms if we stop insisting that the aim is true propositions or true theories about mind and world and if we also give up the idea that progress will be had if we replace that search with a search for true verdicts about where there is sense and where there is nonsense in the discourse of mind. I have also proposed, even if this idea has not been foregrounded so far, that in philosophy neither agreement between rational participants nor overcoming of confusion (whether factual or ideal in a Habermasian or Peircean sense) are criterial for the soundness of arguments. Learning processes, rational progress, enhanced mutual understanding thanks to the power of good argument, may come in the form that we understand better how confusing and difficult are the things which are important to us. While such learning processes in philosophy may lead us to agreement it may also be the case that we do not arrive at agreement, but rather acquire a new, different, perhaps also more lucid, understanding of differences and distances between us which explain why we do not come to agreement. When this happens it need not be the case that something has gone wrong in philosophy. I will next try to develop this notion a bit.

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We have seen above that from the perspective of Bennett and Hacker it is easy enough to explain why naturalism about the mind is in a straightforward sense mistaken. We can with them say: ‘To have an attitude towards a soul is different from thinking that the mind is an emergent property of the body or supervenient on neural processes or belongs to nature thanks to human second nature.’47 Or, we can say with them, ‘Only of something that is like a human being do we say that it has experience. If you transgress the grammatical rules that govern the meaningful use of the notion ‘something that is like a human being’ you are speaking nonsense or changing the subject.’ And we can add: ‘We can see reason for saying this. There is truth in it, in this paraphrase of what Bennett and Hacker have argued.’—We have also seen that it is easy enough to show how to defend naturalism against such criticism. We only need to say, with Dennett, this: ‘There is such a thing as learning, also from empirical science. Such learning can give us reason to reconsider the boundaries of sense and reason to see a new way of speaking as a better way of getting on. Therefore the Bennett-Hacker argument against naturalism does not suffice to prove naturalism about the mind wrong.’ Again we can add: ‘We can see reason for saying this. There is truth in it, in this paraphrase of what Dennett has argued.’ The question may of course come up: But is it not important to see which stance is better? Must we not try to find out on which side there is more truth? The question may seem very important. But, as the reader must have sensed by now, I am suggesting that the task here may not be to find out who is right or more right than the other. We are, as I suggest, dealing with an issue which can not be understood well at all as long as it is posed in terms of true/false (or sense/nonsense) or in terms of quantity of truth. The quality of the truth is what we need to attend to. We should ask: what are we taking on board when we say that there is truth on one or both sides in the debate. Now, someone may ask: Are such questions scientific, everyday or philosophical questions? The last question suggests a compartmentalisation of responsibility which I think would lead us into the dark. I will come back to this. We have suggested that the debate seems not to be intellectually decidable between (i) those who retort to grammar or therapeutic philosophy and claim on its grounds that naturalism in the philosophy of mind can

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only thrive if we take nonsense as sense and (ii) those who deny that and claim that the shift to naturalism in the philosophy of mind is progressive.48 Hence, even if we think that the idea that the rise of the naturalist constellation represents progress in philosophy is vague and implausible, the idea is also invincible.—There is no way to show that it is intellectually irresponsible to commit oneself to it. If you want to devote yourself to clarifying what the issues are in a naturalist philosophy of mind and if you want to contribute new conceptual analysis or innovations to address and solve issues in RPPM there is no argument that can stop you. I take this as a lesson from Wittgenstein. But, obviously Wittgenstein did not endorse or commit himself to the naturalist research programme in the philosophy of mind. I think we may even say that he resented it and fought it. I want now to indicate in what range of argument I see the deepest philosophical challenge coming from Wittgenstein to naturalist philosophy of mind. It has often been assumed, by Kim, Hacker, Searle, Dennett and others that Wittgenstein’s most important challenge to naturalism in the philosophy of mind comes from his remarks on the philosophy of mind. I think that blinds us to the more fundamental importance of how Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations reshuffles the conceptual framework within which the issues in the philosophy of mind have their life. The first paragraph of the first remark in the Philosophical Investigations is a quote from Augustine about how children learn to speak. The quote presents what we may call the representationalist view of language that we find also in Wittgenstein’s own earlier work Tractatus Logico-­ Philosophicus. In the second paragraph questions are put which tip our confidence in this view off balance. One idea that is foregrounded is this: ‘These words give, it seems to me, a particular picture of the essence of human language. … In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. … It is the object for which the word stands.’ What kind of intervention in a naturalist philosophy of mind is this? Is it the first step in an intervention that leads to a denouncement of metaphysics? The idea of later Wittgenstein as anti-metaphysical is widespread but based, I think, on a serious underestimation of how, with what intensity and depth, later Wittgenstein takes on metaphysical issues. The

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on-take begins in Philosophical Investigations 1 but to begin to see that it begins there and how it begins we must take seriously two things; the explicit announcement by Wittgenstein, in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, that he will be doing a ‘criss-cross’ investigation, as well as the polyphonic form of the text itself.49 If these elements are not seen Philosophical Investigations 1 may strike one only as a contribution to the philosophy of language that takes the representationalist paradigm also of his own earlier work as its target. But if we attend to the criss-cross structure and polyphonic approach of Wittgenstein we can see Philosophical Investigations 1 as the beginning of a conversation also about reality, world and what there is. The challenge is to traditional metaphysics and logic but in a queer, transgressive way. Logic becomes an explicit topic in Philosophical Investigations 38. By remark 58 of the Philosophical Investigations, latest, Wittgenstein’s discussion quite explicitly addresses not only semantic questions about meaning but also immediately ontological questions of the type: what is there (what exists)? And, as we noted earlier, when we arrive at Philosophical Investigations 371 and read this, ‘Essence is expressed by grammar’, the connection between Wittgenstein’s linguistic issues in Philosophical Investigations 1 and the traditional metaphysical inquiry into what really or truly exists is quite evident.50 The idea of the Philosophical Investigations as an anti-metaphysical manifesto and the notion that Wittgenstein denounced the metaphysical mind-body problem or that he would have rejected the naturalistic constellation or bald naturalism or eliminative materialism are, I think wrongheaded. At least they are not easy to bring in accord with the seriousness with which he considers the thought experiment in the Bouwsma report. But we see also that his response to the thought experiment is not to ask as a question to be handed over to science: Could this be true? His attention is ethical.51 We may say, also, that the quality of his attention is directly ethical in the following sense: There is no move via a theoretical question asking ‘is this picture a picture that could be true?’ to the further question ‘if it is true, what would follow for moral life.’ The picture is a moral picture. The pertinence of the Bouwsma report in the present context is this: In the Bouwsma report Wittgenstein gives us a reason to say that the very idea that there is a metaphysical mind-body problem may involve a previous, perhaps unnoticed, commitment to the idea that mind and body are

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words whose meaning is in some way or other dependent on what objects they stand for. And he suggests that we may not understand this idea well by looking at how to analyse the metaphysical issues, the questions what mind and body are, what kind of relation to reality, to objects, they have, what kind of being they have or such else. This is so because, as Wittgenstein suggests, the roots of the idea that such questions about mind and body are interesting, perhaps important, are in a certain picture of the essence of language. So, perhaps we will not understand the metaphysical issues, what they are, well unless we look at the idea of language without which we would not ask exactly those questions about mind and body. Am I now saying, as Kim does, but only in a more roundabout way, that Wittgenstein denounced the metaphysical mind-body problem as nonsensical? Is that what we can learn from Wittgenstein about the philosophy of language that it is reductive, nonsensical, impossible or false to think of human language as Quine or Davidson or Habermas or biosemantic theorists think of it?—This would be the case insofar as we would read Wittgenstein as arguing that the Augustinian picture of language that he considers in Philosophical Investigations 1 is false or empty. If that is what we think Wittgenstein is getting at in the Philosophical Investigations 1 we might find that he also rejects RPPM or that he makes RPPM collapse as based on illusion.—The waters are pretty deep here. I have given some reasons already to say: The kind of intervention Wittgenstein offers is one which does not suggest that so-and-so is impossible in the sense of being unthinkable, nonsensical or false.52

9. Responsibility and Philosophy So, why is RPPM attractive? As we have seen, its philosophical excellence is not a straightforward explanation. We mentioned that external, a-­rational pull-factors, like prestige and economic benefits, may play a role, as perhaps also the dim attraction of the debatable notion that when we contribute to RPPM we contribute to a battle against superstition and vitalism. But let me now add a third factor which may be both less obvious and more insidious than the dubious promises of philosophical excellence

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and worldly gratification. Since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early treatises the criticism of division of labour has been an important theme in the diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity. Rousseau’s basic idea is that when we succumb to the role of a specialist we give up freedom: we know what we do as specialists, but we don’t understand what our contribution is to society at large. When we do not know this we do not, in an important sense, know what we are doing. We are no longer free. So, when we assume the role of specialists in the philosophy of mind, we give over our lives to the good fortune that the society we contribute our research to will turn our effort into something that is for the good (Rousseau, 1988; Cf. Theunissen, 1983/1984).53 We are up against a familiar kind of problem: In our times it happens that so called free trade agreements are studied from the perspective of how they advance economic success and that robotisation is studied from the perspective how it can enhance efficiency and contribute to well-being. It is common for such studies of free trade and robotics that attention is narrowly circumscribed and that ‘economic success’, ‘efficiency’ and other key concepts are not subjected to critical scrutiny. Nevertheless, under the pressure of increasing concern about climate change and loss of biodiversity and the lack of success in breaking the link between economic growth and environmental damage and under the pressure also of concern about the social costs of robotics it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the understanding that when one contributes to studies of the benefits of free trade and robotics, which are in the said sense uncritical, one is doing meaningful work.54 So: is this then one feature of RPPM? That when we contribute to it we give up freedom and throw ourselves blindly into the maelstrom of our civilisation? The question is real. Nevertheless, many philosophers who are attracted by RPPM show little interest in the kind of critical issues raised here. This fact strikes me as strange and terrifying. But am I terrified in the wrong place? Consider animism. Is animism irrational? Bad? Perhaps. But what is it? Was animism the idea that there are spirits? Life? And that spirits and life

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should be respected? (see Cadena, 2015 and also Wittgenstein, 1993). And is naturalism the idea that there are no spirits? No life? Perhaps. And perhaps not. Perhaps naturalists only want to say: Yes, there is spirit and life. But not of that kind, and not in those places. Is that, the shift from animism to naturalism, progress towards truth? A shift to a more meaningful language, a more responsible language? Or a change of subject?— My message; look at these questions as questions about truth and argument, about what there is, about meaning, and look at them also, at the same time, as questions about us and about how we live and about how we think it is right and good and truthful to live. Don’t expect easy agreement or agreement at all, don’t build community like that. But try, if you want, to find or build, community of those who share the search. It is confusing that we think of people as machines and as responsible agents. One aspect is that our situation is, as Wittgenstein says to Bouwsma, horrible. This horrifying aspect can be acknowledged and that is no easy thing to achieve without becoming sentimental or shallow in other ways. It can also be kept at bay, domesticated, momentarily silenced or appeased by theories like those of Searle, Dennett or Kim or by the Wittgensteinian grammatical and therapeutic philosophical cures offered by McDowell or Hacker. We may join with enthusiasm the company of those who seek to naturalise the mind or those who take pride in liberating us and others from the idea that naturalism about the mind makes sense. To be clear about the mind is, among other things, to be clear about these purposes and reactions: domestication, enthusiasm, liberation, pride and so forth; about what they are, where they come from and where they take us; about what kind of people we become if we follow, and how we follow, one path suggested in philosophy, or several. Consider this. Dennett writes that ‘the (factual) answer’ to the question whether computer scientists speak of computers wanting and thinking is “Yes”.’ He adds: ‘There is also, I suppose, a political question. Do they have any right to speak this way?’ Dennett’s answer comes quickly: ‘Well, it pays off handsomely, generating hypotheses to test, articulating theories[ … ] and so forth.’ (Dennett, 2007, p. 87). So many things go wrong here. But it is to Dennett’s great credit that he introduces the word political at the place where many of his fellow Wittgensteinians typically use the word grammatical. Whatever we think

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of politics, if we say that a question is political we understand it as a question of some consequence. The consequence is not restricted to those present in the conversation. A political intervention is typically of consequence also to ‘other others’, the people whom we do not know but whose lives are intertwined with ours. Dennett, like Socrates, understands that philosophy is always also intensely political (Plato, 1969, Apology, 36b– 37a). Dennett’s astonishing move is to proceed from his important notice about the political in the philosophy of mind to a quick answer. Any quick answer to this notice is likely to be an avoidance. Dennett’s answer is a perfect example. He assumes, without argument, that a responsible response to a ‘political’ question can (‘well’, as he writes) be given in terms of ‘pay-off’, and, even, that ‘articulating theories’ and such else is a kind of pay-off and (thereby) a good thing that answers the political question. Bennett and Hacker implicitly agree with Dennett’s naive perspective. This is clear when they begin their response to him and Searle by saying that in their joint book they ‘aimed to contribute to neuroscientific research’ and go on as if such contributions, if achieved, stand in no need at all of reflective scrutiny (Bennett & Hacker, 2007b, p. 127).55 There may well be differences between what neuroscientists might learn from Dennett and what they can learn from Bennett and Hacker. But when I say, nevertheless, that Bennett, Hacker and Dennett share a political perspective I mean this: they agree, implicitly and perhaps unwittingly, with what is implied by Dennett’s failure to keep his notice of the political in view, namely, that we have, first, a question about what words mean, about what people say (and what they can say) and then another question, which Dennett calls political. The picture is this. Here: What people say. There: How they live. But that picture is problematic.56

10. Conclusion It has been said that the debates in contemporary philosophy of mind are among the great debates of our times. I have tried to show that there is truth in this. What Kim says and what McDowell says and what Bennett, Hacker, Searle and Dennett say in the philosophy mind comes out of, is part of, and may affect what they and others say and think about pain and

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love, about animal rights, about saving money in elderly care by replacing workers with robots, about funding priorities in neuroscience and about so many other things. The stakes are high. I have tried to indicate that we can recognise the sceptical Wittgensteinian philosophical inquiry that I have advocated as a morally transformative endeavour of a special kind; a kind that does not undermine rational standards and truth but that suggests an idea of what rational standards and the search for truth in philosophy and life involve that challenges habits deeply ingrained in modernity. It can happen to us that we face disappointments with ourselves, our friends, our polity, the world, and also that we experience joy and purpose and love. What I have tried to illustrate is, that in the philosophy of mind, as also in much of contemporary philosophy of religion, we are dealing with efforts to come to terms with such ambivalence especially from the perspective of the particularly modern sense of a crisis of meaning.57 I have argued that in the cases examined the efforts are crippled by problematic ideas concerning what problems there are in the philosophy of mind and concerning what kind of work on these problems ought, at best, to be like. The upshot is this: In the philosophy of mind we may stay with the idea that what we are up against are intellectual problems and that our task is to solve those problems; we may also stay with the idea that what we are up against are illusions of sense and that our task is to dissolve those illusions; we may, finally take on the idea that in critical reflection on what philosophers call philosophy of mind we partake in one way of caring for the ways in which we and others place our disappointments with life and our affirmation of life. Socrates was adamant that the third option is not only the best of the three but the only option available if we seek a life worth living (Plato, 1969, Apology, 43c).58 But is that true? Not all heroes in our canon agree. Descartes would perhaps have opted for the first option and Parmenides for the second.59 Wittgenstein would, I think, have continued to investigate.60

Notes 1. There are parallels between my discussion here and the controversy in the phenomenological tradition between ‘Heideggerians’ and ‘Levinasians’ about the priority of fundamental ontology over ethics or

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vice versa. Heidegger’s aversion against moral concerns (how trivial!) cannot, I believe, be remedied by turning the tables on him. My proposal also stands in some tension with several of the contributions to the current volume. 2. Are some mental phenomena or states of consciousness or brain-states better than others? (Is it better for a brain, organism or person to be in pain, or love, than not to be so?) This we may call the problem of moral value or the axiological problem in the philosophy of mind. From the perspective I pursue below it is striking that this issue, a potential P7 in RPPM, has received very little attention. 3. I come back to the challenge coming from Peter Hacker and other Wittgensteinians below. I will not discuss challenges to the naturalistic paradigm stemming from phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty or from the Freud-tradition, including Lacan. I draw inspiration also from key authors in critical theory, including Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Arvi-Antti Särkelä. Their Left-Hegelian legacy allows them to keep social and political issues within view in their philosophy of mind (or Geist). Nevertheless I see them (even Apel, as I would argue,) as restricted in their philosophical imagination and ambition by the same kind of naturalistic strictures that we meet in the mainstream of analytic philosophy discussed here. Among the authors I have mentioned their closest affinity would be to McDowell some of whose views I will discuss below, and more so to Brandom, whose contribution I will not take on. 4. RPPM owes much of its reliance on physicalism as a default framework in metaphysics to the debates in the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 30s, a debate to which Wittgenstein contributed through the Tractatus and through his intense exchange with Schlick, Waisman, Carmap and others. For discussion of the formation of physicalism and its varieties at the time see Stern (2007). 5. See for instance, Varela, Rosch, and Thompson (1991), Hutto and Myin (2012) and Newen, Gallagher, and de Bruin (2018). For discussion of supervenience in our context see Davidson’s seminal paper: ‘Mental Events’ (Davidson, 1980). For emergentism, see for instance, Popper and Eccles (1977). 6. All quotes Q1–Q5 are from the first chapter of Kim (1998, pp. 1–3). Emphasis in original. I will introduce several quotes from this book. In order to facilitate later discussion of the material provided in the quotations I give them identifications, Q1, Q2, Q3 … and so on, as they appear.

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7. Quotes Q6–Q11 are all from Kim (1998, pp. 119f ). 8. Many authors who qualify as members of Kim’s community are more outspoken than Kim on seeing themselves as members of a club of excellence. For Kim’s attunement to this choir see e.g. Kim (1998, pp. 29f ). 9. ‘Putting Consciousness back in the Brain’, in Bennett (2007, p. 123). 10. See Popper and Eccles (1977). See also McDowell’s remarks on ‘promissory notes’ at McDowell (1996, p. 178). 11. G.H. von Wright’s diagnostic essays on our times are mostly available only in Finnish and in the original Swedish. One of the finest aspects of these important essays, by a philosopher who also made important contributions to the philosophy of mind, is his keen interest in the self-­ understanding of science as a form of intelligibility and his hopeful openness to the notion that this self-understanding may yet undergo intrinsically induced transformations with huge cultural and political implications. Von Wright explicitly sees the discussion among scientists, not among philosophers, as the likely driver of change. See von Wright (1986, p. 153). 12. Is Kim’s reductive physicalism really distinct from eliminative physicalism (or eliminative materialism to use the Churchland’s term). This is Kim’s gloss on the matter: ‘The reductive physicalist would claim that reductionism does retain mentality as a distinctive part of the physical domain, but its distinctiveness is physical distinctiveness, not some nonphysical distinctiveness.’ Kim (1998, p. 134, n. 35). I would like to ask: How much air can we pump into the distinction between physical distinctiveness and nonphysical distinctiveness? What meaning could Kim possible assign the notion ‘nonphysical distinctiveness’? Moreover: What is the physical distinctiveness that Kim holds on to which he thinks eliminativists give up? 13. I leave the claim without detailed warrant. Some of my discussion of McDowell’s views below are relevant for my theme here (the issue of what grounds Kim produces for the superiority of his views against eliminative materialism) and, that discussion will, as I believe, address it from a more fruitful perspective than can be won if we only focus on sifting out the moral drivers behind the proliferation within RPPM of a large number of various alternatives to ‘bald naturalism’ (to use McDowell’s phrase) or ‘eliminative materialism’. 14. For Wittgenstein’s respectful attitude to metaphysical philosophy see also Drury (1981, pp. 114–21).

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15. Or: try to read the first paragraph of remark number 97  in the Philosophical Investigations and try not to see it as part of an investigation in which the relation between logical and metaphysical questions is at stake. 16. McDowell does not give any idea of what he thinks mediaeval superstition was. One almost gets the impression that McDowell wants to place science (whatever that is) above all criticism and that he would have to say that only a crazy person could use, with disgust, the expression ‘soapy water science’ as Wittgenstein does. (In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein et  al., 1980. p.  56)—But we shall see soon that McDowell does not think Wittgenstein is crazy. 17. The irrational nature of philosopher’s commitment to naturalism is perhaps best seen when philosophers are anxious that they might discover anti-naturalism in their midst and the sense of relief when they satisfy themselves that the danger has been avoided. A perfect example is the volume Rorty and His Critics edited by Robert Brandom. The narrative of the volume, as explained by the book’s editor, is centred around that notion that there is one supreme God of analytical philosophy which even Richard Rorty did not betray, and that is naturalism. In his Introduction Robert Brandom writes, with the emphasis rightly placed by Brandom himself: ‘Indeed, Rorty’s pragmatism is itself [ … ] a form of naturalism. [ … ] Rorty insists that he is being more resolutely naturalistic than the fans of natural science among analytic philosophers.’ (Brandom, 2000, p. xiv). The volume that follows can be seen as a monumental testimony to the gap there is between the fascination contemporary philosophers have with questions of the type: What kind of naturalism am I or is s/he? and What is the correct, or responsible naturalistic view of that? as compared with their relatively limited preoccupation with questions of the form: As long as and as far as it is not clear to me what naturalism is or what the word means (as long as it is not clear what it is to be a naturalist) why do I call myself a naturalist? What is the relation between my calling myself a naturalist as a neutral description (however unclear the meaning of that self-­description) and myself thinking of myself as standing under a moral obligation, or political pressure?, to call myself a naturalist?—Of course I, am not implying that we have no reason to call ourselves naturalists. 18. Sellars’s original distinction is between concepts that are intelligible only in ‘the logical space of reason’ and other concepts that can be employed

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in ‘empirical description’ of phenomena belonging to the l­ogical space of law, as McDowell is keen to note (McDowell, 1996, p. xiv). For McDowell’s development of Sellar’s notion, see McDowell (1996, p. 71, n2 and passim). 19. McDowell (1996, pp. xiv and 78). McDowell claims that natural sciences allow us to find a ‘distinctive kind of intelligibility’ ‘in things’ (p. xix). His explication of what the ‘natural-scientific intelligibility’ (that he thinks it would be ‘crazy’ (p. 109) to put at risk) is surprisingly meagre. We may note the claim that in natural science we deal with ‘disenchanted nature.’ (p. 70. McDowell’s does give the Weber reference, but no discussion of Weber’s broader diagnosis of modernity follows.) Further cues could be taken from what McDowell has to say about the scientific study of ‘natural connections’ (e.g. p. xvi) understood as connections between phenomena in ‘the realm of law’ (p. xv) as opposed to the non-scientific idea that we could make intelligible the subject matters that modern science now makes intelligible by viewing them as ‘filled with meaning’ (p. 71).—McDowell draws on Sellars and also on Davidson in making the first distinction. In the fifth Postscript to the second edition of Mind and World, McDowell brings in Frege for the same purpose. (p. 180.) It is interesting that he does not bring in the young Wittgenstein even if the contrast made (and perhaps therapeutically dissolved) in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus between the realm of science (the realm of contingent truths, of what may or not be the case) and the realm of logic (the realm of form, of what is a candidate for contingent truth vs. for tautologies and contradictions) is historically and systematically related to the discourse McDowell addresses. McDowell thereby escapes the challenge of making out how Wittgenstein’s scathing criticism, already in the Tractatus, culminating at 6.371 and 6.372, of the idea that science explains anything at all, is related to the idea Sellars and McDowell cherish, that science does make things intelligible in a formidable way. 20. McDowell (1996, pp.  77–9, 84–6 and passim). McDowell use of the word spontaneity is derived from Kant and in particular from the Kantian idea that what he calls ‘spontaneity’ plays a role in articulating what understanding and knowledge is and how they are distinct from and complementary to mere receptive sensibility that is involved in intuition. Ibid. p. 4 and p. 4n3. The key reference to Kant is to the Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75. McDowell uses the Norman Kemp Smith translation as published by Macmillan, London 1929. 21. For instance, Kim (1998, p. 15) and McDowell (1996, p. 84).

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22. I draw on material offered in the first remark in the Introduction (McDowell, 1996, p. xi). 23. This kind of ‘recommendation’ is a crucial part of the McDowell’s effort to present his strategic notion of ‘second nature’ as substantive and legitimate. 24. Claims to such weak, liberal achievements abound in the book. See for instance pp. xxiii, xxiii, and 113. The status of weak doctrines in this sense and the notion of truth that they involve would be worth exploring, and could, arguably, be used to defend McDowell against my criticism. I will not embark on the topic here. 25. In much of Mind and World McDowell elaborates the second step. 26. The notion that we might free ourselves from anxiety through choice will not be discussed here. All discussion by Wittgenstein about how will and reason are related is of course pertinent here. See also Kierkegaard and Thulstrup (1962) and Nietzsche (1906). I discuss the topic in chap. 7 in Wallgren (2006). 27. See Plato, Apology, 40e–41c. 28. In the last pages of Mind and World this theme is brought up explicitly and Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode brought in as the key reference. McDowell chooses not to engage with Apel’s and Habermas’s critique of exactly those fundamental aspects of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, which are crucial to McDowell. See Apel (1975). 29. Some readers might, as Rupert Read has pointed out to me, object that I am missing the point of McDowell’s ‘therapeutic’ or ‘resolute’ philosophical approach. The point, they would say, is that once we understand exactly what McDowell proposes the grip of the ‘mind—body problem’ will go away. In particular, have I failed to notice how McDowell’s work needs to be reviewed with a keen eye to what exactly is involved in the idea that his kind of philosophical work may help us discover limits of what makes sense. Have I attended with sufficient care to McDowell’s comments on these matters, at McDowell (1996, pp. 159, 178) and elsewhere? My contention is that McDowell remains in several places too close to the perspective of RPPM by presenting matters as if the attractions of RPPM were intellectual or theoretical more than they are practical, moral and concrete. Here is one example: On pages 76f. McDowell offers an explicit articulation of the notion that there are two conceptually ‘tolerable’ (not illusory!) conceptions of naturalism, ‘bald naturalism’ and the alternative which we arrive at if we ‘make room for spontaneity in nature, even though we deny that spontaneity is captur-

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able by the resources of bald naturalism’—Let me once more repeat where the problem lies. The problem is that McDowell accepts (and not only for the sake of argument!) as respectable and familiar the conception that we might have expected that he would wish to unmask, namely bald naturalism. This becomes abundantly clear in how the sentence I just quoted continues: ‘we shall by the same token be rethinking our conception of what it takes for a position to be called ‘naturalism’.’ (McDowell, 1996, p. 77). To make my point fully clear: McDowell is express that he thinks we ‘rethink’ naturalism if we accept his kind of naturalism, which includes second nature and he implies that no rethinking is required to accept bald naturalism as a kind of naturalism. So, McDowell takes for granted that bald naturalism has been thought before we engage in rethinking. But is that so? 30. Wittgenstein’s early philosophical reaction to Frege and Russell and his later reaction to G.E. Moore’s lecture ‘Proof of an External World’ turned, it seems to me, to a significant degree around this question about levels of reflexivity and about where questions come to an end. See the remark on Frege and Russell at p 5. in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914– 1916 (Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Klemke, & von Wright, 1979), remarks 5.43731 and 5.4733 in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1933), and, for the later phase, Wittgenstein, Anscombe, and von Wright (1970). 31. Incisive on this: G.H. von Wright, In the Shadow of Descartes, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1998. See also Wittgenstein’s reflections on fate and freedom in Culture and Value, pp 69f. and von Wright’s reflections in his editorial preface to Culture and Value (Wittgenstein et al., 1980) and in his essay von Wright (1988). 32. Paraphrased with only slight alteration from McDowell (1998, p. viii). 33. The original is: ’[Wir sollten] nicht die ausser Frage stehenden historischen Fortschritte [vergessen lassen], die es in allen Dimensionen gibt, in denen Menschen lernen können’? 34. Habermas’s does leave some room for a non-evading attitude to our evasion issues. See esp. Habermas (2012, p. 51). 35. For my diagnosis of how a residue of dogmatic commitment to Kantian and Weberian notions of ‘differentiation’ between spheres of reason as progress deforms Habermas’s philosophy of modernity, see chap. 6  in Wallgren (2006). 36. For instance in discussion of the so called locked-in syndrome these issues can become pertinent. I am grateful to Kai Kaila for pointing this out to me.

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37. Gaita, Raimond, Romulus, My Father, London: Review, 2000, pp. 194f. 38. I think Rorty is more acute and more honest than most of his fellow naturalists in seeing through the paradoxes analytical philosophers tend to get involved in when they claim that naturalism is, or can be understood and defended as, a morally neutral truth. Rorty also places, I think quite correctly, the question of the moral truth of naturalism in a broad diagnostic and political context. I have tried to explain some of this, and also my differences with Rorty, in Wallgren (2006). 39. Philosophical Investigations, remark 281. Quoted in Bennett (2007) by Bennett and Hacker at page 19, by Dennett at 78, by Searle at 101. 40. We may say, with reference to McDowell, that Bennett and Hacker claim that they unmask as illusory the notion that we say something that makes sense when we say that pain is in the brain. 41. A classic reference in the debate is Philosophical Investigations 500. ‘When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from language, withdrawn from circulation.’ Cora Diamond’s essay ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: How to read the Tractatus’ (Diamond, 1991a) may be the most important contribution to a line of thinking inspired by Wittgenstein which is often referred to as ‘therapeutic’ or ‘resolute’ ‘readings’ of Wittgenstein. See also e.g. Baker and Morris (2004), Crary and Read (2000) and Conant and Diamond (2004). For some discussion inspired by Anscombe of the Fregean background to this theme in Wittgenstein, see the essay ‘Frege and Nonsense’ (Diamond, 1991b). In her ‘Introduction II’ (Diamond, 1991c) Diamond traces Frege’s, Wittgenstein’s and Anscombe’s nonsense-theme back to Kant’s conception in his Logic of ‘understanding that is in agreement with itself.’ See esp. p. 29. 42. For a relevant comparison of Derrida with Wittgenstein see Stone (2000). 43. The most interesting difference between, say, Peter Hacker’s ‘grammatical’ interpretation and Gordon Baker’s ‘therapeutic’ interpretation is, it seems to me, indicated well by Katherine Morris in her Introduction to Baker’s Neglected Aspects, when she writes that ‘the middle Baker’, who worked closely together with Hacker, wanted to ‘police the borders of sense and nonsense’ while (later) Baker does not have such policing ­ambitions. The difference may be theorised as turning around normativity and agreement. The idea of ‘police’ is the idea of an external authority whose norms have validity independently of any acknowledgement by

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the participants in philosophical work. ‘Therapists’ emphasise the intrinsic links between normativity and consent or acknowledgement, a theme the importance of which was highlighted by Stanley Cavell in his (Cavell, 1979). But Baker, too, like James Conant and many other ‘therapeutic Wittgensteinians’ relies on the possibility of leading others to realise that what they thought makes sense does not do so. 44. Some Wittgenstein scholars think we can draw from the later Wittgenstein the lesson that factual and conceptual questions are clearly, perhaps even fundamentally, different from each other. But that idea is easily mystified. 45. For similar reflections by Wittgenstein as provided in the report by Bouwsma see also for instance p. 178 in Wittgenstein (1958). 46. In their chapters in this volume Hannes Nykänen, Joel Backström and Niklas Toivakainen discuss the concepts of openness and love suggesting, if I understand them well, that in an open or loving relation between people we do not see each other as robots. But when Jesus says what he says on the cross, does he not see the Romans as robots? (Gospel of Luke, 23, 34 in The Holy Bible, 1869). And is what he says not an expression of his love for them? (The logic of sin and forgiveness.) 47. See the chapters by Cerbone and Dain in this volume. 48. One might also say that the very concept of ‘intellectual decidability’ is destabilised by our discussion. Let us say that we want to save the notion of intellectual decidability and that in order to do so we introduce the following stipulative definition: A matter is intellectually decidable if there are arguments such that rational agents will in the light of the arguments agree upon the truth of the matter. But it is an open question whether the definition clarifies anything. For a case-study, see Wallgren (2015). For a pertinent general discussion, see the essay ‘Anything but Argument?’ (Diamond, 1991d). 49. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein emphasises the interconnected nature of the topics he discusses, a feature of the book highlighted by Norman Malcolm (in Malcolm, 1954) and later by many more authors. For discussion of polyphony in Wittgenstein, see Pichler (2004) and Stern (2004) and references to earlier sources given there. 50. I follow Theunissen (1991a), in defining metaphysics as inquiry into what truly exists. See also McDowell (1996, pp.  26f.) and Diamond (1991c).

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51. Similarly, Wittgenstein’s remark in Wittgenstein et al. (1980, pp. 69f ), does not make much sense if we see it as rejecting or fighting against the naturalist constellation. Wittgenstein’s concern is with what he there calls ‘overestimation of science’, not with falsity or irrationality of science. 52. For a reading of the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations which is congenial to my discussion here see again Stern (2004). 53. Max Weber’s oeuvre is perhaps the most formidable, but also a deeply ambivalent, defence of the modern division of labour. 54. On efficiency and social costs of robotics, see Turkle (2011). For critical discussion of ‘decoupling’ of economic growth from the growth of resource use and environmental damage see for instance Wiedmann et al. (2015). 55. Obviously I am not suggesting that it is bad if a philosopher contributes to neuroscientific research. The point is that the ambition so defined is above all obscure. It offers no bridge or inroad into reflection on how philosophical discourse of mind meets daily practices, which are closely intertwined with scientific development. We may think here, to take just one controversial issue, of the nexus between mental health, psychopharmaceutical drugs and neuroscientific research. For a critical perspective see Gøtzsche, Peter C. Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare, Taylor & Francis, 2013. 56. See Wittgenstein (1958), Philosophical Investigations remarks 1 and 694. 57. Among the authors I have cited Habermas more than others links his discussion of mind with his discussion of religion and the question of meaning of life within the context of a philosophical, diagnostic engagement with modernity. See references to Habermas given above. See also Taylor (1989). 58. I have first tried to explain myself on the affinities I see between Socrates and Wittgenstein in Wallgren (2006). See also Wallgren (2013). 59. Theunissen’s essay (Theunissen, 1991b) has influenced my understanding of the contribution of Parmenides to contemporary philosophy of mind. 60. I am grateful to many students and colleagues including John Atkins, Joel Backström, David R. Cerbone, Mladen Dolar, Andreas Fjellstad, Kai Kaila, Hannes Nykänen, José Pereira da Silva, Alois Pichler, Rupert Read, David Stern, Tuomas Tahko, Pii Telakivi, Niklas Toivakainen, Tuomas Vesterinen and Bernt Österman for comments and criticism.

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References Apel, K.-O. (1975). Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, Theorie-Diskussion. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Baker, G.  P., & Morris, K.  J. (2004). Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects. Oxford: Blackwell. Bennett, M. (2007). Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, M., & Hacker, P.  M. S. (2007a). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience: The Introduction. In M.  Bennett (Ed.), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, M., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2007b). The Conceptual Presuppositions of Cognitive Neuroscience: A Reply to Critics. In M. Bennett (Ed.), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. New  York: Columbia University Press. Bouwsma, O.  K. (1986). Wittgenstein Conversations 1949–1951. Indianapolis: Hackett. Brandom, R. B. (2000). Introduction. In R. B. Brandom (Ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Cadena, M. de la. (2015). Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press. Conant, J., & Diamond, C. (2004). On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely. In M. Kölbel & B. Weiss (Eds.), Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance. London and New York: Routledge. Crary, A., & Read, R. J. (2000). The New Wittgenstein. London and New York: Routledge. Davidson, D. (1980). Mental Events. In D.  Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. (2007). Philosophy as Naive Anthropology. In M. Bennett (Ed.), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Diamond, C. (1991a). Throwing Away the Ladder: How to read the Tractatus. In C. Diamond (Ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford books/MIT Press. Diamond, C. (1991b). Frege and Nonsense. In C. Diamond (Ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford books/MIT Press.

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Diamond, C. (1991c). Introduction II.  In C.  Diamond (Ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford books/MIT Press. Diamond, C. (1991d). Anything but Argument?. In C.  Diamond (Ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford books/MIT Press. Drury, M. O’C. (1981). Conversations with Wittgenstein. In R. Rhees (Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections. Oxford: Blackwell. Gaita, R. (2000). Romulus, My Father. London: Review. Gøtzsche, P. C. (2013). Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare. London: Radcliff Publishing. Habermas, J. (2005). Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (2012a). Nachmetaphysisches Denken: II, Aufsätze und Repliken. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (2012b). Ein neues Interesse der Philosophie an Religion. Ein Interview von Eduardo Mendieta. In J. Habermas (Ed.), Nachmetaphysisches Denken II: Aufsätze und Repliken. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Hutto, D., & Myin, E. (2012). Radicalising Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kant, I. (1929). Critique of Pure Reason (N.  K. Smith, Trans.). London: Macmillan. Kierkegaard, S.  A., & Thulstrup, N. (1962). Afsluttende Uvidenskabelig Efterskrift. København. Kim, J. (1998). Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Malcolm, N. (1954). Review. The Philosophical Review, LXII, 530–559. McDowell, J. H. (1996). Mind and World: With a New Introduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Newen, A., Gallagher, S., & de Bruin, L. (2018). Introduction. 4E Cognition: Historical Roots, Key Concepts, and Central Issues. In A.  Newen, S. Gallagher, & L. de Bruin (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1906). Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, in his Werke: Band 6. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann. Pichler, A. (2004). Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen: Vom Buch zum Album. Studien zur Österreichischen Philosophie 36 (R.  Haller, Ed.). Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi.

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Plato. (1969). The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters (E. Hamilton & H. Cairns, Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popper, K. R., & Eccles, J. C. (1977). The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer International. Rousseau, J.-J. (1988). The Social Contract and Discourses (G. D. H. Cole, Ed.). London: Dent. Searle, J. (2007). Putting Consciousness Back in the Brain. In M. Bennett (Ed.), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Sheldrake, R. (2013, July/August). Setting Science Free from Materialism, EXPLORE, 9(4), 211–218. Stern, D. G. (2004). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, D.  G. (2007). Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and Physicalism: A Reassessment. In A. Richardson & T. Uebel (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone, M. (2000). Wittgenstein on Deconstruction. In A. Crary & R. J. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Holy Bible. (1869). Oxford. Theunissen, M. (1983/1984). Selbsverwirklichung und Allgemeinheit. Berlin: de Gruyter. Theunissen, M. (1991a). Negative Theologie der Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Theunissen, M. (1991b). Die Zeitvergessenheit der Metaphysik. In M. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Varela, F. J., Rosch, E., & Thompson, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. von Wright, G. H. (1986). Vetenskapen och förnuftet: Ett försök till orientering. Borgå: Söderströms C:o förlag AB. von Wright, G. H. (1988). Wittgenstein in the 20th Century. In B. McGuinness (Ed.), Wittgenstein and His Times. Oxford: Blackwell. von Wright, G. H. (1998). In the Shadow of Descartes: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Wallgren, T. (2006). Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Wallgren, T. (2013). Radical Enlightenment Optimism: Socrates and Wittgenstein. In L.  Perissinotto & B.  R. Cámara (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Plato: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallgren, T. (2015). Freud and Wittgenstein in the Cuckoo’s Nest. In S. Boag, L. A. W. Brakel, & V. Talvitie (Eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting. London: Karnac Books. Wiedmann, T., Schandl, H., Lenzen, M., Moran, D., Suh, S., West, J., et al. (2015). The Material Footprint of Nations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(20), 6271–6276. Wittgenstein, L. (1933). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (G.  E. M.  Anscombe, Trans., 2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). Notes on Frazer’s The Golden Bough. In L. Wittgenstein, J.  C. Klagge, & A.  Nordmann (Eds.), Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Wittgenstein, L., Anscombe, G. E. M., Klemke, E. D., & von Wright, G. H. (1979). Notebooks 1914–1916 (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L., Anscombe, G.  E. M., & von Wright, G.  H. (1970). Über Gewissheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, L., Nyman, H., Winch, P., & von Wright, G. H. (1980). Culture and Value. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

3 The Jaspers Case and the Paradox of the ‘Human’ Sciences Federico Leoni

1. The Human Sciences and Their Paths In this chapter, the name ‘Karl Jaspers’ stands for a problem or a paradox that found a symbolic and historically very influential expression in his General Psychopathology, but that largely transcends Jaspers himself and his work. Over the course of the twentieth century, all the human sciences—or, as they were still called in the General Psychopathology, the ‘sciences of the spirit’—had to deal with this particular problem or paradox. After focusing on the dimension of what is comprehensible, those sciences apparently felt an increasing need to explore the dimension of the incomprehensible. In such a trajectory, a method based on comprehension gradually left room for a method based, so to speak, on incomprehension. For many of such sciences, this problem or paradox turned out to be a crux that each of them—more or less independently—had to face in a similar way for a similar reason. Such reason could be provisionally encapsulated in a formula by saying that it had to do with the failure of their status as human sciences, and with their more or less explicit need F. Leoni (*) University of Verona, Verona, Italy © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_3

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(dictated by the pressure of a kind of epistemological unconscious) to return to be or to become for the first time, and in a proper sense, sciences of the ‘spirit’.

2. A Genealogy of Psychopathology For those who see Jaspers’ General Psychopathology as a paradigmatic ‘case’ to be placed in the category of the human sciences and their twentieth-­ century developments, the history of psychiatry is particularly rich in lessons. It is well known that the historical roots of the discipline which between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to become psychiatry are quite tangled (Foucault, 1961/1972, 1973–1974). In fact, very different forms of knowledge and practices, which embodied equally different needs and goals, contributed to its formation: the therapeutic vocation of medicine, the necessity (typical of the so-called Polizeiwissenschaften) to control deviance, the diagnostic needs of neurology, the will to truth inspiring the practices of the Christian confession, and the educational or rehabilitation models developed by the most diverse pedagogies that modernity has produced. Each of these components assigned a different task to psychiatry, from the identification of a histological cause of madness to the restoration of some behavioral norm, from the search for a renewed well-being of the patient to the attempt to reintroduce the person within the dimension of social exchange or shared morality. However, such a diverse set of needs, plans, and procedures was at some point reformulated according to just one of its components: the neurological one. It was precisely on the basis of the relatively homogeneous language of neurology, its laboratory practices, the sort of questions it raised in accordance with its epistemology, and its multiple criteria of verification or falsification that the vast and diversified field of psychiatry was reorganized and rendered uniform. What happened at this point is extremely instructive for those who want to trace a genealogy of psychopathology, namely of the discipline that Karl Jaspers placed in a position destined to remain paradigmatic within the discussion about the status (human or natural) of psychiatry as a science, and about the properly ‘human’ or ‘spiritual’ nature of many

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(or all) the human sciences. Psychiatry increasingly became a science of nature by retranslating itself into the language of neurology and by adopting a typically Cartesian idea of nature (according to which nature is a machine governed by linear causality and set in motion by the connections and interactions of its discontinuous parts). As a result, an increasingly powerful, insistent, inescapable, and irreducible residue was left out of the picture. Such residue, which eludes the logic of mechanization, is what psychiatry had to deal with. The trajectory just described is already evident in Descartes’ thought, where this kind of fate appears in an absolutely paradigmatic way. This is evident, first of all, in the appearance, within his system, of a res cogitans next to a res extensa, which is in fact the dimension from which neurology would draw its biological model and its histological language, and which was already present in all the medical works of Descartes and in his reflections on the nervous system, the nature of the nervous tissue, and the so-called animal spirits which communicate their movements to such tissue. Second, the residue left out by the mechanical model is visible in the idea of the ‘thinking thing’, which in its very definition appeared to be an element entirely symmetrical and homogeneous to the ‘extended thing’: an element, in other words, subdivided into discrete contents, a sort of archive of thoughts and passions, a repertoire of fragments of mental life rather than a living event of such a ‘mind’. In Descartes’ thought, such residual element had a quite specific name, a name that very accurately emphasized its absolute difference from the ‘thinking thing’: it was called cogito (Descartes, 1642/2019, Deuxième méditation; Merleau-Ponty, 1996). It had the character of a non-­ circumscribable event, of a presupposed threshold or space which could not be reduced to something as ‘given’ and positive as the two symmetrical substances of extension and thought. It was impossible to affirm it or negate it without assuming its very existence or to transcend it without at the same time carrying it along. In order to negate it, one had first to affirm it. This emphasized its total difference from the two classical Cartesian substances and made it absolutely impossible to translate it in terms of a science of the extension (namely physics or a physicalist biology) as well as in terms of a science of the contents of thought or experience (namely a psychological science).

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It was precisely in the course of this attempt at a neurological redefinition of itself that psychiatry experienced the necessity of a psychopathology. In so doing, psychiatry followed exactly the Cartesian trajectory: once he had defined the res extensa and its domain, Descartes identified a first exception, which he baptized as res cogitans, and then found an exception to that exception, which he did not name res cogitans, but cogito, stressing its non-objectual character. In fact, the cogito was an event or an act rather than a fact. It was a pure motion rather than an object moved by another, a self-originated motion rather than one caused by another motion. In fact, Descartes himself, while going through this path and identifying such exception to the exception, could not help pointing, from within his dualistic perspective, to the existence of a sort of common and original ground or first substance sustaining the two other substances, which in this sense were secondary, derivative, and in need of an external foundation for both their existence and, literally, their substantiality. Since its very beginning, Christian metaphysics had called such a foundation ‘spirit’, thereby in turn retranslating the absolute and eternal act, the totally independent and absolute substance, the noesis noeseos, which Aristotle had placed at the foundation of his entire system. The Cartesian philosophy of the cogito, which represented a sort of ‘actualism’, was standing on the same foundation. From this perspective, the history and structure of psychiatric knowledge appear under a different light: it is clear, indeed, that psychopathology functioned, so to speak, as a ‘refuge’ for the dimension of the ‘spirit’—a dimension that psychiatry had lost but could (and to some extent had to) rediscover. This spiritual dimension coincides precisely with the residue of what psychiatry, after its neurological turn, left in the foreground. Psychopathology arose, then, as the last and extreme manifestation of neurological psychiatry, as a discipline with a specific object, but at the same time as a border area lacking a proper status and a clearly recognizable identity. Psychopathology as a science was born with these features as a result of its very genealogy, which explains its ‘residual’ nature and the fact that its object was also somewhat residual. The ‘spirit’ has no reality compared to the objects studied by the positive sciences: it is a non-object, or rather their non-objectual object; it is the unobjectifiable residue of their objectification. Therefore, such r­ esidue

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or near-nothingness, once identified, cannot but impose itself, paradoxically, as the only dimension that the ‘real’ science, namely a neurologically oriented psychiatry, should address if only it possessed the right language to do so. Rather than a discipline with its own specific territory and set of established results, psychopathology is, therefore, a kind of ‘need’ or ‘promise’ that psychiatry—due to its structural weakness—has each time to rediscover. Despite being indirectly rediscovered in response to such unavoidable lack on the part of psychiatry, this need or promise remains exposed to a periodic oblivion and to a systematic neglect.

3. The Logic of Analogy It must be said that psychiatry was able to rediscover this spiritual dimension, thanks to the tools made available by the Zeitgeist, and generally drawing on the repertoire of antidotes against the mechanical views developed by the same Zeitgeist by designating with ready-made terms such ineffable element traditionally identified as ‘spirit’ by Christian theology. When Jaspers wrote his General Psychopathology, for example, he performed precisely this task by introducing in the discourse of psychiatry such key-concepts as the subject, the lived experience, the meaning of experience, the original link between different meanings, and, finally, one’s understanding of one’s chain of experiences and the psychiatrist’s understanding of the patient and his or her experiences. Let us focus on the problem of the understanding, the most classic theme in Jaspers’ General Psychopathology, one for which his work was immediately perceived as a break in the history of psychiatry and as the construction of a radically different paradigm (K.  Jaspers, 1913/1997, Part 2, ‘The comprehensible relationships in psychic life’). Jaspers’ idea of understanding was quite diversified but can nonetheless be reduced to two fundamental movements: on the one hand, the understanding of an experience by means of an identification with it; on the other, the understanding of an experience by means of an exploration into its genesis. In the first case, it is a matter of emotionally transposing oneself into the experience of the other, of placing oneself in another’s position and to some extent experiencing the other as a possibility, thereby coming to the

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conclusion that the other is not unrelated to what we do or can experience. In the other case, it is a matter of grasping the concatenation by which, as Jaspers wrote, each meaning derives from another meaning, and each experience derives from within another experience: this happens not through an extrinsic interaction, but through a kind of ‘flowering’ which, despite the differentiation, generates a kind of continuity, thereby producing within a certain space of sense a meaning that is different from, but not unrelated to, its source. Despite their different peculiarities, these two ways of understanding have a common trait, by virtue of which they appear in fact as specific forms of the same act. The word ‘relationship’, which in both cases designates the core of this operation, is perhaps more revealing than it might seem at first glance. There is a relationship between what the other experiences and what I experience. There is a relationship between what I experienced in my childhood and what I experience today. In both cases, there is a continuity, a common measure, or a kind of proportion between the two poles which the understanding must reconnect. The fundamental assumption sustaining the entire logic of the understanding is that there exists a relationship between seemingly unrelated contents or subjects of experience. This is what Jaspers argued as he first introduced the concept of understanding in his General Psychopathology: here, following a famous insight by Nietzsche, Jaspers showed how from the experience of weakness and suffering moral and religious needs for redemption can arise, through which the weakened consciousness restores its original will to power by other means (K. Jaspers, 1913/1997, p. 360). ‘This is like that’: such is the kind of primary analogy between experiential meanings or experienced psychological contents. ‘This is to that as that other is to that other yet’: this is a more complex kind of analogy which establishes a proportional relationship between many of the contents or subjects of experience. The ‘relationship’ mentioned above is precisely this analogy or this network of proportions. The weakness and the strength, the dialectic between renunciation and reaffirmation, the proportional transformation of suffering into redemption: all this allowed the identification of the homogeneous field within which to grasp the analogical relationships and the forms that structure the differences according to the principle of

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c­ ontinuity and the repetition of the same. The logic of proportionality was precisely the repertoire from which Jaspers drew in order to ‘ferry’ the spirit toward the shores of psychiatry. At this point, a simple historical remark is necessary. It is a fact that the human sciences which in the twentieth century focused their attention on the same key-concepts privileged by Jaspers were in the end somehow forced to distort their original meaning. The disciplines that focused on the subject had later to go through a process of total de-subjectification of their notions and their overall conception of their field of investigation. The disciplines that emphasized the dimension of meaning gradually discovered that their first step was, in fact, to lead them somewhere else, and that meaning proved to be a kind of ‘false friend’, if not even an obstacle on their way to what in the first place they had designated as ‘meaning’. The practices which privileged the dimension of the understanding reached a position where the understanding began to manifest itself as a counterproductive approach with respect to their anticipated goal. The forms of knowledge that constructed their epistemological architecture around the notions of analogy, similarity, and repetition, had to face, at the heart of the analogy, the enigmatic movement of dissimilarity, at the heart of similarity, the heterogeneous, and at the heart of repetition, a kind of blind and ineffable spot. Such was the curious result of the first great European humanistic movement, which had to put at the core of its project such a structurally ‘super-human’ discipline as theology. It is therefore not casual that, in the twentieth century, the epistemic structure of negative theology continually re-emerged in the human sciences each time their vocation to be ‘human’ intensified. Lacan’s psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1966) as well as Blanchot’s literary criticism (Blanchot, 1967), Didi-Huberman iconology (Didi-Huberman, 1990), Bachtin’s linguistics (Bachtin, 1993), Derrida’s grammatology (Derrida, 1967), or the economic theories and science of law of an Alain Caillé (1993) or a Pierre Legendre (2004) are many examples of a ‘negative theology’ of the unconscious, of language or of the literary work—in other words, of a human culture that in this sense has ceased to be a culture developed by human beings for human ends. One might add that these disciplines can have such a characteristic precisely because negative theology in its proper

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sense does not prescribe any specific field or object: the God incorporated in the word ‘theology’, indeed, is nothing more than the name of a name—it is only a path, a method which aims at the destruction of any object as a way to experience the purely ‘spiritual’ movement of objectification, for example, the creation of concrete worlds which are in act here and now. A further remark should address the status of those, so to speak, second-­generation human sciences. The non-subjective, the insignificant, the incomprehensible, and the dissimilar were the ways in which the human sciences, bringing their original humanism to its limits and in fact overturning it, alluded to something that exceeded their humanistic structure and perspective, but that they wanted to capture and thematize in the first place. In a formula, one could say that by identifying themselves as ‘human’, these sciences tried to express but in fact betrayed their aspiration to be sciences of the spirit. Forced to employ the tools made available to them by humanism, these sciences aimed at returning to be, or perhaps at being for the first time, ‘sciences of the spirit’. It appears that the historical trajectory followed by the human sciences in the course of the twentieth century was, in fact, an anti-humanistic one, and that such anti-humanism was the only means by which humanism could ‘express’ the spirit and create some genuinely alternative sciences to the natural ones. If this was really the case, then, the speculative force behind such remarkably regular and widespread historical trajectory must be traced in the dynamic relationship between the spirit and the human being or, in Cartesian terms, between the cogito and the res cogitans, or, finally, in the words of Nicholas of Cusa (whose thought provides the most ancient and profound example of this dynamics), between the human knowledge and the absolute.

 . The Human Sciences and the Sciences 4 of the Spirit It is indeed in the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa that we encounter the earliest foundation of a theory of knowledge in which to know means to establish proportions and to anchor them to their ultimate center: the

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human being. In his De docta ignorantia he wrote: ‘All those who make an investigation judge the uncertain proportionally, by means of a comparison with what is taken to be certain. Therefore, every inquiry is comparative and uses the means of comparative relation’. Knowledge, therefore, was in fact a ‘minor’ form of experience, a structurally diminutive one. To understand meant to incorporate something into an analogy with something identical or, to put it more simply, to inscribe the alterity of the other within the uniform space of the identical, which for Nicholas of Cusa meant within the possibilities of human experience, the dimension of our words and our ways of naming the world, and so on. But Nicholas of Cusa did not stop there. And the instance that guides him in this movement is not devoid of similarities with the instance that carries nineteenth-century human sciences away from the ideal of comprehension toward the ideal and maybe to a kind of practice of the incomprehensible. Nicholas clearly saw that knowledge was proportion and therefore reduction, and that to understand meant to turn the heterogeneous into the homogeneous; he saw with equal clarity that such proportion and reduction must be based on something else. He clarified this point in a passage of his De docta ignorantia immediately following the one quoted above, to which it provided a sort of counterpoint: ‘The infinite, qua infinite, is unknown; for it escapes all comparative relation’ (Nicholas of Cusa, 1440/1981, I, 1, p. 50). The absolute eluded knowledge as an essentially relational operation. In other words—and if we reverse Nicholas of Cusa’s argument—each relationship presupposed the absolute: without the absolute, there would be no relationship at all. Each reduction presupposed something larger with respect to which, as with the polygons inscribed in the famous Cusanian circle, such reduction represented a translation into another language and a peculiar betrayal implied by such language. The polygon is a ‘reduction’ of the circle, and what we know is nothing but polygons and reductions. To think the polygon, however, means for that very reason to think the circle, and to think the limit means for that very reason to think the limitless. Here we must be very rigorous. This unlimited, this infinite in act, every knowledge of which is translation and betrayal, should not be imagined in the guise of God, should not be placed somewhere in an infinite distance as a radically unrelated object. Or in other terms: every

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object of our experience is God, the most common encounter is an infinite that we approach in our finite way, but that doesn’t cease to insist in our finite experience as something infinite and perfectly incognoscible. Nicholas of Cusa could say that this infinite is not a potential infinite, thus an infinite placed in the infinite distance of the bad infinite, but an actual infinite, thus an infinite which we always find right here, in the perfect immanence which pertains to every good infinite. By the way, this is the same difference we could retrace in Descartes’ terms between the cogito and the res cogitans, between the absolute event of the thought that is thinking and the relative series of the thoughts which has been thought. Therefore, in the middle of the journey undertaken by Nicholas of Cusa, there was a ‘major’ experience, with a term which fully belongs to the thought of one of the fathers of that mutation that brought the sciences of the comprehension to become sciences of the incomprehension, namely Georges Bataille. Since by definition there was no knowledge of the absolute, this experience could only be addressed by a negative theology and by a theory of non-knowledge—or, perhaps, what was needed is a non-theory of non-knowledge, since negative theology is not really knowledge, but rather an exercise in or through knowledge, an exercise concerning the human dimension of knowledge and a crossing of the limits of human knowledge and of the human being itself. At the core of the Cusanian journey, there was an all-embracing experience, whose main characteristic was not the proportionate but the disproportionate, not the understanding but the encounter with the incomprehensible or, better said, the permanence in the incomprehensible as in the more persistent and pure element of experience. And if to understand is to establish relationships, this, from a Cusanian perspective, means that from the one side there is understanding only of the incomprehensible and that it is only through the totally negative science of the absolute (which our tradition called and continues to call ‘spirit’) that all the ‘positive’ sciences can find their justification. And that from the other side, this negative science of the absolute is always overtaken by the fact that the absolute is not its object although negative, but the very becoming of experience, its concrete and absolutely affirmative construction. To put it in other terms, if the infinite is not only in potentia but in actu, the incomprehensible is not so much the object of a negative theology but the field of a positive

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and affirmative practice, a bodily field of concrete encounters and ethical acts.

5. The Hardest Problem If, as Ernst Cassirer once suggested (E.  Cassirer, 1927/2010, chap. 1), Nicholas of Cusa is the true founder of modern philosophy because he raised the problem of difference and at the same time of the mutual implication of the absolute and the relative (namely of the reconciliation between the purely negative encounter with the transcendence of the absolute and the construction of a ‘positive theory of experience’), then it appears that such mutual implication has gradually disappeared throughout the history of modern philosophy. It is indeed true that the history of modern philosophy coincides with the gradual loosening of the knot that in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa held together the speculative interest for the absolute with the humanistic interest for a theory of knowledge and therefore for a doctrine of the relationship through which the absolute is accessible to the human being. True, Descartes, as I said, addressed such knot in terms of a disproportion between the cogito and the two substances, the thinking thing and the extended thing. However, while outlining its boundaries in a perfectly negative-theological fashion (to negate the cogito I must affirm it, or to affirm the cogito qua cogito I have to negate it as cogitatum: this, from Plotinus onward, was precisely the method of every speculative theology), Descartes displaced that knot from the center of his system, putting aside the devastating consequences of that disproportion in order to concentrate his efforts on the “positive” possibilities disclosed by their very removal. Such possibilities unfolded symmetrically in a double system of analogies, in a double series of ­‘objective’ sciences: in fact, both the science of the res cogitans (namely what was left after the removal of the speculative theology of the cogito) and the science of the res extensa are, each in its own way, perfectly objective, since both follow the same logic of proportion that Nicholas of Cusa lucidly considered the foundation of all knowledge, be it aimed at the understanding of ‘thinking things’ (today we would say: psychology), or of extended things (today we would say: physics).

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The result of the Cartesian avoidance of the proportionless was a convergence in a common ground and method of the alleged objectivism of the positive sciences and the alleged subjectivism of the human sciences, since both these paths relied on a series of analogies and cognitive proportions: the objectification which aims at ‘explaining’ (to use Jaspers’ terminology) and the knowledge which aims at ‘understanding’ are both the objectification of that non-object or subjectifications of that non-­ subject—of that absolute or ‘One’ which every dualism does not cease to speak about without knowing it, indeed claiming the impossibility of naming it and in the end forgetting the necessity to speak about it. Even Kant was not interested, after all, in the absolute: in his Critique of Pure Reason he followed only one of the two paths outlined by Nicholas of Cusa, namely the path of proportion, and turned it into a most elaborate theory of the phenomenon, which actually retrieved and deepened the idea that to know means to inscribe the noumenon into the interplay of the similarities of experience and into the proportional, repetitive, assimilating, and humanizing writing of the Einbildungskraft. Hegel himself basically followed the Kantian way: in his Science of Logic, he argued that there is no other knowledge of the absolute than a human, humanistic, and humanizing one. This was in fact a dialectic knowledge, fundamentally structured according to that extreme result of the Aristotelian logic which was the disjunctive syllogism. The fate of the disjunctive syllogism, despite its human attempt to disclose the more-than-human (namely to communicate through the analogy what could not be reduced to an analogy), was in the end to perform an absolute reduction of alterity to the articulation of a system of relative differences: the aim was again to transcribe the ‘One’ into the differences of the ‘many’, to name the absolute as a system of relative (and therefore negative) differences, which already as relative and negative proved commensurate to a presupposed ­positiveness, captured in a proportional repetition and reduced to an upside-­down logic of similarity—the difference as negation being in fact another identity, an alter ego, and not something completely different from an identity and an ego. Wilhelm Dilthey was the philosopher in whom Nicholas of Cusa’s speculative knot almost completely dissolved into a totally accomplished Kantism or Hegelism, and his hermeneutics bequeathed to the early

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twentieth century the idea that the only object that can be known is the subject of knowledge, that all knowledge is basically an autobiography of knowledge itself, and that to understand means de jure and de facto to understand oneself in the act of understanding. This is a complete unfolding of Kantian criticism and Hegelian dialectic. This is the deep claustrophobia of a perfectly realized modernity. All knowledge is analogical, and the dissimilar falls out of the human field. The eternal humanistic adage produced all its consequences, with all its lights and shadows: nothing human is alien to me, but only because all that is alien is actually human, so that all alterity in its total and irreducible otherness disappears. And from Dilthey to Jaspers the step is very short. It is the step by which, historically, Nicholas of Cusa’s speculative problem paradoxically passed into the twentieth-century human sciences. The paradoxical result of this transition is that while the aim of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology was to make psychiatry into a science of the spirit, the accomplishment of such a project led him to turn it into a human science. This might appear as a minor difference, but it is in fact a decisive one. Jaspers’ idea of building a Geisteswissenschaft did not result in a spiritual science, but in what from a speculative point of view could be defined as a ‘human, too human’ science. Considering such a profound impasse, it is easy to explain the fact that it was no longer the understanding, but the incomprehension that became the peculiar mark of all those human sciences that during the twentieth century carried out the task of emphasizing the mutual implication of the human and the inhuman, of the proportionate and the disproportionate, and of the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. Jaspers himself caught a fleeting glimpse of this problem when he saw in the phenomenon of delusion something incomprehensible, and in the purest manifestation of madness an insurmountable barrier to the path of psychopathology. The incomprehensible becomes a trauma that continually affected Jaspers’ discourse, a breaking point that revealed a more-­ than-­humanistic vocation at the core of his humanistic project. The delusion represented a laceration within the discourse of Jaspers’ inclusive psychopathology which allowed the encounter with the folly of Nicholas of Cusa’s absolute, with the senseless dimension of the absolute act of the cogito, and with the perfectly insubstantial consistency of the foundation

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that Descartes himself had detected and then hidden under his two famous substances. Thus, the folly of the God of negative theology came back in the guise of the impenetrable madness of delusion, and the incomprehensible that the General Psychopathology could not describe because it exceeded its method no longer appears to us as a lack to be filled, but as the most precious opportunity for the disciplines which will be able to tune in with it. Here we encounter the hardest point, which remains quite obscure in Nicholas of Cusa and for example in Hegel, when it comes to understanding in which way we should read the idea of the absolute knowledge we find at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Is it a form of knowledge, a figure, like other knowledges, other figures? No doubt, it is not. Is it thus nothing else than the sublime movement of destruction, the magnificent and a little macabre bonfire of every knowledge, in so far it brings every finite knowledge in front of an infinite which remains dramatically unreachable? Often Hegel’s readers choose this way, and not without reason. Or maybe absolute knowledge is not knowledge, maybe absolute knowledge is only homonymous, not synonymous with relative knowledge, as far as what it does know is that infinite is infinite in act, thus it is in act here and not elsewhere, thus it is not an object to be known by a science finally installed in its pure spirituality but an instance to be corresponded to by a practice finally installed in the purest immanence? It is the dilemma nineteenth-century human sciences face through their anti-­ humanism, when they explore the almost desperate and generally ineffectual way of the negative, while they promise the most concrete, practical, affirmative engagement. Is it not this affirmative spirit, this bodily singularity that they realize notwithstanding their negative-­ theological framework, as also psychoanalysis tends to become a form of life much more than a theory, literary criticism tends to become literary creation much more than an examination of what others created, as cultural anthropology tends to become a practical strategy of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and as even economics in its absolutely marginal maussian-bataillean lineage tends to become experimentation with new forms of production, distribution, exchange, namely of common life and common wealth?

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References Bachtin, M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Houston: University of Texas Press. Blanchot, M. (1967). L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard. Caillé, A. (1993). Ce que donner veut dire. Paris: La Découverte. Cassirer, E. (1927/2010). The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1967). L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil. Descartes, R. (1642/2019). Méditations métaphysiques. Objections et réponses. (D. Arbib, Ed.). Paris: Vrin. Didi-Huberman, G. (1990). Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration. Paris: Flammarion. Foucault, M. (1961/1972). Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1973–1974/2008). The Psychiatric Power. Lectures at the Collège de France. Picador: 2008. Jaspers, K. (1913/1997). General Psychopathology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil. Legendre, P. (2004). L’inestimable objet de la transmission. Paris: Fayard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996). L’ontologie cartesienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui. In Notes de cours 1959–1961. Paris: Gallimard. Nicholas of Cusa. (1440/1981). On Learned Ignorance. Minneapolis: Banning.

Part II Ethical Critiques of Reductive Naturalism

4 The Missing ‘E’: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Ecological Psychology and the Place of Ethics in Our Responsiveness to the Lifeworld Phil Hutchinson

Cognitive science as an interdisciplinary movement is undergoing something of a change. After fifty years of being dominated by Cartesian representationalism, recent years have witnessed a rising interest in alternative approaches, which emphasise the embodied, embedded, extended and enacted nature of mind-world relations and our responsiveness to loci of significance in our environment. These approaches have been, variously, referred to as 4E cognition (Menary, 2010), ‘The New Science of the Mind’ (Rowlands, 2010), simply as Enactivism (Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010), including its radical variant, Radical Enactivism (Hutto & Myin, 2013) and as Radically Embodied Cognitive Science (Chemero, 2009). The interest in such approaches has generated renewed interest in Ecological Psychology and the theory of affordances (Gibson, 1979; Heft, 2001; Chemero, 2009; Van Dijk, Withagen, & Bongers, 2015), which also emphasises the embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted nature of mind-world relations,

P. Hutchinson (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_4

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while rejecting representationalism. Indeed, increasingly one now finds work which advances a theory of affordances by drawing on Enactivism and Dynamical Systems Theory (e.g. Chemero, 2009, chap. 7.6) and amalgam, or Frankenstein, theories, which comprise of a theory of affordances and enactivist insights while also, somewhat oddly, retaining talk of representations (e.g. Hufendiek, 2016, chap. 5), including by those, such as Jesse Prinz, who until recently had been high-profile standard bearers for traditional Cartesian representationalist computational theorising about cognition (see Shargel & Prinz, 2018; and contrast with: Prinz, 2003). So, what gives? Is this a new dawn, one which promises to accommodate those who have remained opposed to the programme of cognitive science? Or is it a case of more of the same? Well, first we’d do well to tease-out some of the differences, for there are a range of views which, as Menary (2010) points out in his introduction to a journal special edition on 4E cognition, mean that there is little homogeneity here. For, on the conservative wing of 4E approaches we find Andy Clark, who accommodates representationalism and functionalism, and is happy to endorse weak cognitivism (see Menary, 2010, p. 460), in addition to those such as Hufendiek (2016) and Shargel and Prinz (2018) who appropriate the language of affordances and Enactivism while still talking of representations. In contrast, on the radical wing we find those who all-but completely reject representations such as Hutto and Myin (2013) and Chemero (2009) in addition to traditional Gibsonian Ecological Psychologists such as Harry Heft (2001). In what follows I will not be interested in weak cognitivist 4E approaches. I’m interested here in the genuinely radical alternatives to traditional, Cartesian representationalism. The alternative I will focus on here, therefore, will be Anthony Chemero’s work, which amounts to a sophisticated, contemporary attempt to update the theory of Affordances by incorporating Dynamical Systems Theory that emerges out of Enactivism, with the aim of providing a genuinely radical alternative to Cartesian representationalism. Before I progress, a note of clarification regarding my objectives in this paper. I do not here seek to provide a definitive critique of representationalism. Rather, my starting point is that there is increased interest in alter-

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natives to representationalism within the community of cognitive scientists. I seek only to explore some of the reasons why researchers are looking for alternatives to representationalism, and I do so merely as a precursor to examining one of the candidates for an alternative: Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Furthermore, my criticisms of Chemero should not to be taken as defences of or a reason to return to representationalism. Far from it. I agree with Chemero (and Hutto and Myin) that representationalism should be rejected. My disagreement, if there ultimately turns-out to be one, is on how best to conceive of a viable alternative to representationalism.

1. Cartesian Representationalism Since its origins as an interdisciplinary research programme, cognitive science has operated within the Cartesian tradition. One way to see how this pans out is to look at the way in which traditional cognitive science answers the question as to how we respond to loci of significance in our environment. The cognitivist’s way is to propose that such loci of significance have causal impact on our senses, which trigger mental representations (we might talk of elicitation files with semantic content here), that semantically represent a specific locus of significance in the form of a proposition. On this view, the meaningful content of our thoughts does not reside in the loci of significance, but is inferred from the sensations triggered by the causal impacts  issuing from those loci of significance; on this view,  the meaning the world has for us is not ‘out there’ in the world, beyond our skin, but in the head, in some sense. Variations on this view have dominated cognitive science for the past fifty years and the programme set itself the task of providing a scientific explanation, often drawing upon computational metaphors, framed by this philosophical account. However, after 50  years, it seems increasingly clear that representationalist-­cognitivism has failed to establish itself as (Kuhnian) normal science. This is, perhaps, a controversial claim, so what warrants it? Well, it is this: Representationalist Cognitive Science is still at the pre-paradigmatic phase because, as its many detractors have pointed out and the practices of its practitioners so often demonstrate, representationalism cannot

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overcome the problems it faces without repeatedly bringing into question its philosophical foundations. For example, in the area of primate cognition Louise Barrett (2011) has demonstrated how representationalism distorts the research findings. Similarly, Evolutionary (or ‘Sussex’) robotics led numerous researchers to reject representationalism and advocate alternative, phenomenological foundations; see, for example, Di Paolo (2003), among others. Normal science proceeds without having to perpetually refer back to, tinker with, and revise its philosophical foundations. (Representational) Cognitive science simply cannot plausibly claim to be normal science because such a big part of the job of the cognitive scientist is still concerned with revision and arguments in defence of the under-siege philosophical foundations. Let’s take time to consider some reasons why.

 . Challenges to Representationalism: 2 Rejecting Internalism In his 2002 book on the Philosophy of Mind, Externalism, Mark Rowlands (Rowlands, 2002) takes the reader on a tour of many of the Twentieth Century’s philosophical arguments against internalism and for content externalism in the Philosophy of Mind. The tour ranges from Sapir-Whorf, Thomas Kuhn and Putnam-Burge Twin-Earth arguments, to Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to rehearse all of the arguments against content internalism, or even those which Rowlands discusses in the first six chapters of his book, I’ll simply illustrate why we might reject the representationalist picture by invoking one argument, which is traceable back to Wittgenstein (and, on some readings, Frege) and which one finds most clearly argued in the work of radical contextualist philosophers of language, such as Avner Baz (2012), Frank Ebersole (2002), Lars Hertzberg (2001) and Charles Travis (2008). I focus on this particular argument because elements of it are relevant when we come to appraise contemporary non-­ representational arguments later in the chapter.

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 .1. A Radical Contextualist Challenge to Content 2 Internalism and Representationalism The problem for representationalists, as radical contextualist philosophers state it, is as follows: representations are theorised as being internally located and propositional in form, such that we represent the world in a thought which has propositional form. However, the problem is that propositions shorn of context, as they are when abstracted from their use by people, in contexts and on occasions, as they are when they are psychosemantic propositions, residing in modules and elicitation files, fail to represent and they are indeterminate with regards to the worldly events they putatively represent. Let us consider some of the examples one finds discussed in such work. Imagine one person telling another ‘there is coffee on the table’. Or, if you prefer, ‘milk in the fridge’. In both cases, the propositional, or semantic content that one might attribute to the proposition, separated from an occasion of use, falls short of representing the relevant content which that proposition has when employed by a person with interests, on an occasion and in a context. For example, ‘there is coffee on the table’ taken as this string of words, but without specifying an occasion of use, might include the dried, spilt coffee on the table. It might include the two-day-­ old dregs of coffee in the cup on the far end of the table, left there by John on Tuesday. And it might include the several cups of freshly brewed coffee, which have already been poured and distributed to those already sat round the table. However, if this sentence is uttered to you, as you arrive for the breakfast meeting, you know that the coffee referred to in the statement does not include the spilt, dried coffee, it doesn’t refer to the two-day old dregs and nor to the coffee already given to your colleagues who arrived before you. You look for the coffee pot. The dried, spilt coffee, the two-day old dregs, and the cups of coffee in possession of colleagues only come into play as possible referents when we merely focus on the statement as a linguistic item, as philosophers and cognitive scientists are wont to do, and as it is when posited as psychosemantic mental representation, in abstraction from the actual contexts in which such statements are made.

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To illustrate further, let’s consider Charles Travis’s milk example (Travis, 1989, p. 156) and Avner Baz’s discussion of it (Baz, 2012, p. 142). Travis tells us that Hugo, who we are told is engrossed in a paper, remarks to Odile “I need some milk for my coffee”. Odile replies, “You know where the milk is”. Suddenly defensive, Hugo replies: “Well, I don’t really know that, do I? Perhaps the cat broke into the refrigerator, or there was just now a very stealthy milk thief, or it evaporated or suddenly congealed”. (Travis, 1989, p. 156; quoted in Baz, 2012, p. 142)

The point of the example is that Hugo’s reply to Odile is, as Travis remarks, not merely absurd but fails as a counter to Odile’s reply. For much the same reason as me taking a cup of coffee out of my colleague’s hand, having been told ‘there’s coffee on the table’, as I arrived at the breakfast meeting, would have been absurd, Hugo’s response is an absurd response when taken as a response to the sense of the utterance communicated to him on this occasion, that is to say, as a response to what Odile has said to him, even though, grammatically-speaking, as it were, no rules have been violated. The sense of an utterance is essentially contextual, or in Travis’s terms, occasion sensitive. This said, we can go further than does Travis here, as Avner Baz has pointed out. Travis argues that while the formal meaning of the sentence ‘you know where the milk is’ allows, grammatically speaking, for a response along the lines Hugo offers, the sense of the utterance, as spoken by Odile on this occasion, does not invite the kinds of counter-examples that Hugo puts forward, hence the absurdity of his response. For Travis, this demonstrates that the question as to whether utterances in response to Odile’s words amount to pertinent counters or absurd mis-fires, so to speak, is only settleable in a context, on an occasion of use. The meaning one might claim to be formally contained in the sentence falls short of fixing the sense of the sentence, such that we might have the resources to draw the line between absurd and pertinent responses. Travis is surely right on this, but Baz wants to go even further. Baz argues that Odile’s remark should not even be read as an attribution of knowledge, despite what the words might (mis)lead us into believing as analysts. Indeed, Baz believes Travis has himself been misled as to the real lesson that emerges from his own example, and he has been so because he still operates with

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an account of formal word meaning, prior to sense-making acts of speech on an occasion. For Baz, the context Travis provides us with in laying-out the scenario in which Odile and Hugo are embedded, would suggest that Odile’s remark is a rebuke rather than a statement which attributes knowledge (location of the milk) to Hugo. Another way of stating this disagreement between Travis and Baz would be as follows: Travis, following Frege, minimally allows for words, in sentences, as having meaning in lieu of their employment by someone on some occasion, while it is the occasion which gives them sense and thereby renders them useful. One of the ways that the occasion of use, in conveying sense on our utterances, makes our words useful to us can be observed by the way that it allows us to see the line between absurd and pertinent responses. Baz goes further, he wants to fully break free of the Fregean tradition by denying formal word-meaning and focussing exclusively on the sense a sentence has in its employment by a person with interests, on an occasion, in a context. On this view, we forego the claim that certain strings of words have meaning prior to their employment, and instead see the role words play for a language user as akin to the role tools have for a craftsman, which are put to use by people, with interests and purposes, in contexts and on occasions. It is in recovering these interests and contextual factors through careful close observation of language use that we make the sense of an utterance visible to us. Another way of putting this disagreement is, perhaps, as follows: Travis wishes to argue for the primacy, and indeed essential or ineliminable role, of the pragmatic (over syntactic and semantic) contribution to the sense of an utterance. Baz wants to argue for the use, by people, in contexts, being the only factor in establishing the sense of an utterance. There’s a deeper point here too, one on which both Baz and Travis would, I believe, agree. What is lost in any formal analysis of language, where language is analysed in abstraction from its sites of use, is precisely that which is central to the sense our language has when used by us, and that is its normativity. When we see the exchange between Odile and Hugo in its context, as an exchange between these two people, we see that the sense of their utterances is inseparable from evaluative norms. Odile is rebuking Hugo because he asked her to provide him with milk in an underhand, indirect and impolite way, by stating his ‘need’ for milk.

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Odile rebukes Hugo because she, perhaps, resents being expected to fetch the milk for Hugo, or perhaps she resents the way he ‘asks’ indirectly or in a way which has ‘plausible deniability’, by not overtly asking but instead stating a ‘need’ in the hope Odile, as this person with whom he has this relationship, will take the hint and meet his ‘need’. What is clear is that what appears on the surface like a statement from Hugo, is in fact, when seen in context, a hint or a request which Odile understands as containing an expectation (which in turn she perhaps considers to be gendered, entitled or arrogant). In response, what might appear, formally, like a knowledge attribution by Odile, is, when seen in context, a rebuke to Hugo that draws upon Odile’s evaluative perception of the event. Now, the temptation to which many succumb when confronted by such examples and analyses, is to suggest this is all window-dressing, and that the meaning is contained in the words or sentences. However, if we pursue this line of argument we ultimately ignore the actual sense of the exchange between Odile and Hugo, and we therefore ignore what it is they are doing. Any discussion we then have about their words and using their names as ‘speakers’ of those words becomes a discussion which is not about Odile and Hugo or this exchange but actually an unrelated discussion about the interests of the analyst. So, things don’t look good for representationalism. Content is simply not available in abstraction from the use people make of language in contexts and on occasions. Propositions do not represent; they simply cannot do the work representationalists demand they must, as internally-located bearers of content, because they can’t represent, because they do not have sense, in abstraction from being put to use in a context by a specific person with interests, on an occasion. To summarise, the arguments put forward by radical contextualists such as Travis and Baz, and particularly those of Frank Ebersole, suggest that propositions, as units of analysis, do not bear content in abstraction from their being embedded in the practice of language use, on occasions and in specific contexts, by language-using members of a social order, who themselves have learned to use the language as part of their process of maturation and enculturation. Moreover, when we analyse language-­ in-­use, we find that the sense that language has is not purely descriptive or epistemic, but that it plays normative and evaluative roles. Moreover,

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the normative and evaluative are not separable from the descriptive. As Hilary Putnam once put it, it is a ‘fallacy of division’ to believe you can separate the normative from the descriptive, ‘Describing and evaluating are simply not independent in that way.’ (Putnam, 1992, pp. 350–1). So, representationalism seems to demand of language a number of things observation of language use shows it doesn’t offer: it demands 1. that propositions taken as discrete linguistic items represent the world, or states of affairs in the world, which is something that in abstraction from their use by members of a social order, on occasions, in contexts, they cannot do, and 2. it demands that we understand language as in essence serving this representational purpose, hence justifying the exclusive focus on propositions, and the exclusion of the normative and evaluative role language has. The work of Travis, Baz and Ebersole, in addition, I would argue, to the pioneering work of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks, show the error in such a stance.

2.2. The Question of Process Internalism If the arguments of the radical contextualists are valid, as I believe they are, then contextual factors, the social practices in which language is embedded, are an essential, ineliminable, part of what we do with that language; moreover, the descriptive or representational role language might play is not separable from the normative and evaluative roles. The desire to surgically extract propositions from language use, put them in the head or behind the skin so as to build a representational theory of cognition upon them, is akin to the baker trying to extract the egg from the cake because they need more eggs to glaze the cake. So much, so bad, for content internalism and propositionality. So, I agree with Rowlands about the prospects for content internalism, in light of such arguments. However, what interests me equally are not so much the arguments which Rowlands advocated in his 2002 book, but the argument from which he was keen to distance himself. For, while advocating content externalism, Rowlands was keen on ensuring his reader did not take his target to be the status of mental processes. For while much of Rowlands’ book is devoted to arguing that the content of, or the

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meaning our thoughts have, is not, as Descartes and his followers assume, internal (in our heads or behind our skin) but is irreducibly external, he resists challenging the thought that the processes are in our heads or behind our skin. Rowlands’ thought seems to be that while rejecting content internalism is a sound position to defend (even if still seen by many as radical), rejecting process internalism would just be plain wrong-headed— we all know that it is our brains that do the processing, right?

 .3. Rejecting ‘Process’ Internalism: Wittgenstein 2 and Merleau-Ponty What should we make of this reluctance to continue the move from rejecting content internalism to also rejecting, or at least questioning, process internalism? Denying process internalism is, even for externalist radicals such as Rowlands, a step too far it would seem, at least it was in 2002. Two thoughts sprung to mind as I read Rowland’s balking at extending his critique to process internalism, both thoughts are inspired by Wittgenstein. 1. We need to be mindful of the metaphorical status of ‘process’ in the term ‘mental process’, and subject its use to interrogation. (cf. Wittgenstein, 2009, § 308) 2. We should also subject to questioning the assumption that such ‘processes’, if we are to use that term, must be things of which it makes sense to predicate that they are inner or outer. (cf. Wittgenstein, 2009, § 293 & 304) Metaphors can lead us astray, as Wittgenstein puts it, they can lead us to ‘predicate of the thing what lies in the mode of representation’ (Wittgenstein, 2009, § 104); or, in more expansive language and drawing on the terminology of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003), in employing the metaphor of ‘process’ we import grammatical rules from the source domain into the target domain, and these imported rules constrain us in our reflections. So, the grammatical rules to which the term is subject, when employed in its source domain, where

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the term ‘process’ is used non-metaphorically, are carried over into the target domain, where we employ the term metaphorically, in this case, in our reflections on our ways of acting in and on, and responding to loci of significance in, the world. The result is that our reflections on our mental life and our object-involving abilities become constrained by our mode of representation, by our metaphorical employment of certain terms and the grammatical rules that they bring with them from their source domain. This concern about the metaphorical use of ‘process’ constraining us because it carries-over grammatical rules from its source domain can then be put alongside our second concern, which is about the applicability of the inner-outer distinction. We can bring these two concerns together in the following proposal: let us for a moment exchange the metaphorical employment of the word ‘process’ for use of the word ‘act’ and talk instead of mental acts. When we talk of mental acts rather than mental processes we are less likely to be led astray and yet I can think of nothing lost. One thing we might gain in such an exchange is a clearer appreciation of the apparent senselessness of thinking in terms of the phenomena under discussion as having to be necessarily either inner or outer. Acts are not things that take place either in the head/behind the skin or external to the person, outside their head or beyond their skin. Actions are the doings of people, or, less awkwardly put: people act. The analogy we should draw upon when thinking about our mental life, we might suggest, is the organism acting in and on the world, not it’s digestive organs processing food. The grammar of the term ‘act’ does not seem to force upon one the inner/outer question and thereby generate the problems we’ve discussed in this section. Thought of this way, such that we want to use the word ‘process’ to refer to mental acts, we are not obliged to invoke the grammatical rules they import, and thus mental processes, if we must talk this way, are not something for which it makes sense to say that they are either inner or outer. The forgoing reflections are inspired by Wittgenstein, but there are other routes by which one might get here and arrive at the conclusion that commitment to process internalism should be rejected along with the commitment to content internalism. Indeed, I began this chapter by drawing attention to the turn to the New Sciences of the Mind, the 4E approach, Ecological Psychology and Enactivism. We might note that all

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of these emerge out of phenomenologically-informed critiques, with the work of Merleau-Ponty being the most widely, though not exclusively, cited by those offering alternatives to the Cartesian tradition: e.g. the aforementioned Lakoff and Johnson cite Merleau-Ponty as a chief influence in their book Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), the father of Ecological Psychology, James Gibson, was influenced by, and Ecological Psychology has evolved, developed and been defended against critics by drawing on, Merleau-Ponty (Heft, 1989, 2001; Glotzbach & Heft, 1982; Costall, 2003, p. 321), and the Enactivist movement in its origins, in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s book The Embodied Mind (1991) was also heavily influenced by Merleau-Ponty (see for example Hutto, 2013, n. 1). If we put these considerations about the status of mental acts alongside those rehearsed with clarity by Rowlands regarding content externalism, then we see how the philosophical foundations of traditional representationalist cognitive science become seriously philosophically destabilised. For representationalists, operating within the Cartesian tradition, mental processes are theoretically postulated computational processes, which process input to produce contentful representations, which have propositional form.

 .4. Empirically-Discerned Philosophical Objections 2 to Representationalism So much for the philosophical arguments against traditional representational cognitivism. When one looks to empirical work, the news for representationalists isn’t much better, for in addition to the philosophical deflation of the requirement to theorise inner representational mental processes we also find objections emerging from robotics labs (Brooks, 1999; Wheeler, 2005, chap. 8) and primate research (see for example Barrett, 2011). These authors cite empirical areas of research which serve to demonstrate the inability of the representationalist programme to accommodate the empirical data, without bringing into question its foundational philosophical assumptions. It is important not to draw ­too-­firm a distinction between these empirically-inspired objections and

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the philosophical arguments of the previous sections. Louise Barrett’s (Barrett, 2011, 2018) work on primate cognition is empirically grounded and informed but leads her to question the representationalist philosophical assumptions that permeate the field and to recommend an alternative, Wittgensteinian, philosophical approach and advocate Radical Enactivism. Michael Wheeler’s work on Evolutionary Robotics (Wheeler, 2005) emerges from empirical research in robotics labs, which leads him to question representationalist philosophical assumptions and to recommend an alternative, Heideggerian, philosophical approach which has been incorporated into recent work in Ecological Psychology (see Chemero, 2009) and Enactivism. Ezequiel Di Paolo’s work on Evolutionary Robotics (Di Paolo, 2003) emerges from empirical research in robotics labs, which leads him to question representationalist philosophical assumptions and to recommend an alternative, Merleau-­ Pontyan, philosophical approach and advocate Enactivism (Stewart et al., 2010).

2.5. Paradigm in Crisis or Pre-Paradigm Stage? It is tempting, therefore, to depict representationalist cognitive science as a paradigm in crisis. For it is one thing to have philosophers employ deflationary arguments which serve to show internalism is at best non-­ obligatory and at worst senseless, but another to find that your theory faces epistemological crises in domains which should be the sites of its greatest success, such a robotics labs and primate cognition, and which lead those working in these fields to question the foundational philosophical assumptions of the programme. Cognitive science is, therefore, not a paradigm in crisis, but a loosely tied-together programme of research which has failed to establish itself as normal science, and which is, therefore, in Kuhnian terms, still in the pre-paradigmatic phase. It might be that to achieve the status of normal science, to achieve paradigm status, cognitive science must switch-out its Cartesian assumptions and replace these with philosophical insights which draw on Wittgenstein (e.g. Hutto, 2013), Heidegger (e.g. Wheeler, 2005), or Merleau-Ponty (e.g. Gibson, 1979; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).

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Will it be enough to switch-out one philosophical framework for another? Will this give us a science of the mind, or might we find that the critiques we’ve seen counting against Cartesian representationalism cut deeper? Before we address this question in the context of Ecological Psychology, let’s briefly consider the historical roots of the philosophical traditions we’re discussing.

 . Two Philosophical Traditions: Aristotelianism 3 and Cartesianism Before we consider ecological psychology in more detail, let’s reflect a little more on the mind from a philosophical perspective. Something happens in the course of the history of Western philosophy, such that thinking of matter and soul, or body and mind, as distinct substances becomes the norm. The standard, textbook, story is that this happens with Descartes, but I think this story is wrong, to a large extent. One might argue that in Ancient Greek thought one found a kind of prefiguring of Modern dualism in Plato, while Aristotle provided an alternative monist account. With the rise of Christianity and theological renditions of Aristotle’s philosophy, Aristotelian monism is corrupted. The Aristotelian monist alternative to Platonic thinking, in Christian guise, becomes itself rendered in to a pre-Cartesian substance dualism of body and spirit, in Aquinas, for example, motivated by the Christian theologians’ desire to separate the earthly body from the divine soul (see, e.g. Kenny, 1989). The modern era, for which Descartes is the towering figure in the Western philosophy of mind, therefore fails adequately to break free from the Christian corruption of Aristotelian monism. If we return to Aristotle, what we see is mind or soul not depicted as distinct from matter, but rather conceived of as matter with particular form. So, on this (uncorrupted) Aristotelian monist conception, the human mind simply is matter with human form, which, in virtue of this form, exhibits a particular set of objecting-involving and problem-solving abilities and capacities (see, e.g. Nussbaum & Putnam, 1992; Kenny, 1989). We might refer to this as Ecological-Organism thinking, in opposition to

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dualist thinking, about the mind. The interest is in the whole organism, situated and embedded in, and thus part of, its ecosystem, in opposition to thinking about a body with a mind (dualism one) standing in causal relationship to its world (dualism two). The reason for this very brief discussion of the history of the idea of the soul or mind in the Western tradition is to emphasise that there’s precedent for thinking about our mental capacities in an embodied, embedded, enacted and extended way, which draws on resources which predate Gibson’s work on affordances, predate early enactivism which emerged in the 1980s, and which predate the Twentieth Century phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. For we might see this ‘New Science of the Mind’, 4E Cognition, Radical Enactive Cognition and Ecological approaches as, broadly speaking, operative within this alternative Aristotelian monist tradition, in contrast to the Christian and Cartesian inheritance one sees in the representationalist tradition of Cognitive Science. Just as representational cognitive science is but one way of working within the Cartesian framework, and just as within representationalist accounts there are a number of competing theories, so too for the, broadly-speaking, Aristotelian Monist tradition, or for ecological-­ organism approaches. What I want to do in what follows is examine contemporary Ecological Psychology as one approach which tries to work within an Aristotelian framework and in doing so I will offer some criticisms from within. For while my own philosophical predilections are, on these terms, broadly Aristotelian, I will suggest that such predilections are not, ultimately, satisfiable by Ecological accounts, including those which incorporate Enactivism (Chemero, 2009), which advance the theory of affordances.1 Why this is so will pick-up on our argument earlier about the irreducibly-contextual nature of language and the placing of the distinction between pertinent and absurd responses. Ultimately, Ecological Psychology is caught on the horns of a dilemma: retain a rigorous naturalism and fail the absurdity (and abhorrence, and taste, and so on) test. Or, forego naturalism and factor-in ethical and aesthetic concerns into the definition of affordances and you lose the grounds for speaking the language of affordance rather than the language of concepts.

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 . Ecological Psychology and the Theory 4 of Affordances Ecological Psychology was initiated by James Gibson, but has been developed since by a number of authors. Prominent among those authors who have followed Gibson are Harry Heft (Heft, 1988, 2001), Alan Costall (Costall, 1995, 2017) and Anthony Chemero (Chemero, 2003, 2009). For Gibson, perception is action guiding (that is its function) and it is direct (no processing and no representations). Information is picked-up from the environment in the flow of perception as we move through the environment. Information exists as a product of the relation between, for example, light, surfaces and medium, such that when the light, reflecting off the surfaces and travelling via the medium converges at a specific point (say, the eyes of the perceiver) it provides directly, without the need for any kind of cognitive processing, information about the kinds of action afforded to the perceiver by the features of the environment, given the abilities of the perceiver. This, Gibson proposes, gives us an account of information pick-up which is non-representational, and it draws on a conception of information which is, we might say, sub-propositional. Perception is, therefore, of affordances for behaviour. What is perceived is not objects in the environment, nor the properties of objects in the environment, but rather features of a situation, which includes the perceiver, though those features are not perceiver-dependent, ontologically speaking. For as the perceiver perceives they do so as this perceiver, with these attributes and abilities, located here. The account of information pick-up should provide the basis on which such information specifies affordances: opportunities for behaviour for the perceiver. The philosophical challenge is this: how do we conceive of this particular, Ecological, mode of responsiveness to loci of significance in the environment, which avoids representationalism, and the invoking of propositional contents, while not collapsing into purely causal accounts, which are content-free? For, it is important not to be distracted by the flush of the new, as it were, into forgetting knotty old problems. There is a question that needs asking of all such accounts, and that question might be represented in the following way: we have a scale, at one end of the

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scale we have matter and causal relations only. At the other end of the scale we have conceptually mediated relations which can be represented in language. The conceptually mediated relations thereby afford us the ability to be responsive to the meaning the world has for us, which is irreducible to its purely material structure, affords us the ability to act on reasons, and enables us to offer reasons in support of our actions. Ecological Psychology seeks to find middle ground. For, if we rely on a conception of information which is propositional, then, the thought is, we open the door to the representationalists. Gibson has already made it clear that this is not an option for him. However, if we go purely causal, in our desire to slam the door on representationalists, we ultimately leave open the back door to the representationalists, because something needs to give content to the causal impacts on our senses. Gibson’s theory initiates a programme of research in which those Ecological Psychologists who have followed him have attempted, within the bounds he set, to provide a naturalistic account of perceptual information ‘pick-up’ in the theory of affordances, which resists a slide into purely causal accounts (because: no information), but which doesn’t require the theoretical postulation of representations or cognitive processes (because: information comes at too high cost). We might put this in Sellarsian terms. Ecological Psychology sets itself the task of finding the middle ground between the kind of intelligibility found operative in the Space of Reasons and that which is operative in the natural sciences, without collapsing into either. While it is tempting to remark: Good luck with that!, let’s try to assess the merits of the attempt. Gibson was, on the assessment of even his most staunch defenders, somewhat sketchy and perhaps even vague when it came to the details of his theory of affordances. Consequently, much of the work of those Ecological Psychologists who have followed has been comprised of providing detailed accounts of affordances. The accounts vary quite radically. One way in which they vary we might state as an ontological dispute between affordances as properties (Reed, 1996; Heft, 2001) and ­affordances as features (Chemero, 2003). Another point of divergence is between those who remain committed to a strictly naturalist account of affordances (Reed, 1996) and those who open up the account to socialisation and enculturation (Costall, 1995). Of course, depending on where

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one goes with this will, to reinvoke our Sellarsian framework, determine whether affordances are subject to the kind of intelligibility belonging to the Space of Reasons or that belonging to the Natural Sciences. Gibson explicitly aimed for the latter. It was crucial to Gibson, and to many of those theorists of affordances who have followed him, that affordances were located within the space of natural scientific explanation. The problem is that in doing so one restricts quite radically the kind of information that might be considered available to perception. So, let us consider some examples of perceiving opportunities for behaviour in the environment. Consider climbability. Let us say you are passing through the environment, perhaps on a walk across town and through the park, with a 10 year old child. The child loves to climb, and certain features of the environment (the environment includes you and the child, it is not external to you, on this account), as you pass through it, afford climbability. They do so because of how the abilities of the child serve to bring alive certain aspects of the environmental features which are perceived as affordances of climbability or climbing affordance. There’s the 120 cm high dry-stone wall—lots of places for foot and hand holds—but not the 3 metre high brick wall—it’s just too high and too smooth. There’s the old oak tree, with strong, low and approximately horizontal branches, but not the spruce tree next to it. There’s the dedicated climbing wall, with the coloured hand and foot holds, where the colours indicate levels of difficulty, which has been built in the local playground. All of these are the kinds of examples of affordances you will find in the literature and discussed by Ecological Psychologists delivering talks at conferences. They’re good examples which afford a rudimentary grasp of the theory of affordances, if you will.

 . The Missing ‘E’—Ethical Affordance, 5 Evaluative Perception, Concepts and Affordances as Rhetoric However, there is something too easy about these examples. There’s something missing. Such examples are good for illustrating affordances, and the theory, to the uninitiated, but somewhat partial if we want to estab-

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lish a theory of perception and action. One-sided diets of examples are apt to lead us astray. To avoid straying we should always look for the examples which don’t quite fit so obviously. So, to this end we might ask what of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi that you pass on the walk across town, or the statue of the Emily Pankhurst? To be sure these both have certain properties that given the body-scale and abilities of your ten-year-­ old companion would provide excellent climbing opportunities. But do they afford climbability? The question as to whether they do or do not is an ethical question. The Ecological Psychologist has to give an account as to how such ethical considerations can be bracketed-out of our perception of affordances or how they might be included, in a kind of robust, or thick, evaluative perception. Indeed, let us consider another example, that of affording urine-up-­ against-ability, or p-affordance, for brevity. For various reasons, male humans urinate against vertical surfaces. If one needs to urinate, one looks for a vertical surface to urinate against. There are numerous reasons for this which draw on considerations of hygiene, privacy (in most human cultures), shelter from the effects of wind which otherwise might lead to wearing the urine rather than disposing of it down a drain or into the ground. Is p-affordance an affordance in Gibson’s sense? It seems to draw upon considerations which quite clearly imply enculturation. Furthermore, as with our examples of climbability, there are unavoidable ethical boundaries here too. It is an unfortunate fact that the doors of closed retail stores in city centres in the UK seem to offer p-affordance at certain times of night for people who have reached certain levels of alcohol-­induced intoxication, though they don’t do so during daylight hours for sober occupants of the same city centre. Similarly, my next door neighbour’s Great Dane, Frank, stood stationary on the grass in front of our houses, doesn’t offer p-affordance, though it is rumoured that for it, prior to a few months of intensive training, stationary children offered p-affordance. The problem these examples present is that any account of affordances needs to have internal to it the grounds for excluding or including such evaluative, normative and ethical considerations. So, including moral evaluation would demand an account of evaluative perception which involves a kind of Aristotelian account of second nature or a Deweyan

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account of moral training. While I would be amenable to such accounts, this would take us a long way from Gibson’s naturalist account of affordances and stimulus information, provided by light reflecting off surfaces as we move through the environment. Indeed, such a robust, or thick conception of evaluative perception, seems to be unavoidably conceptual and interwoven with enculturation. Again, for a philosopher operating within the Aristotelian tradition this does not of necessity present a problem, we could look to the sort of fieldwork conducted by Ethnomethodologists to bring some light here. However, it does present a problem for the Ecological Psychologist, and for anyone who wants to draw upon the theory of affordances to produce a non-representational approach to cognitive science. The Ecological Psychologist is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Horn One: remain Gibsonian, even with the kinds of sophisticated adjustments and additions introduced by Chemero in his Dynamical Systems Theory (Chemero, 2009, chap. 7.6) of Affordance, and one has to provide an argument to justify the bracketing-off of the ethical in affordance perception. I’ll wait. Horn Two: Move beyond Gibson, and, as Costall (Costall, 1995) recommends, socialise affordances and, I suggest, you step on to a slippery slope which leads away from affordances and to concepts, and the claim that perception is conceptually mediated. The problem for Costall and those who follow him on this is that the language of affordances becomes little more than a kind of rhetorical gloss, designed to satisfy the naturalists. Indeed, our criticism can go further. Our discussion of Radical Contextualist Philosophy of Language demonstrated that abstracting propositions from their use in language, by people, in contexts amounted to abstraction from the very things that enabled propositions to have sense. Similarly, we would also have to charge our Ecological Psychologist who has socialised affordances. Because in formalising our conceptual capabilities and rendering them theoretically as affordances, instead of carefully describing them, the Ecological Psychologist abstracts from that—our concepts—through which we come to register and respond to loci of significance in our environment.

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6. Conclusion The issue might be stated as follows: it isn’t all about externalism, either content or ‘process’. The issues run deeper than that. Whether you’re a radical externalist, non-representationalist like Chemero (and Hutto and Myin), a centrist like Clark, or a conservative representationalist like Dretske and the early (circa 2003) Jesse Prinz there is still an aspect of the philosophical critique of cognitive science, which one can find in phenomenologically-­informed critiques and Wittgenstein-informed and influenced critiques, not-to-mention Ethnomethodological critiques, to which these non-representational accounts are exposed just as are representationalist accounts. Put another way, the problem isn’t just about representations and internalism. We are responsive to loci of significance in our environment, and we need to be honest about what is packed in to the term ‘significance’. To reinvoke the sliding scale introduced in the previous section: • if we locate ourselves too far to one end of the scale, we simply cannot give an adequate account of the nature of that significance, because we’re trying to account for significance, which can be evaluative, even ethical, in purely causal terms. In Sellarsian terms, we remain, at best, trapped in the space of natural scientific explanation, and at worst, we fall for the Myth of the Given, unable to account for our ability to act on reasons, offer reasons for actions and account for the evaluative practices that permeate our existence and shape our world, including ethical practices. • If we shift to the other end of the scale, then accounting for our ability to act on reasons, offer reasons for actions and the evaluative practices that permeate our existence, including moral practices, seems to demand that we have linguistic capacities and the ability to form propositions. This seems too strong-a-demand, and it was certainly unacceptable to Gibson. Enactivists and Ecological Psychologists have tried to find the middle ground, by rejecting representationalism and going outer. What I’ve tried to show here is that, in the case of Ecological Psychology, the problem I’ve here stated with reference to Sellars, actually remains, only now reframed

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as a debate about how to conceive of, or which is the best theory of, affordances. It is, however, the same problem. Ecological Psychology and the theory of affordances is not a solution to the problem outlined by Sellars, but is a reframing of it. We are still left with the puzzle as to how to account for our distinctive responsiveness to loci of significance in the environment which does not, in pursuit of the goal, destroy or dismantle the very phenomena we’re trying to explain. For as the radical contextualist philosophers of language showed how representationalism renders our language incapable of playing the normative, evaluative and, indeed, the representational role it does in our lives by abstracting the proposition from its uses by members of social orders, in contexts and on occasions, so Ecological Psychologists render our perceptual capacities incapable of playing the role they do in our lives such that we perceive, are responsive to and act on norms and values as these are interwoven in to the features of events, and they do so by abstracting ‘perception’ from our conceptual capacities and treating it theoretically for their own formal analytic purposes. Of course, some Ecological Psychologists are aware of the limits their formal-analytic abstractions have imposed, and so, like Costall, they seek to mitigate the damage. The consequences of moves, such as those made by Costall, is that they unwittingly demonstrate the extent to which it is the very language, the formal-analytic, theoretical language, of affordances that generates the problem to which they are now seeking a solution. For, if we instead forgo the theory and look, really look, at humans as members of social orders interacting with each other and the world, in social settings, and describe what we see in the language available to those members then we will resist the pitfalls of abstraction, and have a ­particularist account of the human capacity to be responsive to loci of significance in their environment, which captures the normative, evaluative and ethical richness of our lives.

Note 1. It should also be noted that I don’t believe that Aristotelian monistic predilections were or can be satisfied by a return to the substance of Aristotle’s own account. He initiates this tradition, or at least he is one of the early

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towering figures in Western monism, but his own arguments are too metaphysical to be satisfactory. The Aristotelian monist tradition needs completing by drawing upon Wittgensteinian and Ethnomethodological insights, in my view. But that, as they say, is for another time.

References Barrett, L. (2011). Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barrett, L. (2018). Picturing Primates and Looking at Monkeys: Why 21st Century Primatology Needs Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, 41(2), 1–27. Baz, A. (2012). When Words are Called For. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brooks, R. A. (1999). Cambrian Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chemero, A. (2003). An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181–195. Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012601730-4/50004-4 Costall, A. (1995). Socializing Affordances. Theory & Psychology, 5(4), 467–481. Costall, A. (2003). Book Review of Heft, Harry—Ecological Psychology in Context. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 39(3), 320–322. Costall, A. (2017). 1966 and All That: James Gibson and Bottom-Down Theory. Ecological Psychology, 29(3), 221–230. Di Paolo, E. (2003). Organismically-Inspired Robotics: Homeostatic Adaptation and Teleology Beyond the Closed Sensorimotor Loop. In K.  Murase, & T. Asakura (Eds.), Dynamical Systems Approach to Embodiment and Sociality. Adelaide: Advanced Knowledge International. Retrieved from https://www. researchgate.net/publication/250397907_Organismicallyinspired_robotics_ homeostatic_adaptation_and_teleology_beyond_the_closed_sensorimotor_loop Ebersole, F. B. (2002). Meaning and Saying: Essays in the Philosophy of Language (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Xlibris. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: The Psychology Press. Glotzbach, P.  A., & Heft, H. (1982). Ecological and Phenomenological Contributions to the Psychology of Perception. Nous, 16(1), 108–121.

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Heft, H. (1988). The Development of Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Perception. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 8(4), 325–334. Heft, H. (1989). Affordances and the Body—An Intentional Analysis of Gibson Ecological Approach to Visual-Perception. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 19(1), 1–30. Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hertzberg, L. (2001). The Sense is Where You Find It (Complete Version). In T. G. McCarthy & S. C. Stidd (Eds.), Wittgenstein in America (pp. 90–103). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/ filosofi/Staff/lhertzbe/Text/The_Sense_Is_Where_You_Find_It.pdf Hufendiek, R. (2016). Embodied Emotions: A Naturalist Approach to a Normative Phenomenon. London: Routledge. Hutto, D.  D. (2013). Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian Point of View. American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(3), 281–302. Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kenny, A. (1989). The Metaphysics of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menary, R. (2010). Introduction to the Special Issue on 4E Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 459–463. Nussbaum, M. C., & Putnam, H. (1992). Changing Aristotle’s Mind. In M. C. Nussbaum & A.  Oksenberg Rorty (Eds.), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (pp. 27–56). New York: Oxford University Press. Prinz, J.  J. (2003). Emotion, Psychosemantics, and Embodied Appraisals. Philosophy and the Emotions: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 52, 69–86. Putnam, H. (1992). Responses. In Hill, Christopher (Ed.), The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam. Philosophical Topics, 20(1), 347–408. Reed, E. S. (1996). Encountering the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rowlands, M. (2002). Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again. Chesham: Acumen. Rowlands, M. (2010). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Shargel, D., & Prinz, J. J. (2018). An Enactivist Theory of Emotional Content. In N. Hichem & F. Teroni (Eds.), The Ontology of Emotions (pp. 110–129). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E. (Eds.). (2010). Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Travis, C. (1989). The Uses of Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Travis, C. (2008). Occasion-Sensitivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Dijk, L., Withagen, R., & Bongers, R. M. (2015). Information without Content: A Gibsonian Reply to Enactivists Worries. Cognition, 134, 210–214. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (P.  M. S.  Hacker & J. Schulte, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

5 All Souls: Wittgenstein and ‘eine Einstellung zur Seele’ David R. Cerbone

My concerns in this paper are anchored in two short sentences from Wittgenstein’s later writings. They appear in what I still think of as Part II of Philosophical Investigations, but which has now been re-titled, ‘Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment.’ They read as follows: My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. (Wittgenstein, 2009b, § 22)

My concern lies with the contrast between attitude and opinion Wittgenstein deploys here and with different ways in which that contrast might be developed. I am concerned, moreover, with the difference these different ways make, both in terms of our understanding of Wittgenstein but, more broadly, in terms of our understanding of naturalism, of different forms naturalism might take. One form of naturalism—a form that seems more clearly to have a home in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy—is

D. R. Cerbone (*) West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_5

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a naturalism that ‘leaves everything as it is,’ (Wittgenstein, 2009a, § 124) whereas the other form is one that aspires to scientifically-minded explanations that may ultimately revise a great deal.1

1. The Depth of Attitudes Here is one way of trying to spell out the contrast Wittgenstein draws between attitude and opinion in this passage. We might call this way a privileging way, as it sees in Wittgenstein’s refusal of opinion an appreciation of the depth of the attitude invoked here. That the notion of opinion misfires here suggests that the other’s having a soul is not the kind of thing that any discovery could overturn or diminish in a way that some opinion I may have toward the other could. I may be of the opinion that he would be a good doubles partner, refuse an invitation to watch a Bergman film (or regret having accepted), dislike my libertarian colleague, or never in a million years vote Republican. Such opinions may be more or less firmly lodged, more or less susceptible to revision, but even the deeply held ones face Quine’s famous tribunal of experience, and in time I may find myself having to give some up or alter them in significant ways. But that I stand toward him as one ensouled is not one more of these opinions, not even a deeply held one. It does not take the form of an opinion at all. Wittgenstein notes in a related passage: ‘I would like to say: the attitude comes before the opinion,’ and, at the end of the remark, ‘An opinion can be wrong. But what would an error look like here?’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 38e).2 These remarks reinforce the suggestion that an attitude is quite unlike an opinion; the attitude Wittgenstein appeals to here is not so much immune from error as just not the kind of thing where it makes sense to talk about getting it wrong or right.3 Instead, as a way of being oriented toward the other— of responding to him—the attitude informs and determines the range of opinions I might hold toward him with all the various possibilities of addition and subtraction, but the attitude itself does not figure among those possibilities. Immediately prior to the remark in question, Wittgenstein declares: ‘“I believe that he is not an automaton”,

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just like that, so far makes no sense,’ which suggests that there is nothing here that rises, so to speak, to the level of a belief whose justification might be challenged or in some way detailed.4 The attitude runs deeper than any belief and determines what beliefs it makes sense to have. There is a related invocation of the notion of an attitude far earlier in the Investigations that underscores the kind of difference between attitude and opinion I am trying to articulate here. At Investigations § 310, Wittgenstein writes: I tell someone I am in pain. His attitude to me will then be that of belief, disbelief, suspicion, and so on. Let’s suppose he says: “It’s not so bad.”—Doesn’t that prove that he believes in something behind my utterance of pain?—His attitude is proof of his attitude. Imagine not merely the words “I’m in pain” but also the answer “It’s not so bad” replaced by instinctive noises and gestures. (Wittgenstein, 2009a, § 310)

I said just now that the invocation of the notion of attitude was related in this earlier passage, but we can see also that there is divergence as well. Here in remark 310, Wittgenstein identifies the attitude the other takes toward me when I say that I am in pain as taking the form of a belief (or disbelief, suspicion, and so on). The other could be said to be of the opinion that my pain is not so bad, that I may be exaggerating, and so on. What Wittgenstein is mainly concerned to deflect here is the idea that such a belief must be directed toward ‘something behind the outward expression of pain,’ what we might try to get at with the words, ‘the pain itself.’ In saying only that ‘his attitude is proof of his attitude,’ Wittgenstein sees in these exchanges of words not a directedness toward an underlying entity—a sensation—but a kind of responsiveness to the person. That responsiveness is what is involved in an attitude toward someone as an attitude toward a soul. I may believe that the person who cries out is maybe not so badly hurt as her cry may suggest, but in having that belief—that opinion—I do not thereby show that I have some more basic belief to the effect that she is the kind of thing that can both feel and feign pain. There is nothing of that form involved here. I take this to be

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part of the point of Wittgenstein’s instructions in the last sentence of this passage: replacing the words with ‘instinctive noises and gestures’ brings out the ways in which being attuned to one another as ensouled is a matter of how we comport ourselves toward one another—how we act— rather than something we think. Wittgenstein’s instructed replacement anticipates something he writes later in On Certainty: Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. (That is very badly expressed and probably badly thought as well.) But that means I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal. (Wittgenstein, 1969, §§ 358–9)

Leaving aside Wittgenstein’s worries concerning the adequacy of his formulation, his conception of this ‘certainty’ as ‘something animal’ accords with his appeal to ‘instinctive noises and gestures,’ as these too invite a kind of animalistic understanding of the attitude we take toward one another. One of my dogs steps on something sharp and lets out a loud yelp; my other dog rushes toward it, licks her face, nudges her forward. Does the one dog believe the other is in pain? My dogs’ attitudes toward one another is an attitude toward a dog, which is markedly different from their attitudes toward any other kind of thing, such as cats, squirrels, deer, or people, and this shows up in how they act toward one another, how they respond to the presence of a new dog in the neighbourhood (as opposed to an opossum, for example). These responses need not be understood as mediated or motivated by some underlying beliefs: they are not of the opinion that what they see across the lawn is a deer or that a ‘foreign’ dog is now roaming the field below our house. I do not want to suggest here that my dogs’ attitudes are therefore mere mechanisms or any such thing; only that we see in other kinds of animals the kind of de-­intellectualised responsiveness that Wittgenstein is gesturing toward as playing a role in our own case as well.5 As instinctive, as something animal, conceiving of this attitude as something we take up is already a step in the wrong direction. Wittgenstein is here inviting us to see our

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responses to another’s cry of pain as akin to a dog’s growling when a new dog comes into view or whimpering when distressed. A dog does not decide to act this way; rather, these patterns are inscribed into its canine form of life. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein describes the experience of really trying to give the question of whether others are in fact automata some traction: But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as usual?—If I imagine it now—alone in my room—I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business—the idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for example: “The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.” And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort. (Wittgenstein, 2009a, § 420)

Wittgenstein concludes this remark with the addendum: ‘Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of the window as a swastika, for example.’ Seeing the cross-pieces as a swastika is a variant, but one that takes some effort to delineate in the pattern of the window and to sustain in one’s visual experience, whereas seeing the cross-pieces just as cross-pieces requires no effort at all, either to discern or maintain in one’s vision. Similarly, the suggestion goes, seeing the other as an automaton requires considerable—and perhaps even ultimately futile—effort: I see the variation in my experience of the other by informing the experience with trance-like looks or discoveries of hidden clockwork, but the attending uncanny feeling quickly dissipates along with the variation. It is a ‘limiting case’ in that it marks a limit to my experience of other human beings. To cross that limit would be to court madness, a much more severe and frightening condition but nonetheless analogous to one of seeing window pieces only as swastikas.6

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2. Attitudes and Opinions Reconfigured I said at the outset that I was interested in different ways of understanding the contrast between attitude and opinion that Wittgenstein invokes in our central passage. While I’ve been developing an account of the contrast that privileges the notion of attitude, there is another way of marking out the contrast that sees in his appeal to an attitude something less than an orientation toward some range of facts. Opinions may be only that, but they are nonetheless responsive to reasons and evidence; they may be nonetheless true or false, well-informed or misguided. Whereas an attitude lacks that kind of grip on the world, and so Wittgenstein’s alignment of the category of the soul with the category of an attitude expresses an impatience with those who would want to know whether human beings really have souls or some such thing. There is nothing to know or fail to know: if his having a soul is not liable to revision due to some further discovery, then it is likewise not vouchsafed through one already made. That Wittgenstein can be read in this way is, I take it, the source of Stanley Cavell’s insistence that his philosophy ‘takes the risk of apsychism’ (Cavell, 1979, p. 400).7 Nothing secures or justifies the attribution of a soul to the other beyond the attitude I take toward him. The attribution of a soul is a kind of summary or, better, a picture of the attitude I bear toward him, rather than some further fact to which my attitude is responsive. To look for the soul—to ask where or what it is in the other—is to misread or misunderstand the way ‘it’ figures pictorially in my relation to him: What am I believing in when I believe that men have souls? What am I believing in, when I believe that this substance contains two carbon rings? In both cases there is a picture in the foreground, but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey. (Wittgenstein, 2009a, § 422)

Daniel Dennett’s philosophy is a principal example of a view along these lines. Invoking Dennett here is by no means a piece of free association on my part, nor a matter of importing a view entirely foreign to Wittgenstein’s concerns into our discussion. Indeed, as Dennett notes

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toward the very end of Consciousness Explained, his ‘debt to Wittgenstein is large and longstanding’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 463). He further recalls: ‘When I was an undergraduate, he was my hero, so I went to Oxford, where he seemed to be everybody’s hero.’ (Dennett, 1991, p.  463). Dennett ultimately disdained such collective hero-worship, choosing instead to apply what he saw as valuable and important in Wittgenstein’s philosophy: ‘When I saw how most of my fellow graduate students were (by my lights) missing the point, I gave up trying to “be” a Wittgensteinian, and just took what I thought I had learned from the Investigations and tried to put it to work.’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 463). Dennett’s central notion of the intentional stance exemplifies—and refines considerably— Wittgenstein’s appeal to the notion of an attitude. While I have claimed that this way of developing Wittgenstein’s contrast diverges from the kind of privileging the first way of reading that contrast accords to the notion of attitude, it would be unfair to say that Dennett’s way thereby makes the notion of attitude something shallow. Doing so suggests that there is something trivial or inconsequential in aligning the category of the soul with that of attitude, but Dennett would be the first to insist that taking up the intentional stance enriches one’s orientation toward the world. Patterns that would otherwise be undetectable or intractably difficult to explain from a purely physicalistic perspective can be clearly discerned from the standpoint of the intentional stance. As a result, adopting the intentional stance toward an entity or range of events will often yield far more in the way of predictive success, while any kind of non-intentional stance will afford little in the way of useful insights. That the adoption of the intentional stance yields predictive success, indeed in some cases greater success than might be achieved by adopting the physical or design stance, naturally invites the question of how to account for this success: is it in virtue of revealing or latching onto ‘intentional facts’ that the adoption of this stance so often proves successful? For Dennett, this question is a slippery one, as he himself readily admits. First and foremost, Dennett attributes the success of the intentional stance to its making discernible various ‘patterns’ in the world that might otherwise go unnoticed were the intentional stance to be eschewed. The patterns the intentional stance renders discernible are very often ‘real patterns,’ so that to forego the intentional stance would seem to involve

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missing out on genuine features of the world. But considerable care is needed here in teasing out this appeal to ‘genuine features.’ Some of the ‘patterns’ the intentional stance discerns are cases where we are reluctant to identify them as involving genuine intentionality. For example, one can take up the intentional stance toward a simple thermostat, attributing to it a small array of ‘beliefs’ about the room (such as ‘Too hot,’ ‘Too cold,’ and ‘Just right’), along with another small array of ‘desires’ to change the temperature of the room in one direction or another. While one can take such a stance toward the thermostat, and even though we do often talk this way about things like machines and plants, such talk usually strikes us as loose, figurative, or even metaphorical. These are cases, we usually want to say, of ‘as-if ’ intentionality, and so we stop short of treating them as instances of the ‘real thing.’ Though we can often feel confident about identifying a pattern as an instance of only ‘as-if ’ intentionality, and equally confident with respect to some instances of the ‘real thing,’ the thorny issue, according to Dennett, is one of how to make a principled demarcation between the two. There is, he contends, no clean and clear dividing line between the ‘as-if ’ cases and the genuine ones, and he suggests instead that we should see the difference as one of (admittedly very great) degree rather than kind.8 Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance plays a central role in his overarching method for studying consciousness, what he has dubbed ‘heterophenomenology.’ Distrustful of standard appeals to the certainty of ‘introspection,’ Dennett seeks instead ‘to construct a theory of mental events, using the data that scientific method permits.’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 71). In accordance with his conception of what ‘scientific method permits,’ Dennett’s heterophenomenological investigator is to adopt as neutral an attitude as possible toward the subjects of his investigation, to the extent that the investigator holds open the question of whether his ‘subjects’ even are conscious or enjoy conscious experience: ‘Officially, we have to keep an open mind about whether our apparent subjects are liars, zombies, parrots dressed up in people suits, but we don’t have to risk upsetting them by advertising the fact.’ (Dennett, 1991, p.  83). Such ‘neutrality,’ Dennett insists, is ‘what a science of consciousness demands.’ (Dennett, 1991, p.  83). Strictly speaking, then, heterophenomenology does not study conscious phenomena, since it is neutral with respect to

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the question of whether there are any: its subject matter is instead reports of conscious phenomena, the actual transcripts produced in a laboratory setting recording what the ‘apparent subjects’ say about their ‘experience.’ Indeed, even taking the noises emitted by these apparent subjects to amount to things they say is already a bold leap beyond the given: ‘The transcript or text is not, strictly speaking, given as data, for … it is created by putting the raw data through a process of interpretation.’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 75). In choosing to submit such ‘raw data’ to a process of interpretation, the investigator thereby adopts the ‘intentional stance,’ whereby that ‘raw data’ becomes invested with meaning, so that it takes on the shape of utterances made by an agent with beliefs, desires, and other psychological attitudes. Although there are ways in which Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance aligns with Wittgenstein’s invocation of an attitude, there is nonetheless something peculiar about the ‘official’ policy of neutrality that marks the starting point of any heterophenomenological investigation, and this peculiarity is evident from the kind of Wittgensteinian perspective I sketched at the outset, what I called the privileging way of understanding Wittgenstein’s refusal of the category of opinion. Though Dennett acknowledges that ‘this tactic of neutrality is only a temporary way station on the path to devising and confirming an empirical theory that could in principle vindicate the subjects,’9 even its temporary adoption is problematic. That is, the difficulty lies in making out—or giving content to—the posture or point of view the heterophenomenological investigator is meant initially to adopt. What is the heterophenomenological investigator doing when he adopts ‘this tactic of neutrality’ in relation to his ‘subjects,’ when he ‘suspends judgment’ as to whether or not his subjects even are conscious or enjoy conscious experience? It is not at all clear what to make of this stage of the heterophenomenologist’s investigation, what meaning or significance to ascribe to it. Though Dennett provides a sampling of alternatives to conscious human beings—liars, zombies, parrots in people suits—how seriously these ‘possibilities’ can be taken is an open question. The first alternative, that the subjects are liars, does not seem like much of an alternative, since the idea of lying itself seems to presuppose that the subject is alive and well, and capable of a complex psychological life. As Wittgenstein

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asks in one place, ‘A man can pretend to be unconscious; but conscious?’ (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 931). Perhaps the subjects are lying about the particular qualitative character of their experience, feigning that they are colour-blind, say, or pretending not to hear high-pitched tones, but entertaining these sorts of alternatives is not tantamount to ‘bracketing’ the consciousness of the subjects. The second and third possibilities are perhaps more problematic, since they would seem to involve a lack in conscious experience altogether, which means that the notion of pretence isn’t applicable in the way it was for the liars: parrots are not pretending to be conscious, nor are zombies exactly. The hypothesis that the scientists have before them parrots or zombies rather than conscious subjects is not question begging in the same manner as with liars, but one wonders what kind of hypothesis this is really supposed to be. The question is especially pressing as Dennett sees the entertaining of these alternatives as part of a scientific procedure, and it would be odd for a stage in that procedure to be one to which no clear sense could be assigned. ‘Rule out parrots’ or ‘Rule out zombies,’ considered as a step in the scientific investigator’s procedures does seem decidedly peculiar. Should the scientists check beneath the suits or the subjects’ hair for some traces of green, yellow, or red, perhaps? Or listen for the slight squawk in the voice that betrays its avian origins? Or keep an eye out for the slight wince when the films of George Romero are mentioned (the zombies always get the worst of it in the end)? Is this kind of attention really necessary? Recall Wittgenstein’s remark regarding the ‘uncanny feeling’ he reports when trying to think of other people as mere automata, beings who lack consciousness altogether, much like the case of zombies. Recall further that such a feeling was the most Wittgenstein could wring from the words, ‘The children over there are mere automata.’ The only other alternative was finding ‘the words becoming quite meaningless.’ Dennett does not say whether his imagined investigators produce in themselves ‘some kind of uncanny feeling,’ or whether they find their ‘hypotheses’ to be ‘quite meaningless.’ In either case, the idea that the investigator is here holding open a range of alternatives is difficult to sustain.10 Regardless of how ‘imaginable’ one finds these ‘alternative hypotheses’ to be, the deeper problem lies in Dennett’s motive for introducing them in the first place, namely that his heterophenomenological investigator

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adopt a neutral standpoint. Recall Dennett’s characterisation of the adoption of the intentional stance on the part of the heterophenomenological investigator: in doing so, the investigator goes beyond what is ‘given,’ the ‘raw data’ that must be interpreted so as to yield reports of a putatively conscious being. Wittgenstein is especially suspicious of such an appeal to interpretation as involving distinctive levels of seeing, such that one level may be identified as more basic—more genuinely a case of seeing— than another. Consider the following remark: But now am I to say that I really “see” the fearfulness in this behaviour—or that I really “see” the facial expression? Why not? But that is not to deny the difference between two concepts of what is perceived. A picture of the face might reproduce its features very accurately, but not get the expression right; it might, however, be right as far as the expression goes and not hit the features off well. “Similar expression” takes faces together in a quite different way from “similar anatomy”. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 1068)

This passage stands at the end of a sequence of three remarks concerning the idea of observing the emotions, in this case a child’s hesitant encounter with a dog. The sequence begins with the following: “I can see that the child wants to touch the dog, but doesn’t dare.” How can I see that?—Is this description of what is seen on the same level as a description of moving shapes and colours? Is an interpretation in question? Well, remember that you may also mimic a human being who would like to touch something, but doesn’t dare. And what you mimic is after all a piece of behaviour. But you will perhaps be able to give a characteristic imitation of this behaviour only in a wider context. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 1066)

What are we to make of Wittgenstein’s leading question? How is the possibility of seeing such a thing as the child’s reluctance to be explained? The questions following the leading one indicate a way one might be tempted to go. By invoking the idea of levels, one might then depict the seeing of the child’s reluctance as occupying a higher level, where seeing the ‘shapes and colours’ occupies a lower one. What bridges the gap from one level to the next is suggested by the third question: interpretation. In saying I  see the child’s reluctance or hesitation, I impose an interpretation

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on what I ‘really’ see, which are the moving shapes and colours. What Wittgenstein says following his series of questions is meant, I take it, to interrupt this line of reasoning, primarily by reminding us of the differences between those descriptions, such that one does not simply ‘piggyback’ on the other. Wittgenstein’s appeal to ‘behaviour’ as something whose imitation very often involves reference to a ‘wider context’ suggests that whatever relation there might be between the description of the child in terms of moving colours and shapes and the description in terms of hesitation, the latter cannot be understood as an interpretation of the former for the reason that one looks elsewhere when accounting for the child in terms of hesitation. If this is right, then talk of different ‘levels’ is misleading, as it suggests a hierarchical relation among the descriptions, whereas it seems better simply to note that the descriptions are, well, different. In the middle remark of the sequence, Wittgenstein again notes the importance of the ‘surroundings’ for the description of what one sees: One will also be able to say: What this description says will get its expression somehow in the movement and the rest of the behaviour of the child, but also in the spatial and temporal surrounding. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 1067)

Consider again the example of the reluctant child’s encounter with the dog: Wittgenstein there rejects the idea that our seeing the child’s hesitation should be understood as an interpretation of what we ‘really see,’ namely the bare physical movements. Emotions and expressions are not, Wittgenstein insists, things that we infer from more ‘neutral’ data; we see them as directly as bare ‘facial contortions’ and the like, indeed perhaps more so. As Wittgenstein writes: Consciousness in the face of another. Look into someone else’s face and see the consciousness in it, and also a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, dullness etc. The light in the face of another. Do you look within yourself, in order to recognize the fury in his face? It is there as clearly as in your own breast. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 927)

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The idea that the heterophenomenological investigator does not ‘really see’ the consciousness of his subjects, that his ascription of consciousness to his subjects involves a leap beyond the ‘given,’ is underwritten by a prejudice in favour of one kind or way of seeing over others. One principal motive of Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with ‘seeing aspects’ is to root out precisely this prejudice, to remind us of the multiplicity inherent in the concept of seeing. As he puts it in the psychology fragment: The concept of seeing makes a tangled impression. Well, that’s how it is.—I look at the landscape; my gaze wanders over it, I see all sorts of distinct and indistinct movement; this impresses itself sharply on me, that very hazily. How completely piecemeal what we see can appear! And now look at all that can be meant by “description of what is seen”!—But this just is what is called “description of what is seen”. There is not one genuine, proper case of such description—the rest just being unclear, awaiting clarification, or simply to be swept aside as rubbish. (Wittgenstein, 2009b, § 160)

In the paragraph immediately following the one just cited, Wittgenstein connects the conceit that there is ‘one genuine proper case of ’ description to materialism, at least insofar as materialism takes material objects and properties to be, unlike emotions and attitudes, what we really or directly perceive: Here we are in enormous danger of wanting to make fine distinctions.—It is similar when one tries to define the concept of a physical object in terms of ‘what is really seen’. Rather, the everyday language-game is to be accepted, and false accounts of it characterized as false. The primitive language-game which children are instructed in needs no justification; attempts at justification need to be rejected. (Wittgenstein, 2009b, § 161)

 . The Soul: The Dialectic of Loss 3 and Vindication I have suggested that something is amiss with the way of reading Wittgenstein’s contrast between attitude and opinion that facilitates a move in the direction of a more scientifically-minded naturalism. That

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direction is not one that simply accepts the ‘everyday language-game,’ but seeks to explain it and to do so from a perspective that is neutral in relation to it. Taking in more of what Wittgenstein says in this vicinity raises questions about the intelligibility of this kind of ‘neutral’ perspective: we don’t know what it would be like really to bracket the idea that the other is conscious, as though his being a zombie or cleverly disguised parrot is a genuine (enough) hypothesis that must (somehow) be ruled out. Apart from the very oddity of Dennett’s official policy, I have also tried to show how, from Wittgenstein’s perspective, the motives behind that policy involve an unwarranted conception of perception and understanding as hierarchically-modeled such that seeing the purely physical or material properties of something is more basic or more secure in relation to seeing a person’s or animal’s emotional and other affective qualities. While I have throughout expressed more sympathy with what I called the privileging way of understanding Wittgenstein’s appeal to attitude, both in terms of issues of textual and interpretive fidelity and of offering some critical leverage against the kind of naturalism espoused by Dennett, various readers of Wittgenstein have seen in this way of reading him something far darker and more disturbing. The worry might be put like this: while Wittgenstein may appear to offer reassurance in the sense that no justification of our ‘everyday language-games’ is needed, we should not lose sight of the accompanying idea that no justification is available either. Notice what he says in the following passage: Naturally the question isn’t: “Is it right to say ‘I see his sly wink’.” What should be right or wrong about that, beyond the use of the English language? Nor are we going to say “The naif person is quite right to say he saw the facial expression”! (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 1069)

Hence, Cavell’s remark about the risk of apsychism in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Other readers go further. José Benardete, for example, writes of ‘the widespread impression (one can hardly avoid it) that at the heart of the Philosophical Investigations lies a profound darkness, fixated on pain above all.’ (Benardete, 1973, p. 280). What ‘confirms’ this impression for Benardete is a peculiar scenario that appears more than once in Wittgenstein’s later writings and lectures11 involving the ‘soulless tribe.’ I

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want to try to develop this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking by following out mostly sympathetic readings of this scenario that nonetheless leave what is disturbing about them clearly in view. Such an upshot provides in turn an opening for the heterophenomenological perspective I’ve been finding fault with to plead its case anew. I will suggest in the end that the appeal of such pleading says more about our response to the scenario of the soulless tribe—including those readings I canvas here—than it does about what Wittgenstein is really up to here. The scenario is introduced in the first volume of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology as follows: A tribe that we want to enslave. The government and the scientists give it out that the people of this tribe have no souls; so they can be used without scruple for any purpose whatever. Naturally we are interested in their language all the same; for of course we need to give them orders and get reports from them. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 96)

The scenario is problematic from the start, since the notion of the tribe being ‘soulless’ is introduced as a piece of propaganda, devised by ‘the government and the scientists.’ There appears to be no motivation for this propaganda beyond the desire to enslave the tribe, certainly no evidence of these people lacking souls, of being fundamentally different from the ‘we’ who want to enslave them. In his lectures, Wittgenstein asks his students to suppose that ‘our philosophy is that our slaves aren’t human and don’t feel pain’ (Geach’s version), that they are ‘the tribe without feelings’ (Shah), or that we ‘conquer a race and we believe they feel nothing,’ although also that ‘the philosophers teach that they have no soul; that they feel nothing’ (Jackson). On any of these renderings of the lecture presentation, the explicitly manipulative dimension of the scenario is missing or at least more muted (assuming the ‘philosophers’ are imagined to be sincere), although its absence does not thereby make the scenario all that much less disturbing.12 In trying to spell out the disturbing character of this scenario, the most natural thing to say initially is something like this: these imagined slave owners are somehow oblivious to what should be obvious, namely, that the slaves feel pain (and so on). Their attitude toward the slaves, as failing

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to be an attitude toward a soul, is just that, a failure, an inability (willed or otherwise) to see something that is right there before them. There is, in other words, a whole range of facts about the slaves—that they feel, think, and the like—that the slave owners have (again, somehow) managed to ignore.13 Some readers of this scenario in Wittgenstein have wanted to resist—or finesse considerably—what would seem to be this obvious point. Norman Malcolm, in his review of Philosophical Investigations,14 provides a brief discussion of this scenario, drawing upon Wittgenstein’s lectures. Such slave owners, Malcolm writes, would ‘look at the slaves in a peculiar way.’ He continues: They would observe and comment on their movements as if they were machines. (‘Notice how smoothly his limbs move.’). They would discard them when they were worn and useless, like machines. If a slave received a mortal injury and twisted and screamed in agony, no master would avert his gaze or prevent his children from observing the scene, any more than he would if the ceiling fell on a printing press. (Pitcher, 1966, p. 90)

Malcolm concludes: ‘Here is a difference in “attitude” that is not a matter of believing or expecting different facts.’ (my emphasis). Similarly, in his various discussions of the scenario, William Brenner argues that we should not see the slave owners as making any kind of factual mistake when it comes to their slaves. Brenner says at one point in his discussion: ‘A slave master who insists that his slaves are really automata is no more guilty of stupidity and mistake than is a child who ascribes pain to her dolls and pities them; it is just that his behaviour is expressive of a sinister and far less innocent soul.’ (Brenner, 1999, p. 109).15 Brenner’s point, I take it, is that the moral failings of the slave owners is what is fundamental here. Their moral failure is not predicated on any kind of cognitive failure. They don’t acknowledge the slaves in a way that (we feel) they ought to be acknowledged. The difficulty here lies, though, in understanding just why the masters’ attitude is ‘expressive of a sinister and far less innocent soul.’ Isn’t it because the masters treat the slaves as though they were automata when in fact they are not? The masters’ attitude toward the slaves is not an attitude toward souls: they do not take up that kind of stance toward the slaves. Is that the end of the matter? In order

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for that attitude to be described as ‘sinister,’ don’t we need to have a grip on why that is so? But we might imagine a very different take on this scenario from a reader of Wittgenstein such as Dennett. Notice that Wittgenstein does not consider that any of his imagined scientists or government officials are in fact heterophenomenologists. Suppose, though, that some of them were. What would such investigators make of this fundamental division in society between ensouled masters and soulless slaves? Recall that heterophenomenology starts with an official policy of neutrality when it comes to questions concerning whether any of its subjects are actually conscious. Applied to this scenario, this ‘official policy’ demands that the question of whether either the masters or the slaves really feel pain be left open. Now despite the kind of skepticism with which heterophenomenology begins, Dennett leaves room for the idea of eventual ‘vindication’ of the subjects being studied. That is, heterophenomenology allows for a way of declaring, after sufficient investigation, that its subjects—or some of them anyway—really are conscious. The rough idea is this: really to be conscious just means that subjecting the ‘raw data’ to the intentional stance pays sufficient predictive and explanatory dividends to motivate maintaining that stance. The ‘dividends’ Dennett envisages are ultimately correlations between the ‘heterophenomenological worlds’ projected by the subjects (once, that is, the transcripts of the various noises they make have been interpreted via the intentional stance) and the goings-on at the neurological and other sub-personal levels. Dennett likens these heterophenomenological worlds to the ‘worlds’ depicted or projected by works of fiction. Like the literary interpreter, the heterophenomenologist may look for physiological, neurobiological correlates for all the ‘characters’ in the transcripts of his subjects, here looking among the neurological goings-on in the literal interiors of the subject. If, Dennett suggests, ‘we were to find real goings-on in people’s brains that had enough of the “defining” properties of the items that populate their heterophenomenological worlds, we could reasonably propose that we had discovered what they were really talking about— even if they initially resisted the identifications.’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 85). And that, we might say, is the end of the matter regarding vindication: really being conscious just is a matter of being capable of (and actually on

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occasion) producing a transcript that may be interpreted from the standpoint of the intentional stance as depicting a suitably rich heterophenomenological world whose characters and scenarios are sufficiently correlated with neural and other physiological events. So now if we consider our heterophenomenological investigators confronted with Wittgenstein’s imagined society that divides its population into ensouled masters and soulless tribes, we can see how that division might come to be regarded as thoroughly arbitrary. That is, if both masters and slaves are made the subjects of heterophenomenological study, the investigators will find that each group produces more or less the same kind of ‘scripts’ when it comes to reports about how things seem, how things feel, what is going on ‘in’ them, and so forth. Furthermore, we can imagine that the neurophysiological data collected by the investigators will be more or less the same across the two populations, which allows for the same kind of interpretive recasting and reidentification of what both groups of subjects are talking about in terms of underlying physiological processes and states.16 A blind study might reveal that an expert heterophenomenologist cannot tell, based on such scripts and correlations, whether she is looking at a data set for a slave or a master. From the standpoint of heterophenomenology, whatever might be said in the way of vindicating the claim that the masters are really conscious can be said equally of the slaves; there is, from this standpoint, no motivation whatsoever for the idea that one group consists of people who ‘really’ have souls while the others are more or less automata. Anyone who insisted otherwise, who insisted that only masters really have experiences, really feel things, and so on, will have to say what more that could mean beyond the production of sufficiently rich projections of heterophenomenological worlds that can be robustly correlated with neurophysiological data. In this way, despite its perverse-seeming insistence on an official policy of neutrality when it comes to investigating putatively conscious beings, heterophenomenology can appeal to a range of facts—third-personal, intersubjectively available facts—that serve to explain how and why the attitude of the slave owners is indeed sinister. In sharp contrast with Malcolm and other readers, the heterophenomenologist can say, and say why, the difference in attitudes is a matter of one of them wrongly believing and expecting different facts.

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4. Anti-Dialectic: Recollecting the Soul I have been suggesting that the perspective afforded by Dennett’s heterophenomenology appears to offer a kind of welcome leverage in diagnosing the cognitive and moral shortcomings of our imagined slave owners’ attitude toward the slaves as somehow soulless. Indeed, given heterophenomenology’s conception of vindication, we can be led to think that the whole idea of soullessness might begin to dissolve: in light of the data provided by heterophenomenological inquiry, there simply is no distinction to be drawn between being ensouled and being soulless when it comes to the slave owners and their slaves. Insofar as the slave owners are rightly regarded as ensouled, the same goes for the slaves. The slaves cannot really be understood as ‘outwardly resembling’ the owners and yet for all that lacking something ‘inner.’ In this way, heterophenomenology develops an idea found in a wayward comment Wittgenstein makes about this scenario, well removed from the main clusters of remarks that present it: In these considerations we often draw what can be called “auxiliary lines”. We construct things like the “soulless tribe”—which drop out of consideration in the end. That they dropped out had to be shown. (Wittgenstein, 1980b, § 47)17

Heterophenomenology, it would seem, provides a way of showing that— and how—the soulless tribe ‘drops out of consideration.’ Let us consider once more the masters in the soulless tribe scenario and the question of whether something like Dennett’s heterophenomenology could be the thing that changes their view of the slaves. Isn’t everything that could convince them already open to view: the screams, the writhing, the injuries, and so on? All these things seem to leave the masters cold, indifferent: there is nothing in the way of sympathy, no urge to comfort an injured slave, nothing that registers for them that the slave is feeling anything. As Malcolm suggests, the masters might take an interest in an injured slave in the way we might take an interest in broken machinery: a slave’s cry is, for the masters, like the highpitched whine of a rubbing belt in an engine. ‘That doesn’t sound good,’

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a master might say, which means that the slave needs to be attended to, not to comfort him but to keep him working right. So if we say, ‘Look at how he’s crying! Can’t you see that he’s in pain,’ the master may reply, ‘Yes, he’s hurt all right. When slaves cry like this, you can’t get any work out of them for hours. But don’t be fooled, they don’t really feel anything.’ Wittgenstein imagines people being mocked for suggesting that the slaves might feel something: If anyone among us voices the idea that something must be going on in these beings, something mental, this is laughed at like a stupid superstition. And if it does happen that the slaves spontaneously form the expression that this or that has taken place in them, that strikes us as especially comical. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 97)

It is not clear what it would take to bring the masters around, to get them to see that their stance toward the slave is indeed sinister. What could I show them to see that there is indeed a fact that they have somehow overlooked or are wrong about? Inspired by heterophenomenology, we might try taking the following route: we get one of the masters to agree to an MRI scan and likewise for one of his slaves. We prick or pinch the master’s skin in a way that makes him cry out in pain; we do the same for the slave. Suppose that the same area in their respective brains—the area typically associated with pain—lights up.18 We could now say, ‘See? The same thing is going on inside the slave as in you when you feel pain. Can’t you see now that the slave feels pain too?’ Wittgenstein anticipates this sort of approach when he writes: Imagine that people could observe the functioning of the nervous system in others. In that case they would have a sure way of distinguishing genuine and simulated feeling.—Or might they after all doubt in turn whether someone feels anything when these signs are present?—What they see there could at any rate readily be imagined to determine their reaction without their having any qualms about it. And now this can be transferred to outward behaviour. This observation fully determines their attitude to others and doubt does not occur. (Wittgenstein, 1970, § 557)

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The trajectory of this passage emphasises the ways in which these additional possibilities of observation might be taken up and acted upon in much the same way the observations of ‘outward behaviour’ are. But what is especially noteworthy here is the question between the dashes: if there was some doubt that had been raised about simulation when outward behaviour had been observed, access to the literal insides of the person would not by itself settle or alleviate those doubts. One could just raise the worry all over again: perhaps the nervous system is not such a good guide to whether someone is really feeling something. The lesson of these passages is that if the scenario of the soulless tribe does indeed ‘drop out of consideration,’ that will not happen via a procedure such as Dennett’s heterophenomenology. In order for such a procedure even to get a foothold, those who take it up must already see the slaves—how the slaves ‘behave’—as relevantly similar to those who see themselves (and one another) as feeling pain, enduring sorrow, and so on. If they do not already see the slaves this way, then there is no motivation whatsoever to apply the procedures of heterophenomenology. Any such attempts at demonstration will be little more than sideshow-like curiosities (‘See the slave’s brain light up!’), occasions for mockery and derision of the kind Wittgenstein envisions. And of course, if they do already see the slaves as relevantly similar, then there is nothing for the heterophenomenologist to show or establish. (‘His attitude is proof of his attitude.’) Dennett has referred to consciousness as a ‘perilous phenomenon,’ something that provokes ‘skepticism, anxiety, and confusion’ in those who so much as contemplate its study (Dennett, 1982). Although Dennett’s heterophenomenology appears to provide an avenue for ­dissolving the idea of the soulless tribe, we can see that the whole apparatus that might be contrived for that purpose is nonetheless predicated upon just such skepticism and anxiety. That is, the procedures of heterophenomenology still treat the matter of being ensouled versus being soulless as something one has to find out, and so as a situation where, initially at least, it could go either way. (The very idea of vindication suggests as much.). Given heterophenomenology’s insistence on a neutral starting point, it must entertain the possibility of soullessness as a factual possibility, as a hypothesis that subsequent investigation conducted by experts must rule out. We may well wonder whether this need for expertise is

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misplaced here or, to put it slightly differently, whether the felt need for vindication by experts on our part shows that we have succumb already to the skepticism and anxiety Dennett reports. To (want to) rely on heterophenomenology and its promise of ‘vindication’ already bespeaks a kind of complicity with the attitude of our imagined slave owners and so at the same time a repression of the kind of responsiveness toward one another emphasised by what I called the privileging reading of Wittgenstein’s contrast between attitude and opinion. Nothing further than this responsiveness is needed for the idea of a soulless tribe to ‘drop out of consideration’ and the real work of thinking through the scenario lies in our coming to see that this is so. The real work lies, in other words, in our seeing how our so much as entertaining the idea of the soulless tribe as a real possibility is an expression of a desire to stand aloof from our own attitudes, our own ‘instinctive noises and gestures’ that found and pervade our lives with one another. We stand aloof insofar as we conceive all of that as just a stance that might be adopted or suspended and what facilitates our doing so is our willingness to see the agony of the slaves as a collection of mere movements and sounds. Only in this way could we then begin to wonder about what kind of theory is needed to restore feelings and sensations—everything bound up with the inner—to the lives of the slaves.19 In treating our attitude toward our imagined slaves as a kind of stance, we not only stand aloof from the slaves, but as I have indicated, we stand aloof from ourselves. We do so by omitting—or shielding from view— everything that is involved in our coming to take various stances toward various things, in our having opinions of whatever kind, as though all of that is itself just one more stance among others. Shortly before remarking on how the soulless tribe—as an ‘auxiliary construction’—drops out, Wittgenstein refers to just such a form of detachment: “Human beings sometimes think.” How did I learn what “thinking” meant?—It seems I can only have learned it by living with people.—To be sure, one could imagine seeing human life in a film, or being allowed merely to observe life without participating in it. Anyone who did this would then understand human life as we understand the life of fish or even

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of plants. We can’t talk about the joy and sorrow, etc., of fish. (Wittgenstein, 1980b, § 29)

Wittgenstein’s suggestion here is that whatever kind of understanding of human life such a perspective affords, it would leave opaque notions of human joy and sorrow, thought and feeling, all of those notions woven into the patterns of human life. The heterophenomenologist is someone who wants ‘merely to observe life without participating in it,’ who wants to see human life as though in a film whose meaning must be determined or deciphered. In having such a desire, the heterophenomenologist must repress the idea that she is herself one more participant, someone who does not merely observe the goings-on of human beings as though projected on a screen.20 She too is woven into those patterns that inform her own life as much as anyone else’s. Such a desire, I want to suggest, is characteristic of naturalism’s various attempts to insist upon a conception of ourselves that avails itself only of ‘the data that scientific method permits.’ Such an austere conception, which treats the intentionality of the subject of study as coordinate with the stance of the observer, obscures from view that very observer’s own agency, as someone who takes up various stances toward various kinds of things. At one juncture in the remarks collected in The Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, but also from the 1940s, Wittgenstein writes: We talk and we act. That is already presupposed in everything I am saying. (Wittgenstein, 1978, VI, § 17)

Despite the image of depth I invoked in explicating Wittgenstein’s appeal to attitude, insofar as we try to understand that as simply my attitude, we do not go deep enough. That we talk and that we act—here perhaps we reach the right kind of depth, which is reached not by trying ‘to dig down to the ground’ but instead recognising ‘the ground before us as the ground’ (Wittgenstein, 1978, VI, § 31). Standing on such ground—and recognising it as such—is not a stance at all. Talk of stances gives us only ‘the illusory image of a greater depth,’ whereby we can in some way explicate or even explain21 what having a soul is all about rather than simply seeing ourselves as all—already—ensouled.22

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Notes 1. Daniel Dennett’s philosophy of mind, who serves as my principal example of one way of spelling out Wittgenstein’s contrast, is at the very least open to radical revisions in our self-understanding as subjects of experience. See Note 7 below for further discussion. 2. The passage reads: But what is the difference between an attitude and an opinion? I would like to say: the attitude comes before the opinion. (Isn’t belief in God an attitude?) How would this be: only one who utters it as information believes it. An opinion can be wrong. But what would an error look like here? (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 38e) 3. I am indebted to Edmund Dain for this way of putting the difference. 4. The inclusion of the clause ‘just like that’ is significant here, as there certainly can be situations where those words, ‘I believe that he is not an automaton,’ do make sense. Consider: I am at a carnival with my son. Arrayed along the midway are various ‘living statues’, people who have been hired to pose as statues for the day; interspersed among the people are also mechanical figures that closely resemble the living statues. Periodically, various of these statues and figures move so as to startle passersby. Sometimes it’s one of the people, sometimes one of the mechanical figures. My son and I take an interest in the displays and try to determine which among them are the real people, which the mechanical ones. I look closely at one and notice just a hint of strain around the eyes, a slight slip where the ‘statue’ gives himself away. Pointing, I say to my son, ‘I believe that one’s not an automaton.’ In this situation, such words are perfectly in order, as is the notion that I am here expressing a belief. 5. One could also, I believe, forge a very different kind of connection between Wittgenstein’s contrast of attitude and opinion with various strands of the continental tradition in twentieth Century philosophy. For example, Heidegger in Division One, Chapter 4 of Being and Time is especially concerned to deflect any understanding of the phenomenon of being-with that construes it as a kind of theoretical orientation or achievement: ‘Not only is being toward others an autonomous, irreducible relationship of being: this relationship, as being-with, is one which,

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with Dasein’s being, already is.’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 162/125). For this reason, Heidegger rejects any appeal to ‘empathy’ as somehow founding the relationship toward the other: ‘“Empathy” does not first constitute being-­with; only on the basis of being-with does “empathy” become possible.’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 162/125). Although Heidegger does not say so explicitly, I take it that he would agree that the primordiality of being-­ with is distorted beyond recognition if understood as some collection of opinions. Another example is Levinas. In an essay critical of Heidegger—‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’—Levinas goes even further in de-­ epistemologising, so to speak, the relation to the other. He writes at one point: A human being is the sole being which I am unable to encounter without expressing this very encounter to him. It is precisely in this that the encounter distinguishes itself from knowledge. In every attitude in regard to the human there is a greeting—if only in the refusal of greeting. (Levinas, 1996, p. 7) The inability Levinas cites here, such that even the refusal of greeting is itself inescapably a form of greeting (I can neither greet nor refuse to greet my plants, my favorite coffee mug, or my new shoes), again marks out the kind of depth I am attributing to Wittgenstein’s refusal of the category of opinion. Simply not greeting another human being is simply not an option, just as the question of whether or not another human being is an automaton so far makes no sense. Despite their disagreements, for both Heidegger and Levinas, there is nothing in this repudiation of epistemology that moves their conception of the human—and the self-other relation more specifically—in the direction of conceiving of it as something animal. 6. Wittgenstein’s scenario of the soulless tribe, discussed below, might be understood as an attempt to fill out this kind of limiting case. It is not clear to me that Wittgenstein actually deploys the scenario in this way. 7. After discussing the way in which ‘a serious psychology’ takes the risk of aspychism, as ‘it can no more tolerate the idea of another (little) man inside, in here, than a serious theology can tolerate the idea of another (large) man up there,’ he goes on to note that Wittgenstein too runs this risk: ‘Wittgenstein takes the risk of apsychism, the risk that his understanding of the human body (as, for example, a picture) is unnecessary, or insincere, or dead.’

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Daniel Dennett’s views, which I discuss immediately below, strike me as fully open to this kind of risk. For example, in Consciousness Explained, he writes of ‘threaten[ing] with extinction whatever phenomena of consciousness depend’ upon concepts his investigation may ‘overthrow’ (Dennett, 1991, p.  24). See also Content and Consciousness, where he allows for the possibility that our concept of a person may become ‘obsolete’ (Dennett, 1969). 8. See, for example, Dennett’s ‘True Believers’ in Dennett (1987, pp. 13–42). 9. I say more below about Dennett’s notion of vindication. 10. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein questions the idea that in conducting a psychological investigation or experiment, researchers must assume that the behaviour they observe is ‘backed’ by genuine psychological states: Suppose I describe a psychological experiment: the apparatus, the questions of the experimenter, the answers and actions of the subject. And then I say: all that is a scene in such-and-such a play. Now all is altered. So it will be said: If this experiment were described in the same way in a book on psychology, in that case the description of the behaviour of the subject would be understood as expression of the state of mind, because one presupposes that the subject is speaking the truth, is not pulling our legs, has not learnt the answers by heart.—So we make an assumption? (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 290) 11. See Wittgenstein (1980a, §§ 95–6) and Wittgenstein (1970, §§ 528– 30). See also Geach (1988, pp.  38–45, pp.  160–8, and pp.  280–5), which present Geach’s, Shah’s, and Jackson’s notes on the scenario respectively. 12. As Benardete notes, it is difficult to reflect coolly on these scenarios devised in the 1940s, given the very real mass enslavement and extermination carried out by the Nazis in that era upon those they regarded as sub-­human. His worries are well taken, though it is worth noting that as far as I have been able to gather, the Nazis never denied that Jews and their other various victims actually felt pain. Indeed, given the many accounts of the sadism and cruelty of camp officers and other workers, their victims’ really feeling pain figured centrally in how they were treated. (And that alcohol rations were maximised for soldiers carrying out the exterminations provides further indication of such awareness.) The scenario also invites comparison to antebellum slavery in America,

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where the practices were largely underwritten by beliefs about the inferior status of those who were enslaved. The instability in these beliefs has been noted by Cavell (see Cavell, 1979, pp. 375–8) among others. It is not clear to me whether the same kind of instabilities can be discerned in Wittgenstein’s scenario, precisely because of the extremity of the attitude of Wittgenstein’s slaveowners. Part of the pleasure and power of owning slaves stemmed, I take it, from the slave owners’ confidence that they could make the slaves feel the force of their dominion. Slaves who really lacked all feeling would be less desirable slaves. 13. But consider Wittgenstein’s leading question at § 283 of the Investigations: ‘What gives us so much as the idea that beings, things, can feel?’ Nothing about a stone, he suggests, gives us such an idea, and the most he will say by way of an answer is: ‘Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.’ (Wittgenstein, 2009a). Stones and the like give us nothing to latch onto, but the ‘wriggling fly’ in the subsequent remark does give us a ‘foothold.’ But if that is the case, surely these slaves give us as firm a grip as we could want. It is thus not entirely clear to me how to square Wittgenstein’s willingness to explore this scenario of the soulless tribe at length—to take it seriously—with what he says in these sections of the Investigations. 14. Reprinted in Pitcher (1966, pp. 65–103). 15. Elsewhere in his discussion, Brenner also says that ‘it is a fact that the slaves sometimes suffer pain,’ and even ‘that the masters know this.’ (Brenner, 1999, p. 115). It is not at all clear to me how to square this with the idea that the masters’ ‘insistence’ that the slaves are really automata is not a mistake. See also Brenner (1995). 16. We could also imagine that Dennett’s kind of heterophenomenological investigation reveals a striking divergence between the two populations in the sense that the investigators do not find the same kind of ‘real-life correlates’ to the slaves’ reports as those found in the case of the masters. Suppose that a particular region of the masters’ brains ‘lights up’ in a particular way when they report feeling pain, while only half that region lights up in the case of the slaves. The common half is involved in the motor responses typically associated with pain. The investigators can tell this by careful use of curare, which freezes the muscles but does not diminish the feeling of pain. In the case of the slave owners, when they are administered curare so that the muscles are frozen, they still report feeling pain (and the half of the region that does not overlap with the

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slaves still lights up). With the slaves, when they receive curare, they neither report feeling pain nor does the relevant region of the brain light up. Reports of pain, for the slaves, just are reports of how their bodies move and the like. Of course, none of these imagined heterophenomenological findings serve to justify the idea that the slave owners are thereby entitled to enslave this tribe. For a fascinating discussion of the complexities of pain, see Dennett’s ‘Why You Can’t Make a Computer that Feels Pain’ in Dennett (1978, pp. 190–229). 17. In Zettel, the soulless tribe is introduced explicitly as an ‘auxiliary construction.’ See Wittgenstein (1970, § 528). 18. Suppose, though, that the brains don’t ‘light up’ in the same way and that these differences are consistent across the two populations. Does that show that the sinister-sounding scientists Wittgenstein appeals to at outset of the scenario are not so bad after all? Would it then be all right to beat and whip the slaves to get more work out of them because their cries of pain are really just ‘cries’? 19. One might here wonder what the slaves would make of such belated recognition. How relieved would they be to have their pain and suffering firmly established by such investigations? Practically speaking, they may end up better off, but they would nonetheless likely resent having their acknowledgement await these sorts of tests. 20. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty appeals to a similar danger of repression or forgetfulness in the study of perceptual experience: [The] philosopher describes sensations and their substratum—as one might describe the fauna of a distant land—without noticing that he himself also perceives, that he is a perceiving subject, and that perception such as he lives it denies everything he says about perception in general. For, seen from within, perception owes nothing to what we otherwise know about the world, about stimuli such as described by physics, and about the sense organs as described by biology. (Merleau-­ Ponty, 2012, p. 215) 21. The remark cited here continues: ‘Our disease is one of wanting to explain.’ (Wittgenstein, 1978, VI, § 31). 22. This paper has gone through a number of revisions and transformations. It began life as a discussion primarily of Dennett and heterophenomenology for a 2010 workshop in London on the philosophy of psychiatry sponsored by the University of Essex. I am grateful to Wayne Martin for

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the invitation and to the audience for questions and criticism. A similar version was subsequently presented at a Wittgenstein workshop in the Fall of 2013. But the paper was significantly expanded, then cut down, and then expanded again through a series of workshops and a conference connected with the research project, ‘A Science of the Soul?’ sponsored by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to the entire ‘ASS gang’— Thomas Wallgren, Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen, Niklas Toivakainen, and Fredrik Westerlund—for inviting me to participate and for the many hours of stimulating conversation. I would also like to thank the other workshop participants, especially Edmund Dain and Anne-­Marie Søndergaard Christiansen, as well as the audience at the final Helsinki conference associated with the project. Special thanks to Niklas Toivakainen for detailed written comments, a great many of which I feel I have only begun to address.

References Benardete, J. (1973). Real Definitions: Quine and Aristotle. Philosophical Studies, 72(2–3), 265–282. Brenner, W. (1995). The Soulless Tribe. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 33(3), 279–298. Brenner, W. (1999). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. (1969). Content and Consciousness. London: Routledge & Kegan. Dennett, D. (1978). Brainstorms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, D. (1982). How to Study Human Consciousness Empirically, or, Nothing Comes to Mind. Synthese, 53(2), 159–180. Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Geach, P. (1988). Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–7. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Levinas, E. (1996). Basic Philosophical Writings (A.  Peperzak, S.  Critchley, & R. Bernasconi, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception (D.  Landes, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Pitcher, G. (1966). Wittgenstein, the Philosophical Investigations: A Collection of Critical Essays. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty (G.  E. M.  Anscombe & G.  H. von Wright, Ed., D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Wittgenstein, L. (1970). Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1978). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, & G. E. M. Anscombe, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1980a). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1980b). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II (G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Ed., C. G. Luckhardt & M. A. E. Aue, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II (G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Ed., C. G. Luckhardt & M. A. E. Aue, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Wittgenstein, L. (2009a). Philosophical Investigations (P.  M. S.  Hacker & J. Schulte, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2009b). Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment (P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

6 An Attitude Towards a Soul: Wittgenstein, Other Minds and the Mind Edmund Dain

1. Other Minds My focus in this paper is on the problem of other minds, and specifically on a question about what is involved in believing that other people have minds or souls, or that they are conscious beings and not automata,1 insofar as we can correctly be said to believe that at all.2 We tend to take it for granted that we know what is involved in belief in other minds, and that the real problem lies in trying to justify that belief. By contrast, I shall argue that we misunderstand what belief in other minds really involves, and that the problem of other minds itself has its source in that misunderstanding. My aim is to develop an account of what belief in other minds involves in terms of what Wittgenstein calls, in Part II of the Philosophical Investigations (or Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment, as it is titled in the 4th edition (Wittgenstein, 2009)), our having ‘an attitude towards a soul’. I shall argue that this not only shows what is wrong with the problem of other E. Dain (*) Providence College, Providence, RI, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_6

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minds (or part of what is wrong with it anyway), but also has significant consequences for our understanding of the mind itself. One such consequence is that ethical considerations have a much more fundamental role to play in thinking about the mind than is typically thought to be the case.

2. The Problem We tend, I think, to take it for granted that we know what is involved in believing in other minds. Isn’t it just that we have a belief, the belief that other people have minds? What could be simpler than that? Why should we think that there is a question about what is involved in believing in other minds that needs to be addressed at all? One way to bring out the difficulty here is to look at the ways in which the belief that someone, a specific individual, has a mind, whatever exactly that might involve, differs from other beliefs we might have about someone, such as the belief that they are in pain, or that they are suffering in some way.3 Wittgenstein invites us to make this kind of comparison when he writes as follows: “I believe that he is suffering.” Do I also believe that he isn’t an automaton? Only reluctantly could I use the word in both contexts. (2009, PPF §19/1958, p. 178)

So why might one be reluctant to use the same word, ‘belief ’, in both of these contexts, as Wittgenstein says he would be? What are the differences meant to be here that would lead one to hesitate to do so? Suppose I believe that a colleague of mine is suffering in some way; she is rubbing her temples, groaning, and complaining of a headache. In such a case, I may well come to believe that my colleague is suffering.4 I form that belief quite explicitly at some point during my encounter with her. I form it on the basis of certain evidence, such as her rubbing her temples

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and complaining of a headache, and that evidence might be good or it might be bad. Moreover, I could tell others who know her that she is suffering, and in doing so I might potentially be informing them of ­something that they did not know, and I could explain to them what the evidence is for my belief as well if they were to ask.5 In the case of believing in other minds, things seem to be very different. It is not that, whereas I am willing to entertain the possibility that my colleague might not be suffering after all (perhaps she just wants to avoid today’s faculty meeting), I am certain that she has a mind in the sense that my evidence in this case is especially good, say, and therefore I am not really willing to entertain the possibility of being wrong here at all. It is not a matter of the strength or the surety of my belief at all (I might, for instance, be quite certain that my colleague is suffering from a headache).6 It is not, as Wittgenstein puts it, that I merely believe that so-and-so is suffering, but am certain that he is not an automaton (2009, PPF §19/1958, p. 178). Rather, in the case of believing in other minds, each of the features of my belief that my colleague is suffering noted above seems to be missing. I don’t believe that she has a mind in the sense in which I believe that she is suffering, not because I do not know her well enough yet, but because there is no point during my encounters with her, however well I may come to know her, when I explicitly form such a belief: it is not that I start out not believing that she has a mind, and then, at some point, form the belief that she does. And since I do not form such a belief in that way at all, I also do not form such a belief on the basis of certain evidence that I come by during my encounters with her, evidence that might be good or might be bad: again, I do not start out not believing that my colleague (or the greengrocer, or the passer-by-in-the-street, or anyone else) has a mind, and then, seeing her rubbing her temples perhaps, conclude that, given that, given that she has a headache say, she must have a mind to have an ache in after all.7 Relatedly, that my colleague has a mind does not seem to be something I could potentially inform someone of, however little they knew her (imagine how you might respond to the following remark: ‘By the way, did I tell you that my new colleague is not an automaton?’).

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Each of these differences seems in some sense to be connected to two further differences between believing of someone, so-and-so, that they are suffering, and believing of them that they have a mind. First, whereas it is intelligible that my colleague is not actually suffering, the idea that she might not have a mind is not: my colleague is, as it were, not the kind of thing that might not have a mind. Whereas my colleague could still be my colleague and not be suffering, viewing her as not having a mind would be to view her not as someone at all, but as something. It would involve a radical transformation in the kind of thing that the belief was a belief about. Second, in contrast to my belief that my colleague, say, is suffering, which is a belief about a specific person (namely, my colleague), it is not clear that my believing in other minds involves believing something of a specific individual in the same kind of way at all. Insofar as I can be said to believe in other minds, my belief seems rather to be about everyone and about no one. It is about no-one in the sense that it does not seem to be something I believe about any particular individual, however well or however little I know them—not my children, not my parents, not the greengrocer, the sales assistant, the passer-by-in-the-street, or the students in my class—and it is about everyone in the sense that it seems already to be a part of whatever it is to think of someone as someone, as a human being, at all. To view someone as someone at all just is, it seems, already to view them as having a mind. So there seem, then, to be some significant differences between what is involved in believing that someone, so-and-so, some specific individual, is suffering, and whatever might be involved in believing in other minds, differences in the grammar of ‘belief ’ in the two cases, and insofar as there are such differences, there is a question about what exactly believing in other minds involves—about what our belief that other human beings have minds or souls consists in, and whether the term ‘belief ’ itself is appropriate here at all—and that is the question I want to focus on here. What I want to do, in trying to address that question, is to put aside for the time being the term ‘belief ’, and, with it, the kind of assumptions we tend to make about what a belief is and about what having a belief involves, and turn instead to a distinction that Wittgenstein draws between having an attitude towards something and having an opinion about it.

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3. Attitudes and Opinions Wittgenstein draws the distinction between attitudes and opinions, between having an attitude towards something—in this case, towards a soul or towards a human being as Wittgenstein also puts it elsewhere (1992, p. 39)—and having an opinion about it, in the context of opposing the idea that we as it were ‘merely’ believe of someone that they are not an automaton, that they have a mind or a soul, in the same sense in which we might believe of them that they are suffering. Wittgenstein writes as follows: “I believe that he is suffering.” Do I also believe that he isn’t an automaton? Only reluctantly could I use the word in both contexts. (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain that he is not an automaton? Nonsense!) Suppose I say of a friend: “He isn’t an automaton.” What information is conveyed by this, and to whom would it be information? To a human being who meets him in ordinary circumstances? What information could it give him? (At the very most, that this man always behaves like a human being, and not occasionally like a machine.) “I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. (2009, PPF §§19–22/1958, p. 178)

Wittgenstein here contrasts the idea of an attitude with that of an opinion, contrasts the idea of having an attitude towards a soul with that of having an opinion that he, so-and-so, whoever so-and-so is, has a soul. So what kind of contrast is that? I want to begin with the contrast between having an attitude towards something and having an opinion about it, before turning to what having an attitude towards a soul or towards a human being in particular might involve, and I want to begin with an account of the difference between having an attitude and having an opinion that would, in my view, not

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locate the difference deeply enough, an account that would underestimate the kind of contrast that Wittgenstein wants to be making in this passage. I want to do that as a means of bringing out by comparison the kind of contrast that I think is involved here. So, on one account of the kind of contrast Wittgenstein is drawing here, the difference between an attitude and an opinion would lie in the kind or the level of commitment involved. An opinion, on this account, would involve something, a claim, that might or might not be justified on the basis of the evidence available to us, and that we are open to the possibility of revising in light of the facts. But an attitude, by contrast, would involve a much deeper level of commitment: it would involve a claim that is much more fundamental to our way of seeing the world, something that we are not (or not nearly as) open to revising in light of the facts, however far those facts might fall short of justifying such a commitment. On this kind of account, then, attitudes and opinions differ in terms of the kind of commitment each involves, in the way in which that commitment is reflected in our willingness to revise or revisit that commitment in light of the empirical evidence. But they are nevertheless still similar insofar as they both involve a commitment to a particular claim about how things are, which might be recognizably the same claim in both cases—for instance, the claim that such-and-such a person, so-and­so, my colleague for instance, has a mind or a soul. As a result, we could, on this kind of account, paraphrase Wittgenstein’s remarks as making a distinction, not between an ‘attitude towards’ and an ‘opinion that’, but between an ‘attitude that’, such as the attitude that so-and-so has a soul, and an ‘opinion that’. The response to the problem of other minds to be drawn from such a distinction would then involve a simple insistence that attitudes—such as the attitude that so-and-so has a soul—unlike opinions, are not the kind of thing that stands in need of support in terms of the facts, or that might be revised in light of them, despite their similarity to opinions in other respects: it would involve what might be called a kind of ‘head-in-the-sand’ response to scepticism about other minds. Against that kind of account, I want to suggest that the grammatical difference between an ‘attitude towards’ and an ‘opinion that’ marks a

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much more fundamental contrast between what is involved in having an attitude towards something and having an opinion about it. What I want to suggest is that having an attitude towards something, and having an opinion about it are different kinds of thing entirely: they take totally different forms. It is a contrast between, on the one hand, something— an opinion—that involves a specific claim about how things are, a claim that can be evaluated in terms of truth and falsity, that is at least potentially informative and for which we might have or lack good evidence, and, on the other hand, something that is not like that—something that doesn’t involve a specific claim about how things are, something that isn’t the kind of thing that is evaluated in terms of truth and falsity, something that isn’t potentially informative or for which we might have or lack good evidence.

4. Getting a Grip An attitude, then, as I understand Wittgenstein’s contrast between attitudes and opinion, is not something that is like an opinion, only more deeply held. It is not like an opinion at all. But if that is true, if an attitude is not like an opinion in any of the ways noted above, what is it like exactly? Can we say something about what having an attitude towards something actually does involve, and not only about what it does not? Elsewhere in Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests that instead of looking for something that goes on inside us when we are certain of something, instead of trying to identify a feeling or some other kind of internal goings-on that constitutes our being certain about something, we should ask instead how our certainty is manifested in human action. Wittgenstein writes: ‘Don’t ask: “What goes on in us when we are certain that….?”—but: How is ‘the certainty that this is so’ manifested in people’s action?’ (2009, PPF §339/1958, p. 225e). Our certainty in this sense, the suggestion is, is to be found not in some inner state, not in an opinion, however well supported by the evidence it may be, and not in some special kind of sensation we might have, but rather in human action or behaviour, in what we do rather than what we think or feel.

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Our attitudes, for Wittgenstein, are a matter of our actions and our behaviour, of what we do, in this sense, and what it is to have an attitude towards a soul or towards a human being, accordingly, is a matter of the ways in which we act in relation to a soul, in relation to another human being. What that involves, however, is not, or not simply anyway,8 a matter of how we do act in certain circumstances, of what we do on any given occasion; it is not a matter of our responding to someone’s pain in any particular case with pity rather than with indifference for instance, so that the failure to respond with pity in any given case would in itself constitute a failure to have an attitude towards a soul. Rather, it is a matter of a whole complex of behaviour, of what might be called a ‘form of life’ as Wittgenstein uses that phrase (e.g. 2009, §19, §23), including not only the ways in which we do actually or typically behave, but also, and more importantly, the ways in which we can behave, which is to say the ways in which it makes sense to behave, given the tools we have at our disposal for making sense of one another’s behaviour, given the kinds of things that it makes sense to say about someone’s behaviour. That aspect of what is involved in Wittgenstein’s idea of an attitude, of what it is to have an attitude towards something, comes out in Wittgenstein’s remarks in section 284 of the Philosophical Investigations in connection with our differing attitudes towards what is alive and what is dead. In that section, Wittgenstein begins by contrasting the difficulties we might find in looking at a stone and trying to imagine it having sensations, or being in pain for instance, with what happens when one looks at a wriggling fly, before going on to make the connection with our attitudes. Wittgenstein writes: Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now look at a wriggling fly, and at once these difficulties vanish, and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain.—Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same. All our reactions are different.—If someone says, “That cannot simply come about from the

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fact that living beings move in such-and-such ways and dead ones don’t”, then I want to suggest to him that this is a case of the transition ‘from quantity to quality’. (2009, §284)

If we take up Wittgenstein’s invitation in the first paragraph here, if we look at a stone and try to imagine it having sensations, such as being in pain for instance, the kind of difficulty we encounter is not that it is obviously false that the stone is in pain (for if there is no evidence that the stone is in pain, there is just as little evidence that it is not), and the kind of contrast between the stone and the wriggling fly is as a result also not that whereas the stone is obviously not in pain, the wriggling fly obviously is. The difficulty that we find in trying to imagine that the stone is in pain is that the concept of pain, our concept of pain, seems to have no application in relation to the stone at all. As Wittgenstein puts it, pain gets no foothold (‘angreifen’) here, no purchase, no grip: the stone does not provide the kind of foothold that this concept needs for it to have any application. A stone, one could say, just is not the kind of thing that can be in pain or not be in pain. So when Wittgenstein invites us to look at a stone and imagine it being in pain, he seems to be asking us to do something that is, on the face of it, impossible, as if he were to ask us to look at a stone and imagine it, the stone, not being a stone at all.9 The kind of contrast here, then, between the stone and the wriggling fly, is not that the stone is obviously not in pain and the fly obviously is. The contrast between the stone and the fly is that the wriggling of the fly does provide the kind of foothold that the concept of pain needs if it is to have any application in relation to something, where the stone (and its lack of behaviour) provides no such footholds at all. The fly may or may not actually be in pain, but its being in pain is intelligible to us where the stone’s being in pain is not. In the second paragraph of section 284, Wittgenstein connects the difference between these two cases to the differences between our attitudes towards what is alive and towards what is dead. Like a stone, and unlike a living thing, a corpse does not provide any footholds for our concept of pain. A corpse, as Wittgenstein puts it here, is ‘inaccessible’ (‘unzugänglich’) to pain (2009, §284). The difference in those attitudes Wittgenstein

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describes in terms of the fact that ‘all our reactions are different’ (2009, §284). But it is not simply that we react in these ways to the living and in those ways to the dead. Just as the contrast between the stone and the wriggling fly was a contrast between the kinds of foothold provided for our concepts, for our ways of making things intelligible to ourselves, and so between the kinds of things it makes sense to say in relation to each rather than simply between what is true of each of them, the differences between our attitudes are not simply a matter of us reacting one way or another, but of the ways in which we can react to something, of the kinds of action, the kinds of behaviour, that are intelligible to us in connection with it, given the concepts we have and the footholds they do or do not find there. What it makes sense to say and what it makes sense to do are in this way intimately connected to one another, not simply because what we can say is a part of what we can do, but also because what it makes sense to do is in part a matter of what it makes sense to say—that is, it is a matter of what we can intelligibly say about someone’s behaviour, of how we can make sense of what they do.

5. An Attitude Towards a Soul One might think of our attitude towards something, then, as a matter of the grammatical space that that thing occupies, the space of possibilities within which we conceive it, or within which our interactions with it take place. Our attitudes towards something, such as our attitude towards what is alive or to what is dead, or towards a human being or a soul, are in this sense a matter of the ways in which we can act in relation to it and the kinds of things we can say about it; they are a matter of the kind of behaviour and the kind of talk that gets a foothold in connection with it, or to which it is accessible or inaccessible, or of the kinds of behaviour that makes sense in connection with it and the kind of things it makes sense to say about it. I said above (Sect. 4) that our attitudes in this sense are not, or not simply, a matter of what we do, of how we do in fact act on any given occasion. But how we do actually act on some specific occasion, or how we do typically act—such as our typically responding to another’s pain

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with pity rather than with indifference for instance—nevertheless forms a part of our attitudes in this sense: the two are not entirely independent of one another. And the way in which it does so is closely comparable to the way in which agreement in the judgments that we make, agreement with respect to what is true and what is false, is itself part of what makes the particular language-game or form of life in which those judgments feature, the particular language-game or form of life that it is (Wittgenstein, 2009, §§240–242). So it is not, for instance, that in failing to respond to another’s pain with pity, in denying them our pity, we therefore do not have as our attitude toward them an attitude toward a soul or toward a human being, and so fail in this sense to recognize their humanity, fail to recognize them as another human being like ourselves. That attitude is (or may be anyway) equally present in our denying them our pity when they are in pain, through our recognition that they are the kind of thing from which pity can be withheld, as well as to which it can be given. How we do in fact behave is a part of our attitudes, not in the sense that if we do not behave in certain ways on a specific occasion, then we no longer have the relevant attitude. How we act or behave is a part of our attitudes in the sense that if we did not typically or did not ever respond to another’s pain with pity, or in the ways that are characteristic of pity, our attitude, our form of life, would in fact to that extent be a different one. How we act or behave is a part of our attitudes insofar as it contributes to shaping the space of possible actions or reactions in this kind of way. Our having an attitude towards a soul or towards a human being, then, on the understanding of what having an attitude towards something involves that I have been developing here, is a matter of the ways in which we can and do act or behave in relation to a soul, to another human being, and the kinds of things that we can say about them, given the footholds required by and provided for our concepts. If we try to capture more fully what such an attitude consists in, however, one thing we will find ourselves doing, I think, is reaching for forms of expression that are simply empty tautologies or platitudes about the concepts that get a grip here as a means of trying to indicate the kind of grammatical space we find ourselves in, as a means of indicating the kinds of things that can be

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said of another human being and the forms of behaviour that such forms of expression thereby make available to us in relation to them. We will, that is, I think, find ourselves saying things such as that a human being is something that can be in pain or not in pain, can be pitied or not pitied, can be conscious or unconscious, can be awake or asleep, can be fulfilled or unfulfilled, happy or unhappy, loved or unloved, and so on and so forth. And the kinds of things that we will point to as making sense to say of a human being in this way will, of course, include forms of expression that are distinctively ethical, such as that they can be good or not, evil or not, honest or not, trustworthy or not, honorable or not, cruel or not, corrupt or not, moral or not, immoral or not, and so on. A soul or a human being on this account just is what stands at the center of these forms of expression and the kinds of action and behaviour that they make available or intelligible to us. There is, in other words, an internal connection between the soul and the attitude towards a soul, or more generally between the thing that the attitude is an attitude towards, and the attitude that is an attitude towards that thing. Neither one is intelligible without the other.10 That might make it sound as if our attitudes, such as our attitude towards a soul, are simply arbitrary or accidental, as if nothing in the world justifies our acting and talking in these ways, as if our attitudes have no grounds in the ways things actually are independent of our responses to it. And that is, to some extent, quite true, not because our attitudes are ungrounded, for our attitudes are grounded in the footholds the world provides for our ways of acting and talking, but because our actions and concepts and the footholds provided for them are no less internally related to one another than are, for instance, the soul and our attitude towards a soul. As a result, the kinds of mistake one can make here, not realizing that the shape at the edge of one’s field of vision is a human being, or taking the tree stump in the mist to be a person for instance, reveal themselves in a kind of failure to make sense of the world, a lack of fit between our concepts or our actions and the footholds that are provided for them. They are not straightforwardly a matter of our having a false opinion, but of something much more like a failure to make sense of what is around us. Hence, the kind of experience we have in realizing such a mistake is

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akin to the sudden dawning of an aspect: the object is suddenly altogether transformed in our perception.

6. Belief I want to return now to the idea of a belief, and to the question that I began with about what is involved in believing that other human beings have minds or souls, or are conscious beings and not automata, and I want now to connect those issues with the discussion of the contrast Wittgenstein draws between having an attitude towards something and having an opinion about it. One way of understanding that contrast would be to take an opinion simply to be equivalent to, or just another term for, a belief, and so to see Wittgenstein as suggesting in effect that we do not in fact believe in other minds at all, not really, in spite of how it might seem to us, since recognizing another person as another person and not merely as an automaton is a matter of our having a certain attitude towards them, not of our having an opinion or a belief about them. So we might see Wittgenstein in this way as responding to the problem of other minds by denying that we really believe in other minds at all, and in this way escaping the problem of showing how such a belief can be justified.11 What makes it come so naturally to us to say that we believe in other minds is a matter of our attitudes, not of our opinions or beliefs at all. That way of understanding Wittgenstein’s contrast between attitudes and opinions, and the way in which it translates into talk about beliefs, might be encouraged by Wittgenstein’s reluctance, noted above (2009, PPF §19/1958, p. 178), to use the word ‘belief ’ both in the context of our recognition that someone is suffering and of our recognition that they are a human being not an automaton. But that reluctance can I think also be understood as a reaction to the temptation, which we may easily give in to, to assume a particular picture of what belief involves based on what is involved in the relatively simple case of having an opinion about something, and to let that picture constrain our thinking about what it is to believe that other human beings have minds too, about what such a belief, as a belief, must also therefore involve.

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In response to such a temptation, Wittgenstein’s distinction may be a useful way, not of rejecting the idea that we believe in other minds entirely, but of rejecting the application of a particular picture of what belief involves, or of what it must involve, to the case of our believing in other minds. In that way it is like the use of an alternative notation that, Wittgenstein suggests (see, for instance, 1969a, p. 23), may be helpful in enabling us to look again at what we thought we knew, in breaking the spell of those forms of expression to which we are accustomed, and so in enabling us to look and see what form belief actually takes here, in this particular kind of case. The idea that what is involved in believing in other minds is a matter of our having an attitude toward a soul, understood in the way in which I have been suggesting that idea should be understood, can I think account for those features of our belief in other minds that make it seem so different from some other things that we call belief, such as belief that someone, so-and-so, my colleague for instance, is suffering. That belief, we saw (Sect. 2 above), was a belief about a specific individual, about whom it could be true or false; it was formed quite explicitly at some point during my encounter with them, in response to certain evidence, such as her rubbing her temples and groaning, and it involved a claim that was at least potentially informative to others too. But our belief in other minds seems not to be like that, and this understanding of what an attitude involves can help us to see why, since what such attitudes involve are not opinions about an individual, but the grammatical framework within which we can form opinions about an individual. Hence, our belief in other minds does not have the same kind of specificity as an opinion: it is not a matter of our having a belief about an individual, about whom it might be true or false; rather, it is part of what it is to think them as an individual at all. And hence, too, it is not a matter of a belief that is formed during our encounter with an individual, in response to certain evidence, or of a claim that we might potentially inform others of. Given the differences between attitudes and opinions, the problem of other minds, the problem of justifying our belief in other minds, of providing some evidence that would establish that such a belief were justi-

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fied, seems misguided. That problem is premised on the need to provide evidence that would support such a belief, but that demand for evidence belongs to a picture of belief that identifies it with the idea of an opinion: it takes for granted the idea that we are dealing with something like an opinion, something that might or might not be supported by the evidence available to us. But attitudes are not like opinions, and they are not justified or unjustified by certain evidence in the way that opinions are. The demand for evidence that could support such a belief belongs to an understanding of what belief involves that is not applicable in this kind of case, in the case of our recognizing another person as another person, given what belief amounts to here. An opinion might or might not be justified in light of the evidence available, but our attitudes are a matter of our concepts and the footholds they find, and there is no justifying our concepts themselves by appeal to the evidence in anything like the way in which one can justify an opinion. Our concepts are already at work in our understanding of what the facts are, and so there can be no justifying them by appeal to those facts. The idea that our attitudes, and the concepts that they involve, could be justified is the idea that we could put aside the grammar of the language that we use to understand the world and identify the grammar of the things themselves, just as they are. But things don’t have any grammar in themselves, just as they are, in the way that idea suggests that they must. If we put aside grammar, we put aside the possibility of understanding altogether. There is nothing comparable to the justification of an opinion by means of the evidence in the case of an attitude.

7. The Mind and Consciousness I have argued that our believing in other minds should be understood on the model of an attitude rather than an opinion, and that doing so, understanding our believing in other minds in this way, undermines one of the central premises of the traditional problem of other minds. That problem challenges us to identify something, anything at all, that could

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serve as adequate evidence for our belief in other minds, and, in doing so, it misconstrues the nature of our belief in this kind of case. Our belief in other minds is a matter of our attitudes, not of opinions, and our attitudes are not related to evidence in the way that opinions are, as that problem presupposes. Thinking of belief in other minds in terms of attitudes in this kind of way, then, can help us to see that the problem of justifying such a belief arises because we misconstrue what belief amounts to here, in the case of belief in other minds. The picture of the mind or the soul that is involved in the kind of account I have been developing is of course very different from the predominant picture of what the mind is, or of what it is to have a mind. On that picture, the mind is not internally related to our attitude towards another human being in the way that I have been suggesting; rather, what it is for another human being to have a mind is a matter of the properties of that being independent of what we think or say or do in relation to them, and the question is whether other beings have or lack a certain property, the property of consciousness, and whether any evidence could ever justify us in our belief that they do have it. I have been trying to suggest that that understanding of the problem, and the picture of the mind that goes along with it, radically misconstrues the kind of thing that is involved in our believing in other minds insofar as we believe in other minds at all, the kind of thing that makes it so very natural to us to say that other human beings have minds or souls, are conscious beings and not automata, or that we believe they do, and that as a result, it radically misconstrues what is ascribed to another human being in saying that they have a mind or a soul, and the kinds of question that arise in connection with that. But that alternative, property-based conception of what it is for a human being to have a mind also, in my view, renders the concept of consciousness itself completely irrelevant, divorced as it is from any of the footholds in the behaviour of other beings that give our actions and concepts the purchase they require. The possibility that such beings might, despite everything, nevertheless lack consciousness only serves to highlight the peculiarity of the conception of consciousness that is involved in this picture of the mind and how unrelated it is to the concerns that lie

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behind our thinking of other human beings as conscious beings. As Wittgenstein writes: ‘Say to yourself, for example: “The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.” And you will either find these words becoming quite empty; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort’ (2009, §420).12

Notes 1. I will use these phrases as roughly synonymous throughout this paper. By contrast, Wittgenstein might be thought to use the term ‘soul’ (‘Seele’) partly in order to stress how different his subject matter is from the kind of thing usually discussed in connection with the term ‘mind’. 2. I will consider the possibility that we do not believe in other minds, that ‘belief ’ is the wrong way of characterizing our understanding of others’ as conscious beings rather than automata, below. For now at least, I want to take it for granted that there is something that may (and in fact does for many) make it seem obvious that we do; my question is, one could say, about what that something is. 3. The following points might perhaps be brought out even more forcibly by a contrast between believing of someone that they have a mind and believing of someone that they have a car, for instance (I am grateful to Alois Pichler for suggesting this example). I stick with Wittgenstein’s contrast here, in part because it can help to bring out the sense in which believing in other minds is not simply a matter of attributing to someone a particular state of mind, and so that the claim that so-and-so has a mind does not simply follow from the claim that they are suffering, for instance. Something like that claim is, for instance, made by Quassim Cassam (‘we can come to know that there are other minds by seeing what others are thinking and feeling’ (2007, 159)) and, in my view, it misconstrues what is involved in belief in other minds. I try to give a more complex account of the relation between belief in other minds and beliefs about the specific states of minds of others in Sects. 4 and 5 of this chapter. 4. I think that this is true even though I would not typically express my belief by saying ‘I believe that she is suffering’ rather than, more simply, by saying ‘she is suffering’, since the former expression might be taken to imply an element of doubt that is absent in the case I am imagining.

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5. Not every case of believing that someone is suffering looks like this, and in fact in some cases where we might be tempted to think that it is obvious that we believe of someone that they are suffering I think are much more suited to understanding in terms of attitudes along lines to be worked out in connection with belief in other minds below (as might perhaps be suggested by Wittgenstein, 1969b, §10). 6. The word ‘belief ’ is sometimes used in contrast with certainty in this kind of way, but it need not be used in such a way. Insofar as one might want to say, in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969b), that what we call ‘belief ’ in connection with other minds is a matter of being certain, not merely believing, it is not this kind of certainty that is at stake. 7. As noted above (note 3), the claim that someone’s having a mind simply follows from their being in pain, for instance, seems to falsify this aspect of what is involved in believing of someone that they have a mind. 8. I turn to the importance of what we do in terms of how it contributes to shaping what we can do in Sect. 5. 9. If we try to do this, if we try to imagine a stone being in pain or having sensations, we will I think often find ourselves imagining changes in the way the stone can behave as a means of providing a grip for concepts such as pain. That, I take it, is part of the point of Wittgenstein (2009, §282), which begins as follows: ‘“But in a fairy tale a pot too can see and hear!” (Certainly; but it can also talk.)’ 10. Peter Winch makes the same point in his ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’ (1980–1981, p. 9). 11. I develop this suggestion in Dain (2016b). 12. This paper was written while I was a Leiv Eiriksson visiting researcher at the University of Bergen sponsored by the Research Council of Norway. I am very grateful to the Research Council of Norway and to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen for their generous support. Earlier versions of this material were presented at two workshops and a conference in Finland in 2014. I am very grateful to all the participants on those occasions, particularly David R. Cerbone, as well as to Reshef Agam-Segal, Lars Hertzberg and Alois Pichler for helpful comments and encouragement. An abridged version of this paper was presented at the X National/ VII International Wittgenstein Symposium in Campinas, Brazil in 2015, and published in the conference proceedings as Dain (2016a).

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References Cassam, Q. (2007). The Possibility of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dain, E. (2016a). Wittgenstein on Belief in Other Minds. In A. Moreno (Ed.), Wittgenstein: Knowledge and Skepticism (Vol. 77, pp. 241–250). Campinas, Brazil: Coleção CLE. Dain, E. (2016b). Do We Believe in Other Minds? Contributions of the International Wittgenstein Symposium, 39, 45–47. Winch, P. (1980–1981). Eine Einstellung zur Seele. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 81, 1–15. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.). Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Wittgenstein, L. (1969a). The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1969b). On Certainty. New York: Harper. Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans., Rev. 4th ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

7 Wittgenstein, Psychological Self-­ Ascriptions and the Moral Dimension of Our Inner Lives Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

 . The Place of the Moral in Scientific 1 and Relaxed Forms of Naturalism Since the establishment of the modern scientific world view and especially from the beginning of the twentieth century, many philosophers have accepted an assumption that they take to be the basic truth implied in scientific naturalism, namely the assumption that the world itself is normatively neutral or inert. On the broadest understanding of naturalism, the term simply stands for the opposition to ‘supernatural’ entities, and in this sense, most philosophers today are naturalists. Scientific naturalism, however, involves the denial that the natural on its own implies any form of normativity, and it is often characterised either by an ontological commitment to ‘an exclusively scientific conception of nature’ or by a methodological commitment to the idea that ‘philosophical inquiry is conceived as continuous with science’ (de Caro and MacArthur, 2004, A.-M. S. Christensen (*) University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_7

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p. 3).1 According to scientific naturalism, what is the case is the case, but the world is as such neither better nor worse for being so. This is true of facts about the world, but it is true of facts about humans too. It is one thing to investigate what humans are, say, and do. This simply is. It is quite another thing to investigate what we ought to be, say, or do, or how to judge our being, sayings, and doings in prudential or moral terms.2 This also means that scientific naturalism implies a division of labour in the investigation of value and other morally relevant aspects of human life. We can either turn to a neutral and empirical investigation of what people actually think and judge about moral matters, placed in empirical moral philosophy, or turn to the distinct investigation of what justifies such moral judgements, of what is right or good, which cannot be answered by empirical investigations, but rather needs the approach of normative moral philosophy. At the opening of many contemporary classics of moral philosophy, we find this distinction of labour and the related call for a foundation of morality, for instance in the beginning of Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity (1996). Here Korsgaard writes, ‘It is one of the most striking facts about human life that we have values. … Why should this be so? Where do we get these ideas that outstrip the world we experience and seem to call them into question, to render judgement on it, to say that it does not measure up, that it is not what it ought to be?’ (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 1). In her introductory and brief history of Western metaphysics, Korsgaard goes on to note that the contemporary problem of accounting for values, what she calls the normative problem, is very different from the problem that faced Plato and Aristotle. For them, the Real and the Good was fundamentally one, which meant that they could attend to the task of showing how value was already given in the world. This contrasts with our current starting point, Korsgaard says, because modern science has divorced us from the idea that reality determines value. We see reality as ‘something hard’ (p. 4), and therefore, ‘value must find its way into the world somehow’ (p. 5). Moreover, Korsgaard thinks that this re-entering of value must take a particular form: In moral philosophy, we must establish a source of morality that can serve as the foundation from which to deduce standards for value judgements.3

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The present aim is not to rehearse Korsgaard’s solution to the normative problem, but to bring into focus the fact that the guiding assumption behind the normative problem is the central assumption of scientific naturalism, the allegedly hardness and neutrality of reality. Korsgaard’s point is that even if reality often seems to present itself to us as full of value and normativity, an understanding of the world informed by modern science enables us to see that this is only a matter of appearances, because we can describe the whole of reality, including the human beings who inhabit it, in a way that is neutral, hard, devoid of normativity. If Korsgaard is right, a mere description of the world cannot provide us with an understanding or justification of value, and we instead indeed need normative moral philosophy in order to find some way to re-­introduce value. Korsgaard’s approach to the question of value is widely accepted in contemporary treatments of normativity. It is, however, also challenged by one prominent counter-approach that rejects both the assumption that scientific naturalism is the necessary starting point of moral philosophy and the related call for reconstructive moral philosophy. The central objection raised by this approach is that scientific naturalism cannot account for what is real and what is not real, because the answer to this question hinges on conceptual and rational resources available only from the perspective of the experiencing subject. A leading figure in the development of this approach is John McDowell, and in a number of influential texts from the 1990s, he takes on the task of redefining the relationship between reality and mind in a way that shows how the apparent gap between world and value in scientific naturalism is in fact illusionary (McDowell, 1996, p. 94). McDowell’s strategy is to show, first, that our rational and normatively informed understanding of the world, placed in what he labels ‘the space of reason’, always already has a footing in raw nature, in ‘the realm of law’, and, second, that either of the two can be reduced to the other. To unfold this strategy, McDowell turns to the concept of second nature, which is meant to capture how human beings, through their upbringing, education, and initiation into a certain culture, develop their natural potential, their first nature, into something that involves completely new rational and linguistic abilities. One example of the abilities which constitute second nature is practical reason, which gives shape to a practical

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understanding of the world, that is, what it makes sense to be and say and do, thereby making us susceptible to practical and moral reasons. However, according to McDowell, the development of second nature is a general phenomenon that covers all forms of ‘initiation into conceptual capacities, which include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics’ (p. 84), for example, also the capacities that enable us to be alerted to features of the natural world. The point is that the capacities acquired with second nature are no less natural than other fundamental human abilities, and the development of second nature does not ‘add’ anything to the natural world, rather, it is through the development of second nature that we become able to notice and respond to the world in new ways, rationally and conceptually, within the space of reason. Our nature is largely second nature, and our second nature is the way it is not only because of the potentialities we were born with, but also because of our upbringing, our Bildung. Given the notion of second nature, we can say that the way our lives are shaped by reason is natural, even while we deny that the structure of the space of reason can be integrated into the layout of the realm of law. (pp. 87–8)

Second nature is at one and the same time a natural part of human nature and a social and cultural re-shaping of this nature that radically changes our approach to the world. The concept of second nature thus allows us to see how all human experience is fundamentally shaped by concepts while holding on to the idea that this shaping is itself a part of the natural world. McDowell’s general point is that this understanding of human beings as animals with second nature provides us with a way to reconcile reason and nature in a ‘relaxed naturalism’, a ‘naturalism of second nature’ (p. 86, see also McDowell, 1998). McDowell’s approach and his rejection of the contrast, essential to scientific naturalism, between nature and reality on the one hand and mind and value on the other, have been tremendously influential within forms of moral philosophy which reject that values have to be accounted for within the framework provided by scientific naturalism.4 We find this, for example, in much of contemporary virtue ethics. Instead of reaching back to the Greek conception of the unity of the real and the

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good, philosophers, such as Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), Sabina Lovibond (2002), and Julia Annas (2011), draw on the framework of relaxed naturalism in their attempt to develop an understanding of virtues and values as natural in a way that is incompatible with awarding priority to scientific naturalism.5 In sum, this group of philosophers argue it is impossible to describe the lives and experiences of human beings in a way that is neutral and devoid of normativity or value. This is an important contribution to our understanding of morality, but discussions within relaxed naturalism often proceed as if it is possible to draw a boundary around the moral—for example, in terms of moral virtues, judgements, or reasons. The question is whether we should rather understand the moral as a dimension of life that penetrates the whole of the conceptual sphere available to us; a view that certainly causes problems for scientific naturalism, but which is also neglected by relaxed naturalism, even if it is not incompatible with this position.6 My aim is to open the question of the pervasiveness of the moral by investigating how it shapes our lives in one particular case, that of psychological self-­ascription, and to argue for the impossibility of delimiting the moral, for example in the form of particular field of value, in this case.7 I will show, first, that psychological self-ascriptions are in most cases not to be understood on the standard model of observation and descriptions, as they more often serve as expressions of thoughts and feelings already present for us. And second, that psychological self-ascriptions always raise questions of endorsement and responsibility, which means that self-­ascriptions are ways of situating oneself morally in relations to others—even if sometimes in a very minimal way. In closing, I will use this investigation to argue for the pervasiveness of the moral and critically challenge the ‘two perspectives’ view—the distinction between the realm of law and the sphere of reasons—fundamental to relaxed naturalism.

 . The Standard Model of Psychological 2 Self-Ascriptions My investigation of the possible pervasiveness of the moral will focus on the case of psychological self-ascriptions of concepts, especially the special feature that we treat a person’s psychological self-ascriptions to be

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authoritative in a way that we do not treat her assertions about other things—about the inner lives of others or the world in general—as authoritative.8 Of course, as we know, especially given the groundbreaking work of Freud, this authority is not absolute. It is in some cases possible for us to be wrong about our inner lives, for instance because of lack of attention, emotional uproar, forms of self-deceit or because of different forms of repression. Nonetheless, we can still point to a fundamental asymmetry between the way we treat first-person and third-person uses of psychological concepts. If I am sincere in what I say about my inner life, about what I feel and believe, another person cannot challenge what I say on independent grounds in the same sense as she can challenge what I say about the feelings of Donald Trump or about the year that humans first walked the moon. The question is how we should describe the authority of psychological self-ascriptions. In current debates, this authority is often connected to the question of self-knowledge and our epistemic access to our inner lives and explained by the fact that psychological self-ascriptions are acquired by a special first-personal method, namely that of introspection, and therefore are especially secure or certain forms of assertions (Gertler, 2015). The authority of psychological self-ascriptions is thus explained by the special nature of our epistemic access to our inner lives and is modelled something like this: In a person, we find various psychological phenomena. The only person with direct access to these phenomena is the person having them, who can direct her attention inwards through introspection and in this way obtain an especially certain knowledge of what she finds. On this model, psychological self-ascriptions rest on observations of value neutral phenomena (the ‘hard reality’ of a person’s inner life) and describe what the person finds ‘in there’. For these reasons, they are value neutral. Moreover, if the person in question is truthful, and if the process of introspection is not clouded or distorted, then her psychological self-ascriptions will be authoritative, because they express beliefs that she has come to hold under optimal epistemic conditions. We can call this the standard model of psychological self-ascription as observation and description of inner phenomena.

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3. Challenging the Standard Model In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein gives voice to a description of psychological self-ascription on the above model: ‘At bottom, when I say “I believe…” I am describing my own state of mind’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 162e). However, even if Wittgenstein allows for specific cases, where a person in this way observes her inner life, he insists that these cases are quite unusual, and that they cannot provide us with a standard model for our relation to our inner lives. I can observe the state of my depression. In that case I am observing what I for instance describe. […] Trying to recollect a mental mood can be called observing. What do we call “observing”? Roughly this: putting oneself into the most favourable situation to receive certain impressions with the purpose, for instance, of describing them. (Wittgenstein, 1992, pp. 6–7e)

Even if there are cases where we observe our inner lives, as we may do in therapy, or when we are surprised by our emotional reaction, this activity is very different from that of simply asserting how we feel or what we think. In ordinary cases of psychological self-ascription, we do not hesitate and place ourselves in the ‘most favourable situation’ to receive impressions; instead, we simply express what is on our mind. Moreover, many cases, where we attempt to understand better what we feel or mean, this is not a process of observation, but rather that of attempting to find a better or more precise way of expressing ourselves. ‘I can indeed ask, “Why did I say that, what did I mean by it?”—and I may answer this question too; but not on the ground of observing what accompanied the speaking. And my answer would supplement, paraphrase, the earlier utterance’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p.  161; see also pp.  413–17). That is, according to Wittgenstein, the character of psychological self-ascriptions cannot in general be understood on the model of observation and description. Wittgenstein also discusses the other side of the standard model, the idea that we always use a special mode of epistemic access to our inner lives, namely introspection, and that we thereby achieve an especially

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certain form of knowledge. Again, Wittgenstein is not opposing the idea that we sometimes use introspection in order to better understand our inner lives; he is opposing the idea that introspection is always at play. Wittgenstein discusses this point in relation to a number of cases, here a case concerning beliefs: ‘Does it make sense to ask “How do you know that you believe?”—and is the answer: “I know it by introspection?” In some cases it will be possible to say some such thing, in most not’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 587). In some cases, what we feel or believe may be so opaque or so complicated that we turn to the activity of introspection to get a clearer understanding of these feelings or beliefs; this is, for example, a common phenomenon when falling in love. However, in most cases, we do not use introspection in this way, and we have no need for it, because our inner lives are present to us in a way that the inner lives of others are not, which means that the need for introspection does not arise. If I see a child running out in front of a car, there is no need for introspection to ascertain myself of the fact that I am afraid for the child’s safety, just as I (at least in most cases) do not need introspection to check whether I am amused by a joke or bored at the faculty meeting. Rather, in these cases, my attention is directed towards the world: I am afraid for the child, amused by the joke, or bored by the presentation of a new university strategy at the faculty meeting. The same point holds in relation to (most of ) my beliefs. I simply do not turn to introspection to check my beliefs about where I live, the names of my children, or even to find out what I think about the aforementioned university strategy. Furthermore, in all these cases, introspection would not make me more or less secure about my beliefs and feelings, and it would not make sense to say that I have a particularly certain form of ‘knowledge’ of my inner life. ‘If we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people often know that I am in pain’, Wittgenstein remarks and continues, ‘It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean—except perhaps that I am in pain’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 246). I do not observe my inner life to gain knowledge of my beliefs or feelings—rather, in ordinary cases my inner life is simply present to me. This feature shows in the fact that, in most cases, I am unable to distinguish between the question of whether I have a specific belief and the question

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of whether this belief is true. If someone asks me whether I believe that the new university strategy will improve the research done here, I do not turn my attention to my inner life, but to an investigation of the strategy; a feature of self-ascription of belief that is sometimes called ‘the transparency condition’. With reference to Wittgenstein, Gareth Evans has described this as the idea that ‘in making a self-ascription of a belief, one’s eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward—upon the world’ (Evans, 1982, p. 225). And, as Richard Moran adds, this presents a problem for the standard model’s reliance on introspection: ‘When a person’s relation to her belief conforms to the Transparency Condition, then the belief is expressed by reflecting on the subject matter and not by considerations of the psychological evidence for a particular belief attribution’ (Moran, 2001, p. 84). The general point is that in most cases psychological self-ascriptions are not descriptions of inner phenomena, but rather declarations that refer to our common world. This relates to Wittgenstein’s famous insistence that the concepts we use in psychological self-ascriptions are the same concepts we use in ascribing beliefs, emotions, and feelings to others. Our expressions of how we think or feel are not (and cannot be) settled solely with reference to something ‘inner’; because for such expressions to make sense, we must learn the relevant concepts, and we do so by partaking in the shared practices of ascribing beliefs, emotions, and feelings to ourselves and to others. In one discussion, Wittgenstein asks, ‘The feeling of confidence. How is it manifested in behaviour?’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 579), and comments, ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’ (p. 580).9 That is, the concepts used to express our inner lives concern ways of behaving that we can learn to recognise and use both in relation to others and to ourselves. Against the standard model, Wittgenstein shows that in ordinary cases, psychological self-ascriptions are not descriptions of inner phenomena, do not rely on observation and introspection and do have the form of knowledge claims. Wittgenstein thus holds on to the idea that psychological self-ascriptions (again, in ordinary cases) are characterised by certainty and this is part of the basis for treating them as authoritative, but he rejects that this certainty and authority should be understood on the model of observation and description.

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4. Expressing the Inner Wittgenstein’s points challenge the standard model of psychological self-­ ascription. To this, he adds that such self-ascription must also be understood as having an expressive function. How does a person learn the meaning of the names of sensations?—of the word ‘pain’ for example. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child hurts himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 244)

Wittgenstein is trying to make us see that the learning of the concept of pain is embedded in and dependent on a context consisting of our natural expressions of pain, and that we learn to make pain-assertions by developing the cry of pain into much more complicated ways of using language. The connection between the expression of pain and the more sophisticated assertions of pain also stands out if we consider what is required for a person to be pretending to be in pain. In the wholly natural expression of pain, the experience of pain and the expression of it are two sides of the same phenomenon, for example, in the case of a very small child falling and crying. Here, there is no ‘gap’ between feeling and expression and thus no possibility of thinking that the child may be deceiving us. The possibility of pretence depends on having learned expressions of pain and ways of acting towards pain that are more sophisticated than our natural expressions and reactions. As Wittgenstein points out, ‘When would we say of a child, for instance, that it is pretending? What must it be able do for us to say that? Only when there is a relatively complicated pattern of life do we speak of pretence’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 40). When the child learns how to pretend to be in pain, for example to pretend to fall and cry, she has already learnt a great number of other things: How to play, how a crying child looks, how we react to people in pain and so on. In this way, the genuine expression of pain is primary, and pretence is a secondary form of activity; one which we must acquire, and which is embedded in various complicated practices and interactions. Still, the basis of all of this is the possibility of genuine expressions of pain. In Wittgenstein’s

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words: ‘I want to say that there is an original genuine expression of pain; that the expression of pain therefore is not equally connected to the pain and the pretence’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 55e, see also p. 39e). The expressive aspect of psychological self-ascription is not just limited to very basic feelings such as that of pain. Other, more complicated emotions also have an expressive aspect that can be just as immune to suspicion of pretence as a groan of pain, as in the case of ‘an unmistakable expression of joy and its opposite’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. II 32e). Self-­ ascriptions of abilities or beliefs have expressive functions in a similar way, and this may even be their primary function, as when we are trying to understand something and suddenly succeeds. The sentence ‘Now I know how to go on!’ is, as Wittgenstein phrases it, ‘an exclamation; it corresponds to an instinctive sound, a glad start’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p.323). Nonetheless, Wittgenstein is not trying to exchange a theory of psychological self-ascription of concepts with an expressive theory of psychological concepts.10 He is not saying that our self-ascriptions can be reduced to complicated forms of expressions, and he notes that the expressive aspect may be more or less relevant to our understanding of such ascriptions: ‘A cry is not a description. But there are transitions. And the words “I am afraid” may approximate more, or less, to being a cry’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p.  161). Wittgenstein points to a continuity between the natural and non-linguistic expressions of our inner lives and our use of psychological concepts, and in this way, he shows that the voicing of our inner lives is embedded in our natural ways of expressing and reacting from our inner life. Moreover, he is suggesting that if we are to understand what is at play in psychological self-ascriptions, we should turn away from the idea of observation of ‘inner phenomena’ and instead look at how such ascriptions are used, the role they play in our form of life.

 . Finding the Right Expression: The Moral 5 Stage Setting A supporter of the standard model of psychological self-ascriptions could at this point direct our attention to a type of cases that seem to support this model, namely cases, where we struggle to express what we feel or

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think. In such cases, the objection would go, we seem to observe a phenomenon already present ‘within’ and try to give it the most precise description. Wittgenstein does however also oppose the idea that we can always apply the model of observation and description to cases where we struggle to express our thoughts. What happens when we make an effort—say in writing a letter—to find the right expression of our thoughts?—This phrase compares the process to one of translating and describing: the thoughts are already there […] and we merely look for their expression. The picture is more or less appropriate in different cases.—But mayn’t all sorts of things happen here?—I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. Or a picture occurs to me and I try to describe it. Or an English expression occurs to me and I try to hit the right corresponding German one. Or I make a gesture, and ask myself: What words correspond to this picture? And so on. (Wittgenstein 2001, p. 335)

We are often tempted to understand this effort to find the right expression in line with the standard model of object and description, but to do this, we would have to assume that we always already have a ready grasp of our thoughts, that our thoughts are determined or ‘finished’, and that we only have difficulties in finding the words that would ‘fit’ them best amongst a number of alternatives. This would be parallel to a case, where a person sees a flower of a very particular colour and wonders whether it would be correct to call the colour red or maroon. We may however want to question the assumption that a person can always be said to ‘have’ a clear idea of her thoughts when she struggles to express herself. In the remark, Wittgenstein goes on: ‘Now what if it were asked: “Do you have the thought before finding the expression?” what would one have to reply?’ (Ibid.). Wittgenstein’s point is that in most cases the effort to ‘find the right expression’ of a thought is not an effort to describe it, but to give it form and make it more determinate; an effort that is itself an integrated part of developing this thought. That is, if we want to understand what it is to give form to a thought, we have to look, not to inner processes or occurrences, but rather to what we do in the process of finding this expression, and all the different materials we draw

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on such as the available concepts, synonyms, pictures, expressions, even gestures; all of which connect to a whole range of other concepts, pictures, expressions, and meaningful gestures, and to their meaningful uses, meaningful ways of acting on them and responding to them. What comes into view in Wittgenstein’s investigation is that when a person struggles to find the right expression of her thought, to give it a form, she draws on the same resources that she will use when trying to understand others and that others will use when they are trying to understand what she means. The considerations and connections that make this the right expression of her thought are the same that will enable others to understand it. There is an important point embedded here: The meaning of a person’s expression of a thought or a feeling is not determined solely by reference to a phenomenon in her inner life but is also dependent on the resources available to her, on the context in which she present her self-ascription, and on her purpose in expressing herself. If I try to determine the meaning of my self-ascriptions by reference to something essentially inner, ‘by observing my soul out of the corner of my eye’, as Wittgenstein says, then I am looking in the wrong place. ‘We ask “What does ‘I am frightened’ really mean, what am I referring to when I say it?” and of course we find no answer, or one that is inadequate. The question is: “in what sort of context does it occur?”’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p.  161). To understand what a person means when talking about her inner life, we need not look ‘inside’ her for hidden phenomena, rather, the meaning is established by the concepts that we share, the practices that surround these concepts and the specific context in which her words are placed. We could even say, according to Wittgenstein, that ‘The examples which philosophers give in the first person should be investigated in the third’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 44).11 What we need to know about such uses of words is available to us in language and the context that surrounds language; in most of these cases, ‘nothing is hidden’, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 435). That our expressions of our inner lives are dependent on context and the concepts available to us also means that there may be constraints on how we can come to make up our minds. Following a discussion of the emotion of fear, Wittgenstein notes: ‘The contexts in which a word appears are portrayed best in a play; therefore, the best example for a

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sentence with a certain meaning is a quote from a play. And who asks the character in a play what he experiences when he speaks?’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 7).12 In expressing her inner life, the subject has to draw on the resources of her language, on the available stage setting, the resources that she finds available for herself and for those she addresses. To make this point somewhat crudely, a person can only come to think that an action is perky, if she has learnt the concept of ‘perky’ (or a similar concept), and if she knows various ways of responding to and valuing perky actions; thoughts and judgements about perkiness are possible because of the conceptual framework and the practices that surround them. In a similar way, a person can only come to feel perky if she is familiar with such a concept and its surrounding practices. This is not a point about genesis, but about internal connection, about the mutual interdependency between the possibility of feeling perky and the concept of perkiness. The possibility of thinking or judging something to be perky as well as of feeling perky depends on objective connections integrated in the language that we use and the practices that we engage in, our conceptual and practical frameworks. Furthermore, this means that in making a psychological self-ascription a person also places herself within a language characterised by norms and values. ‘Perkiness’ is not a ‘value-neutral’ concept, it is something some people value highly and other less; and feeling perky or believing others to be perky are loaded with valuation. Finding the right expression of what we feel and or think is thus an endeavour played out in a normative framework, and very often, it will have moral implications—even with regard to the expression of very basic feelings. If one expresses that one is afraid, this of course relates to how one feels, but it is also an appeal to others for help or comfort, an expression of certain inhibitions in one’s own ability to act and so forth. We see this even clearer if we think about a play where one of the characters declares her fear, because here we would find the other characters morally negligent if they did not respond to this declaration, and if they did not respond in morally relevant ways. Moreover, if we believed that the character was sincere, we would also change our moral expectations to her, maybe blaming her for fearing something trivial, or, if we found the fear justified, excuse her for some of her subsequent actions.

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To make a psychological self-ascription is thus in many cases to place oneself within a complicated field of moral expectations and evaluations, and our understanding of such an ascription is bound up with this moral framework. Moreover, if this framework provides us with scarce resources, for example, if it consists of very narrow or inflexible concepts, norms, and possibilities of thinking and acting, we may have limited ways of expressing ourselves. We find a related point in Judith Butler’s work when she notes that there is a relation between a person’s struggle to become someone in particular and the moral and non-moral norms constituting the framework available to her. ‘The norm does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity; one invariably struggles with conditions of one’s own life that one could not have chosen’ (Butler, 2005, p. 19). For these reasons, we should be aware of how particular forms of stage setting may limit the possibilities of what one can feel or believe, how one can come to make up one’s mind, and that these possibilities are very often moral in character.

 . The Moral Dimension of the Authority 6 of Psychological Self-Ascriptions The importance of context and the normative, and often outright moral, implications of certain self-ascriptions have consequences for our understanding of their authority. We can unfold these consequences, if we look at what is involved in judging that such an ascription is genuine. One possible suggestion is that we can account for the genuine character of selfascriptions by stressing their connection to our natural reactions and expressions, and from this conclude that the ascriptions are genuine if they are spontaneous. This suggestion seems to work well in the pain case. If we think again of a child falling, in this case crying and saying ‘It hurts’, the spontaneous character of the assertion seems to support its sincere nature. We may also think that this is what Wittgenstein is suggesting when he says that the self-ascription of pain replaces the spontaneous cry of pain. However, in many cases, the fact that we offer certain spontaneous selfascriptions does nothing to establish their genuine nature. If we take an

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obvious example, in answer to the question of ‘How do you feel’—for example, about getting a divorce or one’s mother being sick—many people will spontaneously offer the reply ‘I’m fine’, even if this is not in any way a suitable expression of how they feel. Moreover, they may be prone to do so even in cases where the question is sincerely meant and is asked by someone whom they know and trust. That is, the fact that we spontaneously offer certain self-ascriptions does nothing to constitute their genuine nature. With practice, pretence may also become quite spontaneous, and we are often prone to forms of pretence about our inner lives. This means that we need an alternative account of the genuineness of psychological self-ascriptions, and another possible suggestion is that it depends on whether such ascriptions are presented truthfully or honestly.13 In order to develop this account, we can look at the more difficult case of trying to give a genuine expression of complicated emotions. Wittgenstein offers the following example: Just think of the words exchanged by lovers! They’re ‘loaded’ with feeling. And surely you can’t just agree to substitute for them any other progressions of sound you please. Isn’t this because they are gestures? And a gesture doesn’t have to be something innate; it is instilled, and yet assimilated.— But isn’t that a myth?!—No. For the signs of assimilation are that I want to use this word, that I prefer to use none at all to using one that is forced on me, and similar reactions. (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 17e)

We may of course try to describe the way a person expresses herself to her lover by stating that this is what she is prone to say. What Wittgenstein notes, however, is that the expression involves more; her words are not just instilled; they are assimilated. The speaker presents these words as the right way of expressing her emotions, as what she honestly feels, and the ascription will therefore also show in how she relates to her words, in how she comes to think about things, and in what she goes on to say and do. Here we find part of what we are looking for, the right context for judgements about the genuine nature of psychological self-ascriptions, namely the intimate connection between a person’s expression of her inner life, what she herself goes on to say and do and be, and what other people can come to expect of her from her words.

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Judgements about the genuine nature of self-ascriptions are made on the background of the expectation that, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘My words are parallel to my actions, his to his’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 10). When we take someone’s expression of her inner life to be genuine, we precisely take it that this connection holds; that what she says of her inner life guides or binds her onwards to certain ways of relating, reacting, and acting. Wittgenstein phrases it this way: ‘My relation to my own words is wholly different from other people’s. I do not listen to them and thereby learn something about myself. They have a completely different relation to my actions than to the actions of others. […] I do not draw conclusions as to my probable actions from my words’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, pp. II 9e–11e). The special connection between my self-ascriptions and my future actions cannot be accounted for in purely causal, statistical, or psychological terms—it is not a point about some sort of psychological mechanism. Rather, this connection is one that I establish as I present myself as thinking or feeling certain things by my psychological ­self-­ascriptions. Richard Moran has pointed out how my expression of a belief entails my ‘present commitment to the truth of the belief in question’ (Moran, 2001, p. 86), and how it ‘commits me to the facts beyond my psychological state; and as a commitment it is not something I am assailed by, but rather is mine to maintain or revoke’ (p. 89). If a psychological self-ascription is genuine, presented truthfully or honestly, it takes the form of an endorsement of and a commitment to a belief or a feeling. An expression of a belief or feeling is genuine if we endorse it and are committed to what follows from it, and this is the reason why what we say we think and feel are connected to our subsequent actions; in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘the certainty, a kind of feeling when uttering a sentence. Well, there is a tone of conviction, of doubt, etc. But the most important expression of conviction is not this tone, but the way one behaves’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. II 21). This also means that psychological self-ascriptions involve an element of responsibility. When I express my inner life, I become accountable not just to norms of consistency and sincerity, but also to the specific responsibilities established by my endorsement of having a specific feeling or belief. Of course, depending on the case, these responsibilities may be more or less demanding. The responsibilities involved in saying ‘I have a toothache’ will often be rather

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minimal, but the ones involved in expressing that ‘I believe the new university strategy is the right one’, ‘I fear for the child’, or ‘I am in love with you’ may be extensive and many of them will be moral in character. If I, for example, insist that I genuinely worry about climate change, then others are justified in having moral expectations of me to react on this worry. Having endorsed this worry, I have made myself a subject of moral valuation, for example, with regard to whether I subsequently make climate-­ conscious choices and help increase public awareness about climate change, or whether I just fail to change anything in the way I live, stay out of discussions about the failure of global action against climate change and so on. In many cases, self-ascriptions of emotions and beliefs make us subject to forms of responsibility and accountability that are essentially public and inter-subjective and are also often moral in character. If we return to our question of the authority of psychological self-ascriptions, we can see this accountability reflected in a special limitation of this authority. If I insist that I worry about climate change but nonetheless fail to live up to this worry in what I do and say in relation to this issue, then it is possible for others to question whether my expression of worry is genuine. That is, the authority of psychological self-ascriptions can be challenged in cases where these ascriptions do not connect to my actions or show in some other way.14 My grasp and expression of my inner life depends on and presupposes shared practices that involve characteristic forms of responsibility and accountability, and if I do not in any way live up to these, then either the genuine nature of my self-ascriptions or the authority of my understanding of my inner life can be challenged. On a Wittgensteinian reading, the authority of psychological self-ascriptions thus has a double source, on the one hand the certainty involved in the present-ness implied by the transparency of one’s inner life, and on the other the requirement of endorsing this inner life and taking on responsibility for the implications of this endorsement. The reason why I do not mistrust my own beliefs, why I do not listen to my own words, that is, the reason for the authority of my psychological self-ascriptions is both that my inner life is present and that it is mine. To the extent that I through self-ascriptions endorse this mine-ness of my inner life, I become respon-

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sible for it, and if I do not live up to this responsibility, it is possible to challenge these ascriptions.

7. The Example of Sultan This revised model for the authority of psychological self-ascriptions challenges the idea that we can describe our inner lives in a way that is normatively and morally neutral. In relation to this, it is important to see how loyalty to scientific naturalism can blind us to the ways that specific forms of stage setting may inhibit the possibilities available for us in expressing our inner lives. We can illustrate this claim by quote from a fictional lecture from J.  M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, where Coetzee’s main character Elizabeth Costello discusses a real experiment on apes conducted by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Costello presents the experiment in this way: Let me recount what the apes on Tenerife learnt from their master Wolfgang Köhler, in particular Sultan, the best of his pupils […] Sultan is alone in his pen. He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming. The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three metres above ground level and hangs a bunch of bananas from it. Into the pen he drags three wooden crates. Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him. Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are up there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates anymore? But none of these is the right thought. Even the more complicated thought— for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me that leads him to believe that it is easier for me to reach a banana from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?—is wrong. The right thought to think is this: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas? (Coetzee, 2004, pp. 73–4)

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If we set aside the issue of whether an ape like Sultan can engage in the form of thinking presented here and simply look at the text as a description of an experiment on a subject with a rich inner life, we see it as an illustration of the dynamics between a particular stage setting and the possibilities of what we may come to think. Setting up such an experiment is by no means a neutral matter because the experiment creates an environment which determines a field of possible feelings, thoughts and reactions, and ways of expressing oneself for the test subject. This means that we can come to create experiments that rest on inadequate, confused, or too narrow conceptions of our inner lives, as Elizabeth Costello thinks the experiments of which Sultan was a part rested on an inadequate, confused, and too narrow conception of his inner life. Another problem is that experiments based on an inadequate conception of our inner lives will not enable us to investigate inner phenomena, but rather becomes a teaching of new ones, because the test subjects will have to learn to respond in ways that are intelligible within the framework or stage setting made available for them. We thus reproduce our understanding of the mental in our investigations of it. This is surely something, for which researchers are responsible—not just as scientist, but also as involuntary moralists. This also shows us one of the risks involved in a blind adherence to scientific naturalism, namely that it may make us come to have wildly misleading ideas about, specifically, what we can learn from experimental psychology, and, generally, what it is to have an inner life, namely that it consists of always already established ‘objects’ to be studied, and that these objects are neutral or ‘hard’, not dependent on the normative framework available to the subject.

 . Conclusion: Back to Scientific and Relaxed 8 Naturalism The aim of the present investigation of psychological self-ascriptions has been to show the inherent normative and even moral dimension of such ascriptions. By showing the impossibility of a normatively and morally neutral understanding the inner lives of human beings, this investigation challenges the idea, central to scientific naturalism, that we can establish

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an absolute distinction between what we are, say, and do and how we should judge what we are, say, and do in prudential and moral terms, at least in the case of psychological self-ascriptions. The investigation also supplements current discussions in relaxed naturalism by showing that there are no sharp lines between the non-moral and the moral, which means that even if morality is not an all-pervasive dimension of our lives, it is impossible to offer a default demarcation of its extension. In this way, the investigation poses a challenge to the distinction between realm of law and sphere of reason in relaxed naturalism by revealing a continuity between our brute feelings and expressions, for example of pain, and the sophisticated, conceptual, and morally significant ways in which we can come to express ourselves. That is, with regard to our inner lives, the brute and the moral elements make up a continuum in the framework of our psychological self-ascriptions and cannot be separated into two distinct realms or spheres.15

Notes 1. See also the informative account of the distinction between ontological and methodological naturalism in Papineau (2016). 2. In a discussion on, and in contrast to, the position of Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond characterises this view as the ‘separation between the metaphysics of the realm of moral values and the metaphysics of other things, taken not to belong to ethics…the metaphysics of the “hard world”’ (Diamond, 2010, p. 57). 3. Another example of this approach is Smith (1994). A clear statement of this need for foundations in morality can be found in Nussbaum (2000). 4. For an argument against the ‘placing’ of ethics within a scientific naturalistic framework, see also Price (2004, p. 74). 5. Phillipa Foot (2000) and Michael Thompson (2004) develop a related rejection of scientific naturalism, but they do so with a starting point in the idea of categorical evaluations of particular lifeforms, an idea also explored by Hursthouse (1999). 6. We find this view of the pervasiveness of the moral in the work of a number of moral philosophers influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance that of Cora Diamond (1996a, 1996b, 1997).

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7. This investigation could take many other forms, for example showing that we only understand the use of a concept if we develop a sensibility to the importance of the differences and similarities between the many uses of that concept within a practical and moral orientation towards the world. We find an example of this approach in Crary (2007). 8. The phrase ‘psychological self-ascriptions’ as well as the description of our way of treating subjects’ assertions about their own states as authoritative is chosen as starting point because it is standard in contemporary discussion of this issue, see Gertler (2015). 9. This is a central point of Wittgenstein’s so-called private language considerations in the Philosophical Investigations, pp. 243–75. 10. Here I agree with Richard Moran’s critique of neo-Wittgensteinian, reductive expressivism, see Moran (2001, pp. 101–3). 11. See Gert (2015) for a thorough discussion of this point. 12. In a related remark in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks, ‘What is fear? What does “being afraid” mean?’, and answers, ‘If I wanted to define it at a single shewing—I should play-act fear’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 161). 13. See also the discussion in Heal (2003). 14. ‘Ask not “What goes on in us when we are certain—?”, but “How does it show”’ (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 21e). We should of course also note that, as there is a possibility of pretence with regard to one’s inner life, there is also the possibility that a person may genuinely hold beliefs or have feelings that do not show in her actions and reactions, for instance if she is prevented from acting on them by other factors. 15. For a different way to challenge the distinction between realm of law and sphere of reason, see Fink (2006).

References Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. de Caro, M., & MacArthur, D. (2004). Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (2004). Elizabeth Costello. London: Vintage. Crary, A. (2007). Beyond Moral Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Diamond, C. (1996a). Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism. In H. D. Sluga & D. G. Stern (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, C. (1996b). We are Perpetually Moralists’: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value. In M. Antonaccio & W. Schweiker (Eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Diamond, C. (1997). Realism and Resolution: Reply to Warren Goldfarb and Sabina Lovibond. Journal of Philosophical Research, 22, 75–86. Diamond, C. (2010). Murdoch the Explorer. Philosophical Topics, 38(1), 51–84. Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fink, H. (2006). Three Sorts of Naturalism. European Journal of Philosophy, 14(2), 202–221. Foot, P. (2000). Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gert, J. (2015). Wittgenstein, Korsgaard and the Publicity of Reasons. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 58(5), 439–459. Gertler, B. (2015). Self-Knowledge. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (E.  N. Zalta, Ed., Summer 2015 ed.). Retrieved from plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2015/entries/self-knowledge/ Heal, J. (2003). On First-Person Authority. In Mind, Reason and Imagination. Selected Essays in Philosophy of Mind and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hursthouse, R. (1999). On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovibond, S. (2002). Ethical Formation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (1996). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (1998). Two Sorts of Naturalism. In Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moran, R. (2001). Authority and Estrangement. An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle, and Bad Behaviour. In B.  Hooker & M.  Little (Eds.), Moral Particularism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Papineau, D. (2016). Naturalism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (E.  N. Zalta, Ed., Winter 2016 ed.). Retrieved from plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2016/entries/naturalism/

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8 ‘Speak to us of love’: Some Difficulties in the Philosophical and Scientific Study of Love Camilla Kronqvist

1. Introduction ‘Speak to us of love’. Thus, begins the speech about love in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. And the prophet Almustafa speaks, ‘with a great voice’, When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. (Gibran, 1923, p. 11)

C. Kronqvist (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_8

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He speaks of love’s ‘threshing-floor’, how love sifts, grinds and kneads you ‘until you are pliant’. He warns against in fear seeking only ‘love’s peace and love’s pleasure’, and of thinking that ‘you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course’. He asks that you let yourself ‘be wounded by your own understanding of love; and [that you] bleed willingly and joyfully’ (Gibran, 1923, pp. 13–14). The poet Gibran places these words in the mouth of a prophet, waiting on the shore of Orphalese to be taken back to his hometown. What Gibran allows the prophet to say offers us the opportunity to contemplate the nature of love, understood not primarily as something rooted in our biology, but as touching on a deeply personal, existential experience in our lives. It gives voice to a conception of love that asks us to ‘follow’, to ‘yield’, to ‘be wounded’ and ‘bleed’, to allow love to direct our course. Yet, it is the initial remark about this setup, the invitation to take these words about love as the words of a prophet, as written by a poet, that will be my focus here. How do such ways of speaking and writing about love, the poetical as well as the prophetical aspects of the language of love, speak to us in love?1 Is this centrally the way ‘love speaks’, and what, then, does it demand of us to ‘believe in him’? There is, as it were, nothing peculiar in the fact that Almustafa, through Gibran, speaks about love in these ways, nothing strange in the poetical and prophetical turns of at least some of our ordinary ways of speaking about love. The poetry of love surrounds us, in literature, film and music. There is even a sense in which all of us become poets, although often bad ones, when we try to express the particular beauty we see in the ones we love, the width and depth of our emotion. There is also nothing peculiar in the fact that such ways of speaking about love speak to us. My partner and I received a Swedish translation of The Prophet as a wedding gift from a couple of dear friends, and I myself included the part on love in a wedding card for another couple of dear friends at their wedding. It is, as it were, a fact about us that we may revel in such ways of speaking, and find comfort and inspiration in them. More than that, they help shape and breathe life into our experience. Yet, it may be felt that it is indeed peculiar that these ways of speaking about love speak to us. One may ask whether this attraction to poetry and prophecy in love really serves to put us in contact with the true nature of

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love. This question may be motivated by a distrust toward poetical and prophetical language as a reliable source for reaching moral clarity, for it does seem that poetry in some situations can obfuscate our moral vision. It may however also be motivated by a more general distrust toward language as a guide to reality. If our concern is to become clear about the nature of love, why should we not rather look to science, and to the development of a scientific theory, than to poetry, prophecy, or for that matter philosophy, to gain an answer.2 For, is it not conceivable that science could succeed in telling us something about love that poets, prophets and philosophers have failed to do? In raising such questions about who may be better placed to describe the nature of love, two conceptions of nature are silently put to work. The first is a picture of ‘nature’ as pertaining to the inner most being of something, its essence, its meaning or significance to us. The second, somewhat more mundane picture, is one of the ‘nature’ of something as having its roots in our biology, neurology, in something that has gained its place in our life though evolutionary history. Naturalism in philosophy, one could suggest, is the presupposition that the latter sense of ‘nature’ is the one that is most true to our nature, understood in both senses, the belief that all other talk about nature can be boiled down to the latter. The following discussion is aimed at questioning that idea. In part I do it by reminding us that when philosophers and scientists speak to us about love, or attempt to speak to us, they do not usually speak to us in the fashion of poets or prophets. I ask whether there is something crucial that escapes us when we leave out these aspects. I mention this, because often when philosophers and scientists speak to us about love, it is difficult to find much love in what they are saying.3 This is true both in the way that they are speaking and in what they are saying. Rather than speaking to us of love, they speak about love. I submit that this testifies to a difficulty in investigating love, both scientifically and philosophically. This difficulty cannot in any simple sense be pried apart from the scientist’s and philosopher’s personal experience of love in their encounters with other people, an experience that in part is shaped by writings such as Gibran’s Prophet. My discussion draws on different attempts to articulate the Wittgensteinian notion that philosophizing about a concept, and in this

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context a psychological concept such as love, in one way or other is a matter of bringing it back to its natural home, the lives we live with language. I consider different ways of appealing to ordinary language as central to reaching clarity about the uses of the concept of love, and how differently the appeals to the ‘ordinary’ and ‘language’ appear in these cases. I also discuss some limitations in speaking about ‘ordinary language’ in the context of a philosophical investigation into love. I begin with a consideration of scientific attempts at explaining love as a natural phenomenon, and question whether the philosophical desire to reject such explanations as nonsensical properly accounts for the possibility that our language of love can also change in the light of scientific discoveries. This insight, however, should not lead one to overstate the scientific capacity to account for the moral aspects of our ways of understanding love. When considering how we as individuals are involved in such an understanding, we, as philosophers, should also be prepared to change our understanding of what is involved in the philosophical reflection on both language and love.

2. False Prophets? I said that philosophers do not usually speak in the poetic and prophetical ways that find expression in the Gibran poem. This claim needs to be amended, since the desire not to speak in poetic ways is more expressive of a certain kind of scientifically oriented analytic philosophy, than the continental traditions represented by the likes of Luce Irigaray (2004) and Jean-Luc Marion (2008). At least the first writes with the explicit aim to find a new language of love, a new language of the bodies filled with desire. Martin Buber (2004) as well as K. E. Løgstrup (1997) add to a set of thinkers that have not shied away from the ‘poetical’ in attempting to capture the dialogical character of human relationships and the demands that face us there. Further examples include Simone Weil (1977), Iris Murdoch (1997) and Søren Kierkegaard (1956, 1964), whose remarks on love provide means for meditating on the meaning of love and its relation to concepts such as truth and goodness.

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One also needs to take note of the tendency to adorn one’s writing with, what I assume to be, meaningful quotes and poems about love, presented as mottos or aphorisms in both philosophical works and popularized science. Since these are usually not given any additional treatment, they are evidently considered to carry their own meaning. Ilham Dilman (1999), for example, cites Gibran’s poem in his Love: Its Forms, Dimensions and Paradoxes. This is also where I read it the first time. When we turn to scientists, however, we should be even more hesitant. Some scientists, it seems, take it upon themselves to be the new prophets of love, telling us literally what the innermost being of love is, and doing it in ways that lean much more on the poetical, and on our poetical urge, than on the scientific findings that should merit their claims. This is especially the case with popularized accounts of love in books balancing between providing self-help and scientific explanations to our most fundamental existential questions. Or how else should we read psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who in her Love 2.0 defines the task of the science of love she is promoting in the following manner? With the greater knowledge of love’s inner workings that this book offers, you’ll become more efficient at accessing that transcendent state, with all its inherent goodness. Science need not inevitably leave you holding a flat corkboard with a dismembered butterfly pinned to it. Science can also glorify, painting a colorful picture and multidimensional road map for a more potent life journey, one that eliminates the detours of false hopes, false prophets, and charts a course toward the real thing. It can leave the butterfly alive and whole and set it free (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 12).

Does science here, as Fredrickson suggests, serve to expel ‘false prophets’, or is there a risk that scientists themselves appear as such? Who is supposed to judge this, and in virtue of what? Fredrickson writes from the perspective of positive psychology, a research program aimed at investigating what makes us prosper and feel well as human beings rather than focusing on mental illness. For that reason, two-thirds of her book also consists of suggestions of psychological interventions aimed at making us love better. These are largely different methods aimed at reflecting on positive connections to other people, taking up the lead from Buddhist exercises in mindfulness.4 Her reason

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for thinking that such exercises would make us better at loving rests on her suggestion that we redefine love. Rather than thinking of the romantic relationship with one particular individual that we possibly never find, her suggestion is to take the word as referring to the positive connections we can make with several people. Thus, she asks the reader to set aside talk about love as ‘exclusive, lasting, and unconditional’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 6), as ‘a special bond’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 5), ‘a commitment, promise or pledge’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 5), and to look at how one’s body defines it (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 5), as a micro-moment of ‘positivity resonance’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 30), ‘that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 9). The suggestion that we give up notions of love that are commonly or ordinarily held as daydreams, ‘deeply held beliefs’ that are ‘more wish than reality’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 6) echoes a scientific attitude to our everyday ways of speaking. It is also found in the much more philosophical suggestion that our everyday ways of speaking about our mental life is expressive of a folk-psychology. The most extreme articulation of the felt need to distance oneself from such pre-scientific ways of talking is perhaps found in the eliminative materialism that suggests that all of our psychological vocabulary should be replaced by vocabulary grounded in neuro-scientific findings (see Churchland, 1981, 1986 for an exposition). It is certainly clear that knowledge about neurological reactions might be relevant to the study of love. It is also conceivable that neurological research may introduce new ways of conceiving of our mental life. There may well be, as Fredrickson suggests, psychological benefits from cultivating the positivity experienced in ‘everyday exchanges with colleagues and strangers’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 37) and to understanding these as a way of allowing love to work in our life. Nevertheless, there are reasons to be cautious about how much science will or should revolutionize our more everyday ways of conceiving love. When Fredrickson claims that she does not love her husband at the moment of writing, because the positivity resonance only ‘lasts as long as’ the two of them ‘are engaged with each other’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 36), do we really have to agree to this description because research has proved that ‘Bonds last. Love

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doesn’t.’ (2013, p. 36)? Why not say that she only offers us a new way of speaking? My reasons for being hesitant to pick up on this new usage are partly  scientific. They concern the conclusions about our mental lives that we are licensed to draw from individual studies or experiments. Individual studies require very specific stipulative definitions and operationalizations to delimit what is to be investigated or observed for the sake of finding behavior that is measurable. This raises an important question about how generalizable individual findings are. What, as it were, are we entitled to say about love on the basis of Fredrickson’s research, and not merely about the kind of reactions she calls micro-­ moments of positivity resonance? (Cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2007b, p. 99). This is not only a question about how much scientists are entitled to generalize from their studies. It is also, as Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker (2007a, pp. 9–10) show, a conceptual question about how empirical studies contribute to our understanding of the meaning of words. Both Fredrickson’s view and the more extreme eliminative materialist view rest on the notion that the word ‘love’, in our quite ordinary ways of speaking about it, as well as in the scientific contexts, is used to refer to a momentary bodily feeling, ‘an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p.  15). Furthermore, they presuppose that the meaning of words is determined by their referents. These notions, importantly, do not originate in empirical research. Rather they reveal an understanding of how the concepts of ‘love’ and ‘meaning’ function that on further reflection proves to be confused. One such confusion is precisely the thought that conceptual questions are questions that can be solved empirically (cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2007a, p. 10). Here, a finer grasp of the roles the word plays in our life can do much to question these assumptions. Consider, for example, Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: “That was not true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly”’ (1967, p.  504). The point of this remark is not to dissociate talk of love from different ways of ­talking about feelings. Rather it draws attention to ways in which we use the word love in our life, which cannot be reduced to the mere reporting of a momentary state, such as wondering whether we really are in love or are only pretending (cf. Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 587). It

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calls to mind that such a question cannot be answered simply by appeal to how we momentarily feel but bears on how we conceive of our responsibility to another human being in the light of ‘love’. Contrary to the definition Fredrickson puts forth, it reminds us that love is not to be reduced to a happening within our bodies but concerns us as persons, responding to each other with love (cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2007a, pp. 10–11). Thinking of love as ‘micro-moment of positivity resonance’, then, fails to do justice to, or just simply ignores, several seemingly important questions about love. Thus, we can question whether Fredrickson has really succeeded in saying anything about the concept of love, if by this we mean the way the word is used in our life. She has only offered us a more limited definition. Here, it is also important to note that it is precisely Fredrickson, and not our bodies or the abstract science, who asks us to reconsider the ways we use the word. Our bodies cannot, in any strict sense, be said to define what love is, although we may in particular cases, using the metaphorical language Fredrickson leans on in making these claims, encourage someone to listen to her body. Whether we take up on Fredrickson’s suggestion to change our ways of speaking is a matter of how well we think that her usage does speak to our experiences and relationships with other people, whether we think, for example, that it makes sense to think of love as only denoting a feeling or that it makes even more sense to think of it as a bond. I, for my part, do not see that Fredrickson’s redefinition makes much more sense than saying that I do not stop loving my wife and children when I am not interacting with them in a positive way.

3. Turning to the Ordinary What, however, is it we take upon us as philosophers ‘of the ordinary’ or ‘of love’ to do, if we reject the definition of love that Fredrickson offers us, by appealing to the sense or meaning speaking about love has in our everyday lives? One way of understanding this turn toward the ordinary is to see it as providing us with criteria for deciding what could count as a meaningful,

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or again as a meaningless use of the word ‘love’. Then we could say that speaking about love as a momentary feeling does not make sense since it does not take account of the ways in which these feelings play a role in the greater context of a committed relationship where we in different ways matter to each other. Yet, what is at stake in Wittgenstein’s remark, as I see it, is not drawing a general line between meaningful and meaningless uses of words, as if that is something that could be done in abstraction from any particular case in which we are inclined to make such a distinction. Clearly, I, as a philosopher, can come up with uses of the word love that, taken like this, lack any clear sense, say, ‘My love sits on the waist’. I can then remark that love, unlike pain, ‘cannot be assigned a somatic location’ (Bennett & Hacker, 2007b, p. 98), and remind us that if we want to say that love sits somewhere, we would usually point to the breast and not the waist (cf. Wittgenstein, 1980a, p. 438). Considering such ordinary and extraordinary uses of the word may indeed help us find asymmetries, analogies and other significant relations between different uses of words. Thus, it may advance our understanding of our workings with the concept. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to say that since ‘we usually do not say this’ we ‘cannot say’ this, or that it is ‘meaningless to say’ that. The natural response to that is to ask: What ‘we’? What ‘usually’? What ‘cannot’ be said? If we really do attend to what people in actual situations do say, a near-by conclusion is rather that our ordinary uses often have quite an extraordinary character. There are awkward declarations of love, failed attempts at poetry and metaphor, as well as unexpected expressions of love. What is more, our ordinary declarations of love at times fail to carry any weight. With a little imagination, we can also think of situations in which what first struck us as a meaningless expression seems perfectly meaningful. I exclaim, ‘One can see my love for you on my waist’, as a way of saying ‘I really love your food’ (cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2007b, p. 105). To the extent that philosophy is aimed at showing that something a scientist like Fredrickson is inclined to say is meaningless, the point, therefore, is not that it cannot be said (and hence is nonsense) but that it does not have the meaning she thought it had.5 She is, as James Conant

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(1996, p. 273) has put it, under the illusion of making sense. On this view, Wittgenstein’s writings press us to see that Fredrickson’s view is expressive of metaphysical commitments of which its author is possibly not aware (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 116). The ordinary is then introduced precisely to break the spell of metaphysical speculation, and not as a field, the ‘ordinary uses of language’, to be analyzed in its own right. In Fredrickson’s case, as well as in many other scientific and naturalistically driven philosophical accounts of love, such metaphysical commitments are found, for example, in the unspoken assumptions that ‘love’ requires reference to a localizable on-going inner state to have meaning or that science should be the source for determining what love is, rather than say art, literature and religion. The role of the philosopher here is not to disprove Fredrickson’s claims. It is not to argue that love is indeed a commitment, exclusive or unconditional. Such views may prove to be problematic on closer inspection, and may indeed carry metaphysical commitments themselves. Metaphysical pictures of love, in that way, do not only appear when we distance ourselves from ordinary use, but also when we are deeply immersed in ordinariness (cf. Gustafsson, Kronqvist, & Nykänen, 2013, pp. 11–12). The central distinction, therefore, is not between metaphysical and ordinary uses. What makes a statement metaphysical is not something we can read off a statement in isolation. The risk of engaging in metaphysical speculation is rather an aspect of not having clarified to oneself how one uses language in a particular situation, whether one, for example, is speaking metaphorically, or is taking a metaphor, such as ‘what my body is telling me’ too literally (cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2007b, p. 107). The role of philosophy is in that way rather to show what kind of meaning certain expressions have in a person’s life on a given occasion. This involves careful consideration of how a word is used and in what contexts, how it matters to the person speaking and ties in with that person’s understanding of other words. Consider, for example, how different the sense of what a commitment is if it is conceived as a contract or as a bond, or as related to our promises to each other and how deeply ingrained keeping such promises is in the trust we have in our loved ones (cf. Kronqvist, 2011). Or, think of how embracing the notion that love is unconditional must not lead us to accept that it is uncritical, or, how

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exclusiveness does not have to be regarded as a form of possessiveness. Raimond Gaita, for example, suggests that fidelity can be seen ‘as an ideal in the light of whose requirements sexuality (and what we think to be natural to it) is transformed’ (Gaita, 1991, p. 84). Such reflections can lead a scientist, such as Fredrickson, who was inclined to speak of love as a bodily feeling, to recognize a tension between this way of speaking and others that she had also made use of in her own writing. When Fredrickson, for example, speaks of love as a ‘transcendent state’ with ‘inherent goodness’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 12) and points to science showing us the real thing, she leans on the distinctions between true love and pretense that Wittgenstein showed were internal to how we make sense of love by contrast to an inner state. When she, however, asks us to look at how our body defines ‘love’, she disregards the place distinguishing between ‘false hopes’ and ‘the real thing’ (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 12) has in an interpersonal context. She overlooks the sense in which we as speakers, and potential lovers, may ask whether we are truly seeking love or only its ‘peace and pleasure’, as Gibran puts it, as well as the existential and moral aspects of such questions. In these cases, the philosopher, talking through the ordinary, may be described as offering reminders of ways of speaking that are already available in the speaker’s own life. It is only that she, in this particular context, had failed to acknowledge them, and thereby failed to make sense in the way she intended. Seeing the role of ordinary language philosophy as progressing in such ways, I take it, is one of the ways in which we may regard the practice of philosophy as therapeutic (cf. Wittgenstein’s suggestion that philosophy offers ‘different therapies’, 2009, p. 133).

4. Speaking with Depth In the context of refraining from taking metaphysical stands in the name of science, I agree with assigning to philosophy this therapeutic role. Nevertheless, these ways of conceiving philosophy fail to do justice to a different form of criticism we may direct at a person’s understanding of love. Think only of calling someone’s understanding immature, destructive, light-hearted, self-seeking, superficial or cynical. In these cases, it is

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incorrect to say that someone, in any simple sense, fails to grasp the language of love. Yet it is possible for someone to conclude that they do not speak that language with any greater depth. The person to whom we want to attribute a superficial understanding of love, for one thing, clearly has some grasp of the language. Where things go wrong, we may think, is in the spirit in which the person speaks, or in the person failing to speak it in a certain spirit. The cynic, for another thing, is not conceptually confused about the language of love. Rather we can say that his or her cynicism is a whole-sale rejection of the notion that there is any greater meaning in speaking this language. It is also a rejection of the notion that anyone could see the language of love as constituting a real possibility in one’s life, and not just as an unattainable idealization. The cynic, in this respect, embodies a different perspective on what meaning ‘love’ has; it is used primarily as a tool for a certain kind of self-deception. Here someone may interject: ‘But is it not the cynic that is deceived?!’ (cf. Kierkegaard’s suggestion that one can be ‘deceived in not believing what is true’ [1964, p. 23]). Certainly, that is a meaningful thing to say. ‘But is it more meaningful than what the cynic says?’ To answer that question, we first have to clarify what we mean by ‘meaningful’. In particular, we have to distinguish between two senses in which something can be seen as meaningful or be rejected as meaningless. On the one hand, we may use the word to say that something is intelligible or unintelligible. Here the sense of the word can be connected with ordinary usage. On the other hand, we may use it to mark what someone says as particularly important and significant. Here the central thing is not whether it is intelligible to say something, or how many people would actually say it, but what a person says and how that matters to the ways we understand him or her. If, then, we feel that the cynic does not present us with a meaningful use of ‘love’ or that she fails to give meaning to her words, we are leaning on a use of the word ‘meaningful’ that is not in the first place connected with how the words are ordinarily used. Clearly cynicism about the possibility of love, and superficiality about what it may demand of one is quite an ordinary feature of our language of love. In fact, Fredrickson takes hold of precisely this feature when she urges us to reform, or in her

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own words ‘upgrade’ (2013, p. 5) our ways of speaking about love. (As if this was not a very superficially chosen word for addressing the theme of changing the meaning of a central moral concept!) The idea that there is one true love for each and every one that she is criticizing is clearly a superficial notion of what it is for love to be true. It can also play a very limiting role in people’s lives if they think that they are doomed to a loveless life if they do not find their true love, or if their ‘one true love’ proves to make them miserable. Against that idea, the notion that love consists in positive moments that we can share and cultivate with anyone, and that our life can, thus, be full of love even if we do not have one ‘true love’, seems much more liberating.6 Consider, however, how this understanding of ‘true love’ fares in relation to the following remark by Wittgenstein. “If it passes, then it was not true love.” Why was it not in that case? Is it our experience, that only this feeling and not that endures? Or are we using a picture: we test love for its inner character, which the immediate feeling does not discover. Still, this picture is important to us. Love, what is important, is not a feeling, but something deeper, which merely manifests itself in the feeling. We have the word “love” and now we give this title to the most important thing. (As we confer the title “Philosophy” on a particular intellectual activity.) (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p. 115)

Wittgenstein, here, points to a different question of truth than the potential truth of the statement ‘There is one true love for you’. He relates this question to the inner character of that love, to something that ‘manifests itself in the feeling’ but is not discovered by looking at the immediate feeling. The descriptions I have given of certain uses of the language of love (I might as well have said certain visions of love), as ‘superficial’, ‘deep’, ‘cynical’, ‘limiting’, ‘liberating’ are similarly qualitative. They are used to bring out the manner in which someone speaks, just as we may use them to describe the character of a person or his or her speech and actions. If we defend our understanding of some of these ways of speaking the language of love by saying that they are more meaningful, we are also using the word meaningful in a qualitative manner. We use it to

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characterize the content of the perspective on love that, say, the cynic claims to be exposing, and the significance we, ourselves, see in the perspective that he or she rejects. Can we keep these two uses of ‘meaningful’ apart in philosophy? Is there a problem if we do not? D.Z. Phillips (1999) answers yes to both questions. Within the Wittgensteinian tradition he criticizes, among others, James Conant’s (1996) discussion of the relation between Wittgenstein’s and Kierkegaard’s philosophies, for not properly accounting for the contemplative conception of philosophy that for Phillips characterizes Wittgenstein’s work. Phillips agrees with Conant that both Wittgenstein, at least in the Tractatus, and Kierkegaard put forth a view of philosophy as directed at expelling nonsense. What Conant disregards, however, is that Kierkegaard’s attempt at exposing the illusions of what he called Christendom is driven by a religious interest (Phillips, 1999, p. 25). Kierkegaard intended for his contemporary Christians to acknowledge that they were calling themselves Christians, although they failed to manifest any deeper sense of what it means to be Christians in their life. Such a religious interest is to Phillips lacking in Wittgenstein’s writings. Despite Conant’s attempt to dispel of the idea, Phillips persists in stressing the need to separate gaining philosophical clarity about the role certain concepts such as a ‘true Christian’ has in someone’s life and appropriating that concept in one’s own life. Within a contemplative conception of philosophy, Phillips says, the philosopher should not take a stand on any one perspective, but rather clarify the diversity in perspectives and practices that there are. Otherwise she risks not taking people at their word, and rather becomes an advocate for ‘the moralism that takes the form of calling “confused” what is, in fact, a different moral, political or religious perspective from those with which [the philosopher] sympathizes’ (Phillips, 1999, p. 99).7 The philosopher, as it were, becomes more of a prophet than a philosopher. Phillips’ final criticism echoes my worry that delivering grammatical remarks about love with the intent of returning words to their ordinary use (cf. Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 116) is really a way of according weight to a usage one has oneself come to think of as the most important. (The question is if we can refrain from doing so and still be speaking about love?) Yet, I also agree with Conant that Phillips’ attempt to drive a wedge

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between clearing up grammatical confusions and examining one’s life (Conant, 1996, p. 279), or what one could call philosophical problems and problems of life (cf. Dilman, 1998), is problematic. Phillips is right in emphasizing that there are times where our investigation can be helped by distinguishing between clarifying what is entailed in a perspective and actively endorsing it. At other times, however, it is equally instructive to remind us that certain grammatical confusions ‘can only come into focus for the reader through an examination of his own life’ (Conant, 1996, p.  280). This, we can say with Conant, is for Wittgenstein an examination of ‘his life with words’, where the confusions ‘have their source, in part, in the shoddiness of our attention to what our words mean and to what we mean by our words’ (1996, p. 280). Here the ‘failure of attention to how we speak cannot be separated from a failure to attend to the various ways in which we act’ (Conant, 1996, p. 280).

5. Having Love These observations help us clear away one possible way of clarifying grammar that I think poses no problem to either account. A person who was attracted by Fredrickson’s idea that love is cultivated by seeking to increase her own moments of positivity resonance (2013, p.  35), may come to recognize that her love may also be said to grow by reflecting on her responsibilities toward others. She may even realize that the focus on her own responses paves way for a self-centered and perhaps even cynical view of love, such as the one committed to the psychological egoism that claims that all human behavior, and thus also love, is motivated by self-­ interest. If, then, she does not wish to express cynical views about love— she does not desire to be a cynic, but merely had not considered the implications of her new ways of talking, perhaps only picking up on Fredrickson’s—she may as a consequence decline to speak in such ways in the future. In such a case, there is nothing that is personally at stake in the words in which she chooses to frame her talk about love. The more challenging cases, however, are those in which someone’s appreciation of what can count as a grammatical clarification of the lan-

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guage of love is itself dependent on the extent to which they, themselves, are able to speak that language with love (cf. Cavell, 1979, p.  177). Consider, for example, people whose parents have divorced. They often have difficulty truly believing in the possibility of marriage, or taking as a real possibility that we may utter the words ‘until death do us part’ and mean them. People who have suffered abuse in several relationships may similarly find it difficult to conceive that in love ‘we want the best for each other’ or that there is anything such as ‘wanting the best for each other’ in the first place. Furthermore, there are people who have not in their own life encountered the particular forms of goodness that may have us speak of goodness as an absolute (cf. Gaita, 1999). Such considerations lend intelligibility to their rejection of talk about unconditional goodness or love as an empty ideal, since the recognition of such a possibility at the same time could mean coming to grips with how seriously it is and has been lacking in their own life. It also throws light on why such people may look for support for their views in intellectual considerations such as the psychological egoism I mentioned earlier. It is easier to reject love as an unattainable or illusory ideal than to confront one’s own lack of it. What sense are we, however, philosophically to make of these kinds of experience, in relation to the clarity we hope to bring about through a philosophical investigation into the language of love? Are we to say that these people are mistaken, that they are confused, under an illusion or self-deceived? There is, we should add, a gliding scale from the epistemic (the one Wittgensteinians know they should reject) to the increasingly moral judgment here. Or, are we to say that there are other possible ways in which one can relate to ‘love’ and attempt to show what the word means in those cases? I have misgivings about both alternatives, the deepest of which can be seen by considering the first two sentences of this final quote from Wittgenstein. Love, that is the pearl of great price that one holds to one’s heart, that one would exchange for nothing, that one prizes above all else. In fact it shows—if one has it—what great value is. One learns what it means to single out a precious metal from all others. (Translation from Monk, 1991, p. 505; Wittgenstein, 2000, MS 133, 8v)

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The remark continues with an anti-Kantian twist where it is our immense preference that leads us to recognize the demands of duty that is well deserving of discussion. Here, however, I only want to direct your attention to the addition‘—if one has it—’in the second sentence, for that in many ways captures the essence of my concern. It is inviting to think that the two first sentences offer grammatical reminders of the way in which the idea of what is valuable, and even most valuable, is tied to and something we learn through loving. Love, as an attempt at paraphrasing, is that which gives meaning to the notion of something being valuable in the first place, both in the sense of a precondition for learning the concept of value and as an expression of the value one recognizes. If one has it, that is. But what then if one does not have love? What if I recognize in someone’s response the failure to believe in love, to have faith in it, a rejection of the longing they once felt for it? I do not mean the belief that Fredrickson wants to rid us of, the longing for one’s true love, but a failure to make sense of suggestions such as Iris Murdoch’s ‘Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’ (1997, p.  215) or Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of heart is to will the good in truth’ (1956). These are uses of love to which I have come to accord great weight in my both personal and philosophical reflections on love. They are personal to the extent that they serve to articulate a perspective of love that is both grounded in and helps to shape aspects of my personal experience, a personal experience that cannot be torn apart from engaging in questions about what it means to philosophize about love. They are philosophical at least in the sense that they cannot be isolated from an understanding of their role in these two philosophers’ visions of love. This use of ‘philosophical’, however, goes beyond the therapeutic as well as the contemplative conception of the practice of philosophy that I have considered so far. They constitute examples of speaking about love that are not far from the remarks about love that figure in the Prophet, verging on the poetical as well as the prophetical, if not being clear examples of both. (Is it then that they are presented in the context of a philosophical work that gives us as reason to consider them as grammatical remarks, where we may feel less inclined to treat Gibran’s words as such?)

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6. Bearing Witness To speak about these kinds of failure to make sense of the language of love in one’s own life as a confusion is to my mind to fail to acknowledge the inherent tragedy in such a failure. It neglects the doubts and difficulties involved in finding love a meaningful perspective in our relationship to other people, or keeping up the faith that it does constitute such a possibility. It is at least a task for philosophy to clarify the kinds of difficulties that make up much of this endeavor, for that, one could say, is an ever-present aspect of life with language. I doubt, however, whether it is fruitful to construe this as describing one possible way of using ‘love’ among others, as Phillips suggests. The problem with speaking about stopping at seeing possibilities is that that too is a moral stance, which runs the risk of being moralizing. Thus, we always have to consider what is involved in taking such a stance in relation to the particular question with which we are concerned. What we see as possibilities, a thought which Phillips takes from Peter Winch (1972, p. 178), will be expressive of our moral outlook. That, however, means that another can always contest what one person describes as a moral possibility by saying that the one who truly considers this a possibility is deceived (cf. Cook, 1999, pp. 84–7). A description of different possible perspectives of love would therefore have to show how one thinks of the other within these perspectives. In other words, who thinks of whom as deceived? A different way of framing my objection is to note that speaking about the love of which Murdoch and Kierkegaard, as well as Gibran, speak, as one possibility among other possible understandings of the meaning of love, fails to acknowledge the authority these ways of speaking have for the speaker. Neither Murdoch nor Kierkegaard wish to advance this as an understanding of love that one can decide to take to heart, but that one can also refuse without either being deceived (Kierkegaard) or not possessing a deeper understanding of love (Murdoch). A better way of phrasing this is perhaps to speak of the authority love has to the philosophers who express its significance in this way. This is the authority that Gibran’s prophet gives voice to when he says, ‘when he speaks to you believe in

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him’. Their ways of speaking are, as it were, closer to a call, than to a description. It is a call to understand love in this way, and further to recognize the authority inherent in conceptualizing love in these terms.8 It is in these ways they approximate a way of speaking that also characterizes the prophet. A similar move can be traced in Raimond Gaita’s writings about love, and especially in the more autobiographical depictions of the kind of love the meeting with a nun in a mental ward, as well as his father inspired in him. These personified a love that, to take just one articulation, did not merely speak of the inalienable dignity (Gaita, 2011, p. 56) of each and every person, but also acted out a love without a hint of condescension (Gaita, 2011, p. 58) to those who had fallen into madness. (Gaita chooses to speak of them as mad rather than mentally ill, and defends his choice of words, 2011, pp. 70–3.) These acts showed what it means that these individuals too were someone to love. (Cf. Gaita, 1999, p. 24, ‘we sometimes learn that something is precious only by regarding it in the light of someone’s love’.) The role Gaita has here is not necessarily the one of a prophet. Although I have tried out that notion to point to certain aspects of philosophizing about love, we may rightfully be hesitant to use it. He does, however, write as a witness (cf. Gaita, 2011, p. 64) of a certain kind of love, bearing testimony of that understanding as it had figured in the life of particular persons he has encountered (cf. Gaita, 2011, p. 66). The significance of these ways of making sense of love cannot therefore be separated from the personal significance these persons had to him, and to others with similar experiences. It is, as it were, in virtue of such love that a certain way of speaking the language of love makes sense to us, that it speaks to us of love. The question, that I will have to leave for now, is what consequences this should have for philosophers who wish to ‘speak to us of love’.

7. Conclusion Gibran’s prophet delivered his speech on his way home. Initially I suggested that some ways in which scientists and philosophers speak about love may appear far from home, and thus in need of being brought back.

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However, I also brought out some problems involved in introducing a home, in ordinary language, to which our words about love need to be brought back. Sometimes, as it were, we may feel too much at home in our ways of speaking about love. We speak of love with such ease that our words become banal or sentimental, we find comfort in cynical ways of speaking because they do not suggest that anything is wrong with our own attitude to love. The sense in which the prophet’s speech may hit close to home, is also not necessarily in presenting us with ways of speaking about love to which we are already accustomed. It also provides us with ways of articulating and expressing our love, new pictures of the claims love makes on us. The fact that we in such ways may explore (cf. Diamond, 2010; Bagnoli, 2012) and extend our language of love, that we may find a deeper meaning in some uses of it, and find others superficial, thus needs to be part and parcel of our description of the different ways of speaking in which ‘love’ is at home. The philosophical investigation itself may be part of such exploration, and does not in that way need to be limited to what just anyone or everyone would ordinarily say. There is, as it were, no one grammar of love for philosophy to uncover. What one is prepared to see as a grammatical remark, however, will depend on the ways in which the philosophers themselves are prepared to speak of love. This makes it difficult to easily fend off the accusation that philosophers of love are idealizing love, that is, attempting to describe ‘true love, genuine love or authentic love’ (Garrett, 2012, p.  102), and thus slipping into ‘moralizing language’ (Garrett, 2012, p. 102). Yet, I see that risk as no reason to refrain from speaking about love as philosophers. It does, however, raise the demands on the speakers to clarify to themselves what they are doing when they do. I ended my words of introduction by asking whether philosophers are more akin to scientists or prophets. I have not answered that question. Some (popular) scientific accounts of love mask as prophecies, but the scientists, or scientifically minded philosophers, speaking in that way resemble false prophets. They purport to spread knowledge of the nature of love, its neurological and psychological underpinnings. Yet, the methods they use for attaining this knowledge is unsuitable for elucidating the moral and existential questions that face us when one attempts to grasp the concept of love in one’s life and use it wisely. Nevertheless, there is

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need for hesitation in thinking of philosophers as prophets of love. Proclaiming oneself a prophet of love often backfires, turning one again into a moralizer or a false prophet. Perhaps the best we can do, as philosophers, if we do not want to remain silent, is to attempt to speak of love, as a way of bearing testimony, aware of the possible complications involved in this attempt. The question whether philosophers are more like prophets (or poets), however, requires a more thorough discussion of what in entailed in being a prophet than I have been able to provide. By speaking quite loosely about the poetical and the prophetical as aspects of the language of love, I have rather lumped together art, literature and religion as a contrast to the scientific, or better yet scientistic attempts at explaining love, since all of them present us with practices within which aspects of our language of love is learnt. More could therefore be said about the prophet as a spiritual guide, as a mediator between the natural and the supernatural (or the natural and the non-natural), or as someone aspiring to wisdom, and the ways in which one as a philosopher of love can identify with or want to dissociate oneself from such pictures of the philosophical practice. It also needs to be said, if one’s task is to clarify the relation between the prophetical and philosophical. For now, however, I have to leave that task.

Notes 1. The notion that we receive knowledge of love through an act of divination, or through someone with more or less prophetical powers, is of course also familiar in the philosophy of love through Socrates’ speech in the Symposium where he recounts the teachings of love by Diotima. 2. This is the route taken by Paul E. Griffiths (1997), who in What Emotions Really Are, suggests that the answer to this question is found by surveying the most recent studies into emotions. Jesse Prinz’s Gut Reactions (2004) follows this lead. What Griffiths gleans out of the scientific study of love in that study is that love is something of a pseudo emotion. It is a socially constructed emotion which involves the adoption of social roles ‘that reflect society’s conception of what is appropriate in that situation’ (Griffiths, 1997, p.  139). Under the pretext of being ‘carried away by

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love’, that is, passively suffering from one’s emotions, it, for example, allows one to cast off social ties ‘without questioning the legitimacy of those ties’ (Griffiths, 1997, p. 142). 3. They do, however, say much about reasons, explanatory or justificatory, or as a matter of intelligibility. They speak of love as the bestowal or creation of value (e.g. Singer, 1984), and as a form of valuation (e.g. Kolodny, 2003). They speak of beliefs, desires (e.g. Taylor, 1979) and interests and ends (e.g. Velleman, 1999). I should add that what I am critical of in such discussions is not primarily speaking about love in terms of reasons, values or interests, and so on. What makes me somewhat numb to these discussions, and feeds my experience of them not speaking to me by contrast to other philosophical works that do, is rather the tendency to treat questions about the role of love for the human being as intellectual problems. Considering love’s place among the emotions, in relation to rationality or as a contested constituent of morality, becomes a matter of fitting love into one’s great puzzle, where the other pieces already are in place, or at least are lying on the table. Leaning on Gibran’s poem I would suggest that this is conducting a discussion of love at a place where one has already passed ‘out of love’s threshing-floor’. It is a place where one’s own fear of love, or difficulty to love, does not prevent one from attempting to gain knowledge about love, and construct definitions of it. 4. There is internal criticism of the interventions proposed by positive psychology within psychology. Julia Norem (Azar, 2011), for example, raises the general criticism against positive psychology that being optimistic and positive may not benefit people who can be defined as defensive pessimists. 5. Lars Hertzberg (1994) clearly exposes the problems in delineating nonsensical sentences from those that make sense. 6. This picture of love as a more all-embracing experience is not as new as Fredrickson makes it out to be. It is quite a common picture of love among mystics, a becoming one with God, or the universe. To find these more watered out mystical ideas in Fredrickson’s book, is not as surprising at it may sound, since she alongside science appeals to Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness to teach us how to become more loving. 7. This criticism is explicitly directed at Stanley Cavell and the sense in which Phillips thinks he departs from Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. I will not here take any particular stand on what the best way is to read Wittgenstein. I do this partly because I am uncertain whether

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there is such a best way to be discerned from his writing, partly because many of the differences between his interpreters depend on the specific remarks on which one builds one’s case and partly because I am doubtful whether any general conclusion can be drawn about the significance of these differing perspectives without considering the contribution they make to concrete cases. 8. Cf. also what Gaita describes as a ‘call for seriousness’, which is always to a particular individual, unique and irreplaceable, and it calls her to an individuate responsiveness—to speak out of what she has made, and should continuously be making, of experiences that are her history and that make her what she is. The call is at one and the same time that she speak disinterestedly in the sense that she should try to overcome the many temptations of what Iris Murdoch called the “fat relentless ego”, and that she speak personally, that she speak in or recover or, even for the first time, find the voice that reveals her distinctive take on the world, that reveals, as Kierkegaard puts it, that she has lived her own life and no one else’s. (Gaita, 2011, p. 28)

References Azar, B. (2011). Positive Psychology Advances, with Growing Pains. Monitor on Psychology, 42(4), 34. Bagnoli, C. (2012). The Exploration of Moral Life’. In J. Broackes (Ed.), Iris Murdoch: Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, M., & Hacker, P. (2007a). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience: The Introduction. In M. Bennett et al. (Eds.), Neuroscience and Philosophy. Brain, Mind & Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, M., & Hacker, P. (2007b). The Conceptual Presuppositions of Cognitive Neuroscience: A Reply to Critics. In M.  Bennett et  al. (Eds.), Neuroscience and Philosophy. Brain, Mind & Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Buber, M. (2004 [1958]). I and Thou. London and New York: Continuum. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Churchland, P.  M. (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78, 67–90.

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Churchland, P. S. (1986). Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/ Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Conant, J. (1996). Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors. In D. Z. Phillips (Ed.), The Grammar of Religious Belief. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cook, J.  W. (1999). Morality and Cultural Differences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diamond, C. (2010). Murdoch the Explorer. Philosophical Topics, 38(1), 51–85. Dilman, I. (1998). Language and Reality: Modern Perspectives on Wittgenstein. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. Dilman, I. (1999) Love: Its Forms, Dimensions and Paradoxes. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Love 2.0. How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become. New York: Hudson Street Press. Gaita, R. (1991). Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gaita, R. (1999). A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love & Truth & Justice. London and New York: Routledge. Gaita, R. (2011). After Romulus. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Garrett, B.  J. (2012). Troy Jollimore: Love’s Vision. Philosophy in Review, 32(2), 102–104. Gibran, K. (1923). The Prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Griffiths, P.  E. (1997). What Emotions Really Are. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gustafsson, Y., Kronqvist, C., & Nykänen, H. (2013). Introduction. In Y. Gustafsson et al. (Eds.), Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture: Wittgensteinian Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hertzberg, L. (1994). The Limits of Experience. Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica. Irigaray, L. (2004). Key Writings. London and New York: Continuum. Kierkegaard, S. (1956). Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Kierkegaard, S. (1964). Works of Love. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Kolodny, N. (2003). Love as Valuing a Relationship. The Philosophical Review, 112, 135–189. Kronqvist, C. (2011). The Promise that Love Will Last. Inquiry, 54(6), 650–668. Løgstrup, K.  E. (1997). The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Marion, J.-L. (2008). The Erotic Phenomenon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape. Murdoch, I. (1997). Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (P. J. Conradi, Ed.). New York: Penguin Books. Phillips, D.  Z. (1999). Philosophy’s Cool Place. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Prinz, J. (2004). Gut Reactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhees, R. (1969). Without Answers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Singer, I. (1984). The Nature of Love: Vol. 1 Plato to Luther. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Taylor, G. (1979). Love. In T. Hondrich & M. Burnyeat (Eds.), Philosophy as It Is. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Velleman, J. D. (1999). Love as Moral Emotion. Ethics, 109(2), 338–374. Weil, S. (1977). The Simone Weil Reader (G. E. Panichas, Ed.). New York: David McKay Company Inc. Winch, P. (1972). Ethics and Action. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1980a). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Volume I. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1980b). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Volume II. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1998). Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Wittgenstein, L. (2000). Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition. [CD-ROM]. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

Part III The Second Person and the Hidden Moral Dynamics of Philosophy

9 Philosophy of Mind and/as the Repression of Interpersonal Understanding Joel Backström Modern and contemporary philosophy of mind is thoroughly determined by a subject-object problematic. The basic question is taken to be, in different ways, how the ‘I’ with its ‘subjective point of view’ relates to a world of objects describable in impersonal terms, where these objects include the body and brain in which the subject is somehow supposed to reside, or from which it is supposed, perhaps epiphenomenally, to arise, as well as the bodies which somehow house other subjects—although on this view, the very (or the ‘possible’) existence of ‘other minds’ becomes a ‘problem’ for the subject. This problematic has been with us since Descartes, and although materialism has long since replaced Cartesian substance-dualism as the standard metaphysical view, contemporary materialists accept Descartes’ basic framing of the issue, the radical splitting of our ‘minds’ from our mechanically-materialistically (mis)represented ‘bodies’. They then deny the existence of the other half of the split, the ‘immaterial’ mind—supposedly, we’re all ‘made of mindless robots and nothing else’ (Dennett, 2003, p. 2)—but this metaphysical denial leaves the logic of the situation intact. The ‘body’ and its ‘behaviour’ are still conceived as merely physiJ. Backström (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_9

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cal, that is, as ‘not-mind’, and the big philosophical question remains relating this physical brain/body to apparently ‘first-personal’, ‘subjective’ experience, the very possibility of which now seems profoundly mysterious. The widespread idea that we need a ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) to understand others also presupposes the Cartesian set-up insofar as the ToM is supposed to enable an inference from visible behaviour to its invisible mental causes (invisible like Descartes’ immaterial mind). The aim of this chapter is to expose and discuss the basic confusion that Descartes shares with contemporary materialism, namely, the framing of the issue in subject-object terms. Irrespective of the details of the picture one paints within it, and whether one admits this or not, that frame itself excludes the relationship between human beings. That relationship is inconceivable in subject-object terms but is, as I hope to show, the very centre of human intelligibility and inseparable from our relationship to ourselves. ‘I’ exist only in relation to ‘you’. When this ‘you’ is ignored, the ‘I’ turns into a kind of spectre, reappearing as that fantasised ‘entity’ called ‘the subject’—a notion strictly correlative to that of ‘the object’ that this subject thinks or experiences—whose reality one is inclined alternatively, and fruitlessly, to insist on and to deny, as illustrated by the interminable oscillations, throughout the history of modern philosophy, between various versions of dualism/subjectivism/idealism and monism/ objectivism/materialism.1 The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 1 elaborates on what I mean by the ‘I-you-dimension’ of human experience. Section 2 brings out (some aspects of ) the irredeemable incoherence of the inferentialist picture of understanding others (e.g., ToM-accounts). If one ignores or denies the dimension of unmediated I-you-understanding, one has to assume inferentialism in some form; hence, showing the untenability of inferentialism shows the impossibility of lucidly—actually, on the level of understanding rather than official pronouncement—denying the I-you-­ dimension. Section 3 sketches how our pervasive difficulties of understanding may be explained, given my stress on unmediated interpersonal understanding. I also argue that the idea that ‘the context’ determines the meaning of expressions shares with inferentialism a misguided ­objectification of ‘the expression’, and I explicate the essentially engaged nature of understanding. Generally speaking, apparent failures to under-

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stand others should be seen as forms of repressing one’s own engagement and understanding, rather than as mere absences of understanding. Section 4 elaborates, mainly through a discussion of our relationship to pain and suffering, how ‘engaged’ means morally engaged, that is, how there can be no satisfactory morally neutral account of interpersonal understanding. Section 5 analyses further how lack of understanding and a certain, always ambivalent, split of body from mind and of one mind from another is produced in everyday life through various strategies of repression, and how repression is basically a shared, social ‘project’. The concluding section draws the threads together by indicating how the confused subject-object-perspective in philosophy arises from and mirrors the moral-existential confusion in everyday life created through repression.

1. The Openness Between ‘I’ and ‘You’ The first ‘object’ infants focus on is no object at all, but the human face of the persons who care for them, who address and are addressed by them, and with whom they will later explore the world of objects.2 This relationship between human beings can be conceived as neither ‘objective’ nor ‘subjective’, nor as some combination of both.3 This is strikingly illustrated by the experience of meeting someone’s eyes; no less strikingly philosophers have almost universally overlooked this most basic human experience.4 As Wittgenstein pointed out, the eye that sees isn’t part of its own visual field (1951, 5.633–5.6331), but your gaze isn’t part of my visual field any more than is my own. That is, when our eyes meet, I’m not looking at your eyes, or at you; I might not even notice the colour of your eyes or anything in particular about your appearance. I look into your eyes, but not as one might look into a drawer to see what’s inside; my eyes find no object, they find you. To meet someone’s eyes is to be aware of the other person, to be in contact with her. One might say that here the eyes function not as visual instruments, but rather like organs of touch. Think of the arresting experience of unexpectedly meeting a stranger’s eyes, of how the distance between you instantly vanishes as your eyes meet.

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When our eyes meet, my eyes find you, and at the same time I’m found by you; while I can look at you, observe you, without your noticing, I can look into your eyes only if you look into mine. This experience isn’t, then, one that might, contingently, be shared. Rather, it is the experience of sharing, not this or that, but, one might say, of sharing life with the other, being there with her. In other words, this experience isn’t properly subjective, since I cannot subjectively have it without you also having it, being with me in it. In this sense, it cannot be subsumed in, and so breaks the apparently unbreakable hold of, the standard philosophical idea of ‘experience’, according to which it is something a subject has, by itself, and whether another subject has the same experience (in the sense that both of them saw the grey cat crossing the street, say) must be determined through their reporting on and somehow comparing their subjective experiences—with interminable philosophical debates and existential doubt ensuing about whether two people can ever ‘really’ have the same experience. When our eyes meet, however, we’re in the same experience, we’re in the meeting. As one might say, there’s here nothing for one to do/experience unless the other is doing/experiencing it too. But the meeting of eyes is indeed an experience; it isn’t an objectively determined event any more than it is anything subjective. Our eyes cannot meet without both of us knowing; without our partaking in the experience of our eyes meeting there’s no event there for anyone else to register. The experience of meeting someone’s eyes is, simply, an experience of openness, our openness one to the other. And the point isn’t that meeting someone’s eyes is a strange anomaly, the one experience that’s radically different from all others. On the contrary, it is only a particularly striking illustration of that pervasive and most basic dimension of experience in which we address and are addressed by each other; a dimension constituted through and as this addressing-and-being-addressed. The distinction I illustrated in terms of what the eyes can do (looking at another vs. meeting their eyes) can be formulated in any number of ways in all ‘sensuous’ registers, including the tactile. Hence, the difference between using one’s hand to investigate, perhaps for medical purposes, the form of someone’s skull, and caressing them or being touched by their caress—or that between hearing a noise and hearing the address in someone’s voice, as when they call one’s name.

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Our openness to the other’s touch and address is, one might say, the very life of our life; an object is inanimate insofar as it exists beyond any possible address, and death is the moment when the once living other ceases permanently to be reachable by our address. But if this openness to the other’s address is inescapably part, and indeed the very heart, of being alive, it is also the point around which our difficulties crystallise. The range of reactions that being addressed may occasion—embarrassment, shame, bewilderment and so on—and the felt impossibility, in ‘normal’ circumstances, of looking into another’s eyes, of keeping contact, for more than a few moments, illustrate the existential-emotional charge and the enormous difficulty of the encounter with the other. Our encounters are pervasively deformed by all kinds of wishful and fearful manipulation of self and other, our life lived in the tension between a longing for an open encounter and fear of it, where the fear, too, manifests the very receptivity and openness to the other’s address that one fears. And this means, as I’ll try to bring out, that our understanding of each other and ourselves is, from the start and unavoidably, a morally charged affair where truthfulness is the task and neutrality impossible.5 Philosophers try, but cannot in fact quite manage to ignore this dimension of openness: the ghost of the other returns, just as does the ‘I’, when one tries to exorcise it. Thus, Dennett wants to purge ‘the subject’ from philosophy; ‘A good theory of consciousness should’, he says, ‘make a conscious mind look like an abandoned factory (recall Leibniz’s mill), full of humming machinery and nobody home to supervise it, or enjoy it, or witness it’ (2006, p. 70). But a mere page earlier he spoke, en passant, of how an almost paralysed Parkinson’s patient’s minimal, and therefore particularly striking, response to the jokes his visitors tell him—‘the corners of his mouth turn up in an involuntary smile and [there is] a little crinkling at the edges of the eyes’—‘bring home vividly that there is still somebody at home in there, listening attentively to whatever you are saying’ (2006, p. 68). Officially, however, in theory, we’re told that there’s really ‘nobody home’, so how are we to understand Dennett? It might be said that these are different levels of discourse, different senses of ‘the subject’—Dennett himself says ‘I don’t maintain, of course, that human consciousness doesn’t exist; I maintain that it is not what people often think it is’ (2006, p. 71)—but the point is that the apparent interest and

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attraction, the shock value, of Dennett’s claims hangs on his systematically conflating them. And the important thing is that what stubbornly refuses materialist reductions are not some supposed ‘qualia’ inaccessible to anyone but myself (a muddled notion rightly criticised by Dennett), but rather the striking presence of another human being, to whom I cannot but respond.

 . Understanding Others: The Inconceivability 2 of Inferentialism In the world as imagined by Descartes and his contemporary materialist heirs, the living (human or animal) other is supposedly not directly present or ‘accessible’ to me, or I to them. There is only one subject, and the objects it observes. ‘I’ only perceive ‘material bodies’, and have to ‘infer’ the ‘inner life’, the ‘states of mind’ of others from the behaviour of their bodies conceived, in C. L. Hull’s (1943) phrase, as the ‘colourless’ movement of mere matter. Different theories in psychology and philosophy of mind disagree over whether such inferences need or can ever justifiably be made, and if so, in what exact form. Behaviourists and eliminative materialists apparently deny this need altogether, while proponents of ‘folk psychology’ and ‘Theory of Mind’ think we need ‘mindreading’ or ‘mentalising’ in order to make sense of, explain and predict what would otherwise remain random movements. Again, the details of the various proposals for how this is supposedly done vary, but they all implicitly or explicitly assume—whatever this is really supposed to mean—that ‘the mental states of others… are completely hidden from the senses [and so] can only ever be inferred’ (Leslie, 1987, p. 139), so that, at bottom, ‘[the idea that] there are minds or souls attached to some bodies is simply a hypothesis, introduced to account for certain observed facts’ (MacIver, 1964, p. 308). Human beings are ‘just complex objects in our environment whose behaviour we wish to anticipate but whose causal innards we cannot perceive’ (Heal, 1995, p.  11), understanding them being ‘no ­different, in principle, from… understanding the behaviour of other, more inert, objects’ (Stone & Davies, 1996, pp. 126–7).6

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The problem with this (post-)Cartesian idea of how we ‘read’ others is that there’s no such thing as ‘mere, colourless behaviour’ from which the mental life of ‘other minds’—or, indeed, any kind of life—could or would need to be inferred. That is: if we try to conceive such an inference, we end up not with an intelligible idea but with nonsense. The mythical element in the myth of the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ isn’t just the ghost, but equally the machine, and as Ryle himself notes (1949, pp. 20–5, 309–11), historically it was the machine-myth’s obvious inability to account for human action that gave rise to the myth of the ghost. What we actually perceive in our dealings with each other isn’t ‘colourless’ behaviour, but behaviour in the very different sense of a living human being’s meaningand feeling-laden responses. From behaviour in this latter, full sense, life cannot, but also needn’t, be inferred because it is directly manifested and seen in it, that is, sensed, and in being sensed understood, in various sense-modalities, whether felt in the other’s movement or touch, heard in her words or sighs, or seen in her demeanour or her eyes. But dualism and its materialist progeny are blind to this; they suffer from a fundamental ‘life-blindness’ (Midgley, 2014, p. 143). In abstract terms, the point against the idea of ‘colourless’ behaviour is simple: if one doesn’t perceive the life in the behaviour one also cannot infer it, for what is lifeless remains lifeless—and if one does see the life, one need not and indeed cannot infer anything either.7 Tears, for instance, aren’t just ‘water running from the eyes’, from seeing which I then infer that you are sad. If that—‘water running from the eyes’—is what I see, I might indeed make an inference or conjecture as to the cause: perhaps what made your eyes water is that you’ve been chopping onions or just came in from the heavy wind outside. What I’ll not infer is that you’re sad, because if you were sad you would be crying, which is wholly different from ‘having your eyes water’. To see tears as tears is to see them, not as mere water, but as an expression of sadness—or, say, of anger, happiness, humiliation or despair—and this is seeing the emotion itself, that is, the other person’s state of feeling and understanding (or bewilderment) that is expressed in the tears. But once this is seen, there’s nothing left to infer. In other words, tears don’t relate to sadness as an effect relates to the cause it allows one to infer, even if I might (perfectly correctly) say that you cry because you’re sad. Whereas one can perceive an effect without perceiving

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its cause, if one doesn’t see the emotion in the tears, that is, if one doesn’t see tears but ‘eyes watering’, one will, to repeat, have nothing from which to infer anything emotional at all. Putting the point in the form of a reductio: If one needed inferences, there’d be no room for inferences. And note that since the supposed ‘leap from observable behaviour to unobservable mental states’ is strictly inconceivable, it is no use saying that the leap is ‘so common and routine that people often seem unaware that they are making a leap’ (Epley & Waytz, 2009, p. 499). If the supposed move simply cannot be made (or even tried), then a fortiori it cannot be made routinely or extremely rapidly through unconscious brain processes, or again by evolution working very slowly over millions of years. This simple point should be obvious, but a purportedly ‘scientific’ prejudice makes it seem unacceptable. The objection goes something like this: ‘You’re saying that we simply understand others’ expressions; that their meaning is just there. But that’s mysticism, and we want science; explanations of how complex phenomena/perceptions are built out of simpler elements’. I have nothing against explanations; however, my point is that nothing will ever be explained if one tries to construct meaning out of ‘colourless behaviour’. That’s like trying to find the news in a newspaper by chemical analyses of the ink and paper, and can only produce endless mystifications and pseudo-explanations.8 The absurdity of the standard (post-)Cartesian picture can be seen from another side when one considers that the ‘inner mental state’ one would, on that picture, postulate or infer to make sense of the other’s otherwise supposedly meaningless ‘outer behaviour’, can itself only be conceived in terms of the unmediated understanding of the other that the picture denies. Thus, if I try to imagine the sad person (or ‘mind’?) whose presence ‘inside that head’ I’m supposedly led to infer from seeing those watering eyes, how am I to imagine her (‘it’)? The only way I could even seem to do this is by imagining the ‘person inside’ being sad in the ordinary sense, that is, expressing her sadness in various ways, and so the unmediatedly understood meaning I banished, because of theoretical commitments, ‘without’, returns, surreptitiously, ‘within’. To be sure, I might imagine someone having sad thoughts. But what makes a thought sad? Merely saying to oneself ‘I’m sad’ or ‘That scene made me sad’ doesn’t, as such, necessarily express a sad thought. It all depends on how,

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in what tone or spirit, these words are spoken. If they’re spoken absent-­ mindedly, bitterly, ironically or angrily, they don’t express sadness (a sad thought), but rather reveal one’s bitterness or anger, or they may leave it unclear what one’s words express. Similarly, if various pictures—say pictures involving your now absent friend—are in your mind, which emotions and meanings these pictures relate to or express depends on the spirit in which you engage with them. In short, it won’t do to pretend that ‘colourless’ words and other behaviour could get their meaning and emotional significance from some ‘inner state’ essentially unconnected to the responses of a human being manifested in glance, demeanour, tone of voice and so on, for, to repeat, if one pretends not to see the meaning and expressiveness of ‘outer’ behaviour, one will in effect have to smuggle it back into the ‘inner’ mental states supposedly inferred from it. This is the (or one) upshot of Wittgenstein’s discussion (1958, § 243 ff.) of the fantasy of a private language, a ‘language’ of inner experience that would have no connection to one’s life with others, at least no connections that would be understandable to others, even in principle. Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that we know what a ‘private language’—in contemporary jargon: ‘qualia’—would be, only there cannot (logically) be one, but that nothing has really been imagined, conceived under that title.9 Correlatively, ‘zombies’, beings indistinguishable from us except for lacking conscious experience, seem conceivable to contemporary philosophers of mind only because what they conceive under the title ‘conscious experience’ (or ‘qualia’) is really nothing, so everything indeed seems to stay the same even if one removes ‘that’. But as I have tried to show, what one conceives of as the ‘everything else’ that would be left after one has ‘removed’ this nothing—that is, all of human behaviour, only ‘without inner experience’, as mere ‘colourless behaviour’—is also, in fact, a nothing. When one attempts to split ‘inner’ from ‘outer’ in this way, one doesn’t get a split reality, one gets nothing really conceivable at all. Instead of hopelessly trying to imagine body and soul as essentially distinct, we might say, with Wittgenstein, that ‘if one sees the behaviour of a living being, one sees its soul’ (1958, § 357, transl. modified); or, again, ‘if the play of expression develops, then indeed [but not before] I can say that a soul, something inner, is developing’ (1982, § 947). It is often possible—in some cases, for some time, with some people—to hide

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one’s thoughts and feelings by controlling or feigning expressions, but the very fact that this is possible only through special effort, that one has to stifle the expressions (e.g., the sob, the smile or the interjection) that ‘want out’, or set oneself to produce the semblance of a genuine expression (e.g., forcing a smile), reinforces the point that we are fundamentally and ineluctably expressive beings, beings who are open to, stand in relationship to each other. This isn’t ‘logical behaviourism’, a would-be ‘position’ that presupposes the inconceivable split into ‘mere behaviour’ and ‘something else’ in its claim that the former is the criterion of ascribing the latter (e.g., a pain) to a person, or that ascribing the latter amounts to nothing more than ascribing the former. Feelings or thoughts cannot be identified with, or reduced to, particular behavioural manifestations; we express them in indefinitely many different ways. If I can express a thought in only one way, stubbornly repeating the same formulation, unable to put it differently to explain and elaborate on what I mean, it becomes unclear whether I really express a thought at all, as opposed to repeating a formula I don’t understand. Similarly, my sadness or happiness will come to expression not just in tears or laughs, but in demeanour, behaviour and so on, suffusing everything I do. Note that, while my discussion shows the incoherence of radical social constructivist ideas of ‘emotional expressions’ as merely culturally developed interpretations or labels put on behaviour which would be ‘colourless’ in itself, it doesn’t therefore support competing theories of a fixed number of basic emotions with characteristic facial expressions hardwired by evolution.10 I take no position on any empirical hypothesis. My point concerns the basic character of interpersonal understanding; an understanding that is presupposed in everything we do, including in our scientific work and empirical hypothesising, hence cannot itself be tested empirically. Note, further, that so-called simulation-accounts of how we understand others (e.g., Goldman, 2006) share the same untenable starting point as other Theory of Mind-proposals, for they accept that we first register a piece of behaviour that in itself means nothing to us, and that becomes endowed with meaning only as we somehow (perhaps ­unconsciously) ‘simulate’ being in the same situation as the other, and thus find out what that would be (is) like. But unless we already, directly, understood the other, we wouldn’t know which ‘situation’ she was in, or

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that she was in any situation at all, or even that there was someone else there in the first place.

 . Misunderstandings, the Idea of ‘Context’ 3 and the Engaged Nature of Understanding It might seem that what I’ve said about the immediacy of interpersonal understanding is contradicted by the fact that we often read—project— into the expressions of others meanings that weren’t actually expressed by the other person, just as we often miss or ignore and repress awareness of what was expressed. However, such cases don’t contradict what I have said, because they cannot (nor can cases of simple mistakes or errors in perception) be understood as a matter of one’s seeing a piece of ‘colourless behaviour’ on which one then imposes the wrong interpretation. When, say, a distrustful person sees hostility in what is actually a friendly gesture, hears the other person as laughing at her rather than with her and so on, there’s no neutrally describable perception of the other’s gesture that she would share with someone who isn’t distrustful and so sees or hears the friendliness that’s actually being expressed, with the difference only arising through different interpretations being put on what is perceived. Rather, her own distrust colours and distorts her experience of the other from the very start. The possibility of different, more or less false or truthful, perceptions of the meaning of the same expression doesn’t vindicate the unworkable idea of ‘colourless behaviour’, then. Rather, it alerts us to how understanding the expressions of another is a process in which one is oneself inescapably engaged, and where what one ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ see—that is, what one can allow oneself to see—depends on the character of one’s engagement with the other person, on how far fearful and wishful fantasies distort it and so on. The unmediated, basic understanding between people obviously doesn’t prevent pervasive misunderstandings and confusions in our ­relations. The question is how these constant breakdowns and blockages of communication are to be understood, and the crucial point I’ll try to elucidate is that they’re basically symptoms of moral-existential difficul-

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ties, of our fearfully refusing, that is, repressing, our understanding of each other and of ourselves. We don’t allow ourselves to become clearly aware of what’s going on between us; we block our understanding before it can unfold into full awareness and articulation. This isn’t to deny that there are also genuine, innocent, misunderstandings between people where no refusal to understand is involved (e.g., one may see the other’s anger but have misunderstood what she is angry about). But they aren’t the main thing, and they have the destructive consequences for our relationships that they sometimes have because they’re intertwined with refusal and repression—where the point is that refusal of understanding is destructive because it means refusing open relations with the other person who one refuses to understand. For example, in one’s proneness to suspicion and resentment one instinctively takes even innocent misunderstandings as proof of the other’s ill will or indifference, and so one thinks, say, that the other wasn’t listening when she simply couldn’t hear what one said. It may seem strange that I haven’t mentioned the importance of context—a favourite philosopher’s term—in understanding human expressions. Indeed, in speaking of an unmediated understanding of others I may seem to be denying it, and such obvious facts as, for example, how differently someone’s smile may strike one when one realises what they’re smiling at, which might be a happily playing child, or in another case, a suffering enemy (the example is from Wittgenstein, 1958, § 539). But I don’t deny such facts; the question is only how they’re to be understood. It seems to me that the need to insist on giving our expressions a ‘context’ arises only when one has already, without realising it, reified, one might say fetishised, ‘the expression’—as though what was at stake were understanding the meaning of, say, ‘the smile’ or ‘the tears’, conceived as some kind of quasi-objects, whereas what one understands (or fails or refuses to understand, if there is trouble) is really the person smiling or crying. And once one has, in one’s theorising, turned the expression into a strange ‘something in itself ’ by isolating it from one’s understanding of the person who expressed something within a relationship, this abstraction indeed cannot be understood ‘in itself ’, and so one appears to formulate a crucial insight by insisting on the need for ‘context’ around this reified expressive ‘object’ to ‘determine’ its meaning. For example, if one defines

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‘the smile itself ’ as what is visible in a photograph taken of just the smiler’s mouth, one may well be unable to tell the smile of the person smiling down at the child from that of the person looking down at the suffering enemy. But such artificial conceptions of ‘looking/being the same’ are irrelevant for interpersonal understanding, which is precisely a concerned understanding of what goes on between people, of how we relate to each other. We smile at each other, and it is here, within our relationships, that we understand the differences between different smiles, the friendliness and the destructiveness they can manifest. And here, the cruel smile at a suffering enemy is as different as can be from the heartfelt smile at a playing child. Now, in reifying ‘the expression’ in the way described, depriving it of its life and meaning by tearing it out of the living, meaningful interpersonal relationship where it belongs, one has actually rendered the idea of the ‘context’ lifeless and meaningless, too, and one will be unable to ‘generate’ meaning and understanding by putting ‘expression’ and ‘context’ together—just as one doesn’t get a living being, or anything intelligible at all, by putting a Cartesian ‘body’ and ‘mind’ together. How, for example, is one to describe the ‘context’ that is supposedly added to make the smile intelligible? The mere fact that the person is smiling at a happily playing child doesn’t yet determine what the smile expresses, for one may smile at children in myriad problematic ways, too: sentimentally or condescendingly, say, or indeed cruelly. I’m not saying that one can see precisely what is expressed in a smile by just intently looking into the smiler’s face, that it is ‘all there’. On the contrary, I’m criticising such reifications of ‘the expression’. I’m saying that the meaning of the smile cannot be found by looking somewhere else, either, into a ‘context’ supposedly distinguished from ‘the smile itself ’. Rather, one understands the meaning of the smile insofar as one understands the smiler in her relationship to the one she is smiling at, and to other people. And this means, crucially, that one must understand oneself aright in one’s relation to these people, for insofar as one’s attitude to them is deformed by self-deceptive and destructive attitudes such as sentimentality or cruelty, this deforms one’s understanding, too. Thus, if one is prone to sentimentality, one sees even what is actually a heartfelt, loving smile in a sentimental light; in a light, that is, which presents love and human beings in an idealised, ‘prettified’, and at the

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same time unconsciously cynical way, as in ‘Oh, children are so cute; how beautiful and sad that paradise can’t last and they’ll soon be grown up…’ (i.e., that they’ll soon be foul adults like oneself ). What understanding another may in practice involve cannot be determined in advance; it is as open-ended as our relationships. If you enter the room with a smile on your face, I might ask you why you’re smiling. Your smile tells me you’re happy, but not why you are, and your answer (‘I just heard John is visiting’) might be said to provide ‘the context’, or ‘the cause’, of your smile. But it was only because I saw your happiness, that is, because I already understood you, that I felt a need to ask you for any ‘context’, any explanation at all. And how or whether I understand your answer depends on my understanding of you; for example, given my sense of your relationship to John, I may wonder how you could be happy that he is coming, or there may be something in your voice that makes me feel you’re not being sincere and so on. There are endless variations. But whatever they are, rather than saying that ‘the context’ gives meaning to our expressions, one might say that our way of relating to each other, manifest in what we do and express, is ‘the context’. But why would one talk of ‘context’ here at all? I said that one cannot determine in advance what understanding another may involve. But in an important sense this cannot be determined at all, insofar as one cannot really say what understanding another person involves, or consists in—and not because understanding is somehow vague or uncertain, but because it isn’t built up of discreet factors that could be enumerated and described. What I tried to show in the previous section wasn’t merely that some particular version of inferentialism fails, but that understanding others isn’t basically (but at most in special and marginal cases) a matter of making inferences or drawing conclusions from discreet pieces of evidence of any kind. How do I know that you’re sad? From seeing your tears? Well, one might say that, but then how do I know that those are tears and not just runny eyes, and furthermore tears of sadness, and not of joy, for example (for people do cry from joy, too)? There’s nothing one can point to as ‘the things from which I conclude that you’re sad’. That is, whatever one points to, one can again ask why I see that as showing your sadness. Whatever may be proposed as a certain, independently ascertainable ‘sign’ of sadness is

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bound to have exceptions in both directions—the ‘sign’ may be there, but no sadness, and there may be sadness, but no ‘sign’—and furthermore, even if there were a sign that we found in fact accompanied all and only sadness, how would we know that these were all cases of sadness? Obviously, the sign didn’t tell us that, for, ex hypothesi, the presence of the sign is something that we discovered, contingently, to accompany the sadness. Only our understanding of sadness, that is, of people, others and ourselves, in our sadness and joy, would allow us to say that these were indeed cases of sadness, and this understanding itself isn’t based on detecting any sign, but manifests our unmediated interpersonal understanding, which doesn’t really consist in anything (enumerable signs, elements, etc.).11 It is crucial to see that the root confusion I’m trying to diagnose in this chapter isn’t a mistaken conception of how we ‘gain knowledge’ of the other’s feelings, thoughts and intentions, where the mistake would be to think we infer them from outer signs rather than immediately understanding people’s meaningful expressions. The real confusion is the notion that our relations to others are, most basically, epistemic, that is, relations in which a ‘subject’ gains knowledge of, or believes or predicts something about, an ‘object’ (where that ‘object’ may be conceived of, say, as ‘the expression’ or as ‘the mental states’ of another person). While I have spoken freely about understanding, in this context ‘understanding’ isn’t basically an epistemic notion, but rather itself an aspect of our caring for each other. When I speak of our openness to each other, I mean this engaged, caring-understanding—which, importantly, is typically more or less troubled and repressively deformed. It is this caring that gives us anything to understand in the first place. It isn’t that we notice an expression on someone’s face, and then start caring. Rather, we notice particular expressions because we always-already and inescapably care for, and in this caring understand, each other. Perceiving a heartfelt smile, for example, doesn’t mean merely registering, knowing, that the other person smiled; it means, most basically, smiling back—not because one has learned to do so in response to facial contortions of a particular configuration, but because the other’s smile warms one, moves one to smile in response. The response is spontaneous, but not blind or automatic; it is a matter of opening oneself, opening one’s own heart, in response to the welcoming openness the other manifests. This being-open-and-moved-to-respond

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isn’t something that might follow as an independent reaction on the perception of the other’s smile, but is itself the basic form of perceiving heartfelt smiles, that is, of understanding the person who smiles and oneself in relation to them. In other words, the heartfelt ‘quality’ of a smile— what distinguishes a heartfelt smile from a mere grin, and from the myriad forms of ambivalent, more or less manufactured, strained and/or hostile smiles—isn’t really a quality of the smile considered as a quasi-­ object, but something that is there, when it is, between the smiler and the one she is smilingly turning to, just as the meeting of eyes is something that happens between two people, a mode of their being in contact, in relation. This is, of course, also true of all the smiles that aren’t heartfelt but polite, sardonic, disdainful, ironic, melancholy and so on. They, too express the smiler’s way of relating to the person(s) he is smiling at. The smile is itself a manifestation of his way of relating to them, and so the irony or politeness, say, isn’t some mere ‘quality’ of the smile itself, and to perceive irony or politeness basically means responding to the person who is ironic or polite, in one of any number of ways in which one may respond to such attitudes; for example, the other’s politeness may provoke an impulse to be rude, or one may feel thankful that the other had the courtesy to treat one politely, even after one was rude to them. What distinguishes the heartfelt smile from the other kinds of smile is that it manifests the smiler’s wholehearted opening of himself to the one he smiles at, a longing to abolish every reserve and distance between self and other, whereas in the other cases, there is, consciously or unconsciously, an element of distancing involved, of taking up a stance vis-à-vis the other (‘I’m over here, and take this attitude towards you, over there’). Such distancing manifests our fearful attempts to defend against our openness to each other, against our own caring, against the way it brings us into contact with the other and with ourselves through the responses the other awakens in us, which we pervasively feel are ‘too much to take’. Just think of the often desperate efforts people put into preventing themselves from crying, or, if they couldn’t stop a sob from breaking out, into regaining their composure as soon as possible, steeling themselves against their own emotional response to another.12

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As I will presently try to explain more fully, this whole dynamics between human beings, with its understanding and openness, and its pervasive distancing and urges to close oneself to and not understand the other, is essentially a moral matter, that is, it cannot be understood in morally neutral terms. Or as I put it above: interpersonal understanding is essentially engaged. The central task of this chapter is to make clearer what this means, and how the engaged nature of understanding renders our philosophical accounts of it morally charged, too. As philosophers or scientists we don’t speak from some morally neutral position ‘outside’ of the life we wish to account for; rather, we speak from within our life with others, we address them, even if we pretend otherwise, and our morally determined, wishful and fearful difficulties with opening ourselves to and understanding others (our evasiveness, suspiciousness, eagerness to please, etc.) will form and deform our supposedly ‘disinterested’ accounts of life, too. As I noted above, there is a diverse literature that is critical, as I am, of the inferential picture of interpersonal understanding and, more generally, of the neglect of the ‘intersubjective’ or ‘second person’ perspective in standard philosophy of mind.13 What I find unsatisfactory in most of this literature is precisely that, notwithstanding valuable individual points and arguments, where one could find close parallels with many points raised above, the critiques tend to overlook, or at best downplay the importance of the moral dimension of interpersonal understanding. To put it more strongly and precisely, they treat it (insofar as they take note of it) as merely a ‘dimension’ of the human reality studied, whereas my central point is that interpersonal understanding is essentially moral understanding, and that this means that philosophical accounts of it, too, are drawn into its morally charged field.

 . Compassionate Torments: The Relation 4 to the Other and the Moral Life of the Soul Our understanding of each other is morally charged from the very start precisely insofar as it is indeed, or exists within, a relationship of caring between people, between ‘I’ and ‘you’. Between ‘subject’ and ‘object’,

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there is no moral relation; between ‘I’ and ‘you’, the whole relation is, and cannot but be, morally determined. We don’t have an independent sense of what ‘moral’ means that we could then subsume the I-you-relation under; rather, it is our being in the I-you-relation, with the experiences of love, of caring, of hurt and betrayal and bad conscience that this includes, that opens up morality to us, that gives the concept ‘moral’ any meaning at all (cf. Backström, 2007, 2017; Nykänen, 2002). That the I-you-relation is a moral relation means, among other things, that the meaning or ‘effects’ of what is done within it, of how one behaves towards the other, cannot be limited to only this or that aspect of the relationship. Thus, if someone approaches me with an open, heartfelt smile, and I smile back in the same way, I cannot immediately proceed to mistreat them, whereas it is quite possible to smile politely (or regretfully, sardonically, devilishly, etc.) while stabbing someone in the back. This, obviously, doesn’t mean that sardonic smiles or stabs in the back aren’t morally determined, but rather that the difference between the cases is a moral difference, and that this difference is a matter of one’s whole way of relating to the other. The point about the heartfelt smile is that it is an expression of a wholehearted opening-of-oneself-to-the-other, which makes the thought of mistreating them impossible, because opening up in this way means that one’s resentments, envy, vengefulness, callous egocentricity and so on—all the ways in which one closes oneself up in oneself and hardens oneself against the other; all the motives out of which terrible deeds are done—melt away. This doesn’t mean that opening or closing oneself is a once-and-for-all, on/off affair. But there’s a tension, a conflict, between a longing to open up and a fearfully felt wish to close oneself to the other. Thus, insofar as one is determined to close oneself, keeping the determination involves refusing to see and respond to the other’s smiles or other expressions as heartfelt, and instead misperceiving them—in a way that is neither deliberate in a conscious way nor independent of one’s determination—as ingratiating, as pathetic naivety and so on. One is determined to close one’s heart to the other, to harden it against her, and this means hardening oneself against one’s own heart, refusing to feel the openness of the other that one perceives in one’s own heart. One represses one’s own heartfelt response, and because repression doesn’t delete understanding

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and feeling but rather deforms them and makes them superficially unrecognisable, one doesn’t simply feel nothing as one closes oneself to the other, but rather feels hard or numb, or feels a murderous rage, for example. The sense in which interpersonal understanding is an inescapably moral matter can be further elucidated by considering our relation to pain—that crypto-Cartesian philosophers’ favourite, because it can seem both indisputably real and essentially private (‘I cannot doubt my pain, and it’s mine; I suffer it, no-one else’). Reflection on our actual responses to our own pain and that of others quickly reveals the absurdity of this idea of essential privacy. Thus, a child’s primitive response to pain is crying and looking to us for help and comfort, and the child’s pain is no more doubtful—indeed, it may in an obvious sense be felt to be more real, attending to it more urgent—than one’s own. As underlined above, in seeing you wince with pain I don’t register a neutral movement; I see you wince. And as we also saw, this perception isn’t only unmediated (non-inferential), but moves me, for example, I may wince myself in response to your pain (‘Ouch, that hurt!’). That is, I don’t first see your pain, with the question of how, or whether, it concerns me raised, if at all, only after the perception. Rather, my very perception of you in pain is itself a mode of being concerned for you, affected by what befalls you; your pain pains me (in compassion), just as your sadness saddens me and your gladness makes me glad. Perceiving another’s expressions means responding to them; to perceive is to be in relationship with the other. It might seem easy enough to imagine someone perceiving another’s pain without being in any way moved to compassion. But what are we actually imagining here? If there really were no essential connexion between seeing another’s pain and responding compassionately, we would be able to imagine someone seeing that another is in terrible pain, being alive to the terror of their predicament—for that’s what perceiving pain as pain, perceiving its painfulness, means—and yet remaining completely indifferent to it. But there’s nothing we can coherently imagine here, for nothing would show that the one who supposedly remains indifferent to the pain they perceive really perceives the pain. Even if they know that giving the other a pill calms them, or that pricking them makes them scream, that still shows no perception of pain as pain, for we are, ex hypothesi, imagining that these actions (administering pill or prick) are under-

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taken in a spirit of complete indifference—for purely instrumental reasons, or perhaps with the kind of curiosity one might display in finding out how a machine works. Insofar as someone seemed wholly to lack compassion, then, they would also seem unable to perceive pain (its painfulness), and although their lack of understanding might lead them to actions that caused others great suffering, they would be incapable of callousness or cruelty. Precisely the possibility of morally destructive responses which, superficially, appears to demand distinguishing the mere understanding of what others feel (‘empathy’) from one’s morally significant response to it—say, compassionate (‘sympathy’) or cruel—actually reveals the untenability of this distinction.14 That perceiving pain as pain is inextricable from compassion obviously doesn’t mean that we always act compassionately towards others. But where a compassionate response in action is lacking this isn’t because there is simply a lack of compassionate understanding of the other; rather, this understanding, this being-moved-by-­ the-other’s-suffering, has been inhibited, either consciously suppressed or denied and repressed, derailed and perverted in various ways, due to the presence of other motivations and considerations which conflict with the compassion. These conflicting motives won’t only inhibit compassionate action but will also deform one’s feeling-response to the other, so that instead of simply feeling compassion, one feels, say, the malicious satisfaction of cruelty, Schadenfreude, disgust, or its more distanced and respectable cousin contempt; or perhaps one feels overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the other’s suffering and so retreats from them, leaving them to their suffering to protect oneself. There are countless variations on the theme of perverted compassion, including apparently ‘positive’ responses like pity, that privatisation of compassion where, instead of opening myself to you and understanding you and myself in our relatedness, I reduce my response to you to private ‘sentiment’ and you to a mere ‘suffering being’, the mere ‘object’ of my pity. But the important point is that none of these responses are simply alternatives to compassion, as though one would have them instead of compassion. Rather, they are perversions of one’s compassion; the compassion isn’t simply absent in them, but present in repressed form. That is, cruelty and other destructive responses aren’t responses to the other’s pain directly,

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but to that pain as revealed by compassion. In cruelty, my very wish to hurt you shows how intimately your suffering affects and concerns me; if it didn’t, if I didn’t compassionately care about you, I wouldn’t care to hurt you. In other words, there’s an asymmetry between openness to the other— of which compassion is one face or mode; as it were the colouring it receives from the shadow cast on it by the other’s suffering—and closing oneself to them in cruelty, indifference and so on. The latter are destructive/repressive responses to the former, and their destructiveness consists in the fact that one isn’t just destroying some external object—there’s in this sense nothing destructive about, say, demolishing a wall, just as such, because here we indeed simply have a person handling an object—but rather one is trying, hopelessly, to destroy the very connection and openness between oneself and the other. In one’s destructiveness, one turns viciously on oneself as much as on the other. This can appear in various, and on the face of it very different, modes: one can destroy in a murderous frenzy, in a spirit of cold calculation or sentimental pity and so on. In these and countless other ways, one represses and deforms one’s own inevitably felt sense of what one is doing to the other, of what transpires between oneself and them. Reasoning supposed to justify one’s behaviour often plays an important role in creating an appearance that one isn’t callously closing oneself to the other—which on one level one cannot help feeling and knowing— but is doing something natural and unproblematic, or good or necessary. But the reasoning, too, takes on an emotional aspect when it is introduced into moral-existential contexts, that is, into contexts where interpersonal relations are at stake. Thus the spirit of cold calculation is indeed a spirit, a mood, a mode of emotionality; hence its coldness, its callousness. The inescapability of the openness, the responsive moral concern and understanding between us shows, for example, in facts like this, that when people assume a calculative stance to others, their stance is indeed cold. Calculating isn’t cold in itself; there’s nothing cold about, say, a carpenter making calculations when making a table. What is cold, what chills, is that someone should try to repress their heartfelt understanding of themselves and the other through adopting towards them an attitude modelled on that to objects in the world.

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The coldness shows—is one of countless illustrations of—the way in which it both is, and more fundamentally is not possible to actually model the I-you-relationship on the subject-object-relationship. And it also shows, to put the same point differently, the way in which the very life of our souls, our whole psychology, is a moral affair, is an expression of the way we’re related to each other. It isn’t just that one may judge our psychological responses as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ from an external moral perspective, in the light of some norms or ideals, but that what we respond to and what we feel is itself morally determined through-and-through; often in the form of these responses in themselves being ways of repressing, that is, falsifying and perverting, their own moral significance, which is felt only ‘unconsciously’, in the way compassion is felt in cruelty, say. Morality is, most basically, a matter of our heartfelt responses—ineliminable but repressible—to others. These responses aren’t based on norms or principles. On the contrary, the latter borrow whatever moral meaning they may have, for good or ill, from being variously related to the heartfelt interpersonal understanding which may also be called ‘conscience’.15

 . The Fear of Openness: From Polite 5 Distancing to Brutal Repression We are inescapably open to each other’s touch and address; if we weren’t, we wouldn’t understand each other, or ourselves, at all. My critical discussions of inferentialism, contextualism and the idea of a neutral perception of pain were all meant to show this: how, if one denies or ignores the openness, one can make no sense of our understanding each other. The attempt to imagine mind split off from body and one mind from others, or to imagine them connected only or primarily in an epistemic way, through a relationship of neutral ‘knowing’, leads to paradox and confusion. However, in a certain sense—always ambivalent and finally only apparent—we indeed split mind and body apart because and insofar as we have difficulties in relating to each other openly, that is, because we fear abiding in and welcoming the other in the openness that in another sense we cannot abolish. Succumbing to this fear we try, in ambivalent

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attempts that never finally succeed but can be endlessly persisted in, to close ourselves to and split ourselves apart from the other, which also means creating a split in oneself by hardening one’s heart, that is: hardening oneself against one’s heart. And as I said, there is a sense in which, in closing oneself to the other, one also splits ‘body’ from ‘soul’, ‘inner’ from ‘outer’. Thus, if one feels that someone is closing himself, one might think ‘This is the face he shows the world, inwardly he has another one’, but as Wittgenstein observes, ‘this does not mean that when his expression is genuine he has two the same’ (1958, § 606). That is, if someone addresses me openly and I respond in the same way, I won’t feel that his ‘outer behaviour’ is an accurate representation of his ‘inner state’, but rather there’s no place for the very distinctions inner/outer, being/appearance; I simply respond to him. The distinction, the split, enters with the closing, with distrust. However, if the other’s way of relating to me strikes me as suspicious and I get a sense that he is hiding something from me, then even if his ‘inner’ is now hidden from me, his attitude to me is revealed in his behaviour no less than another person’s openness is revealed in their open smile. I know that he is hiding something, even if I don’t know what it is. When one closes oneself to another, this closing will itself be expressed, revealed, in one’s demeanour, and in this sense one’s mind (one’s inner life) isn’t really split from one’s body (one’s behaviour) here, any more than when one is open. Distrust and dissimulation aren’t exceptional occurrences, contrasting with a supposedly ‘normal’ trust and openness, but pervasive features of what is regarded as normal, everyday living—although it is part of this very normality not to present things (quite) in this way. ‘Normal’ distrust appears in the form of pervasive anxieties over how others will respond to one, how one will be received, manifesting and leading to a fear of any wholly open, unguarded address, even in our most intimate and so-called personal relationships. The fear of openness takes different surface forms, for example, one might fear that one’s interest in the other will be experienced as intruding, that one’s longing for closeness will be felt as embarrassing or disgusting, or again that the other will reveal something in oneself that one doesn’t want anyone to see, or to have to face oneself. Whatever the case, one tries to adjust one’s expressions in order to manage the impression one makes. Thus, one tries to calm, encourage or flat-

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ter as seems demanded by the situation—that is, by one’s own agenda for the encounter, usually a rather inchoate one, more instinctively fantasised and felt than explicitly formulated. In plain terms, one tries to manipulate the other by modifying what has now become one’s self-presentation, as opposed to one’s simple self-expression to the other. One standard form of avoiding open, direct engagement is to keep things on a polite level, which means choreographing our encounters in such a way as to avoid raising the question of what one’s true feelings and thoughts are; one keeps on the social surface, deliberately leaving the depths of the soul untouched—and there are depths of light, not only of darkness. That is, one substitutes the management of appearances for reality. In uttering ‘How are you?’ you’re not typically asking a genuine question, and in replying ‘Fine’, I’m typically neither masking how bad I feel nor expressing how fine I feel, although we use a form of words whose primary use is to ask about and express real feeling; ‘primary’ not in the sense of more prevalent, but in the sense that polite conversation ambivalently plays at being real. If it is obvious from your tone that you’re not in the least interested in how I feel, your ‘How are you?’ isn’t polite, but rude or mechanical. In our conversations there’s a pervasive play and tension between polite performance and a longing for real, open contact—which, however, is also feared. The function of politeness is precisely to manage this fear in a discreet way, without making its character of fear apparent; conversation becomes a kind of balancing act in which one tries to be ‘natural’ and affable, so that one’s cautious reserve doesn’t become too conspicuous while, at the same time, this reserve, politely called respect for the other, should be clear enough that both parties can relax, feeling secure in their sense that the other won’t challenge them by ‘too’ direct an address. The fear of openness isn’t only a fear of the other knowing what one really thinks and feels, but a fear of finding out and acknowledging this for oneself. One’s ‘inner’ experience and one’s attitude towards the other are inextricably intertwined. Here’s a banal example: you start expressing your delight at a film you saw, but sensing that the other thought the film bad, you instinctively retract, fall silent or try to explain your delight away as a misunderstanding and so on. This isn’t typically mere conceal-

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ment of something you yourself are clearly aware of, because in fact your own sense of your reaction, your articulation and development of it— and in this sense the very reaction itself—is something you gain only in the course of expressing it, giving expression to your delight, articulating and exploring it in a process which might also, we should note, end in your modifying or even eventually rejecting your own first reaction. All this you cut short, however, because you sense or fear that the other won’t appreciate it, and so not only they but you yourself are robbed of the opportunity to find out what you really thought about the film. On a less banal level, this same kind of self-censoring self-obfuscation in the interest of preventing truthful self-revelation turns marriages and other intimate relationships into terrifyingly painful comedies of error, where neither party knows who they or the other are—and, of course, even expressing one’s views about a film seems fearful, ‘impossible’, only insofar as it is connected to moral-existential-emotional anxieties, that is, to things far from banal. The film-example illustrates how, in trying to hide oneself from others one succeeds only in losing oneself, while in one’s very hiding-operations one’s fearfully awkward self stands painfully revealed—to those who have eyes to see. But we often close our eyes. If this weren’t so, there would be no self-hiding games, no comedies of error, for in one’s selfobfuscation one needs collaborators; people who accept one’s self-effacement and falsifying self-presentations, who don’t ‘notice’ that there’s anything funny going on. And one generally finds them, because others are as anxious about openness as oneself. Thus, mutual pacts of assistance-in-repression are constantly formed; ‘understandings’ not to understand, agreements to accept appearance for reality, censored utterances and fake gestures for genuine expressions—agreements which are by definition unspoken and whose existence will always be denied. Politeness is pervasively used for the ends of such collective repression; the agreement of various powerful groups to find their disdainful and brutal treatment of people from socially weaker groups quite ‘natural’ is a darker aspect of the same dynamics. Thus, a rich man can convince himself that his mistreated servant shows genuine gratitude when he for once treats her a little less brutally than he would have a ‘right’ to, and

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that what he himself feels and expresses is genuine sympathy—even if her anger and contempt for him, and his conceit and lack of wholehearted concern for her are obvious for anyone with eyes to see. But the rich man and his rich friends have agreed to close their eyes to this kind of thing; they help each other uphold a mendacious story about what goes on between them and their servants, and the centrepiece of this collective repression is a falsifying, comforting ‘management’ of the feelingresponses evoked in them by their encounters with servants; they harden themselves against and malign certain responses, while sentimentally indulging and magnifying others. It isn’t that they simply lack any understanding of what goes on between them and their servants, for the openness between us is impossible to simply erase; rather, they systematically pervert and misrepresent their own sense of what goes on in their relationships.16 In the case of rich and poor, there are obvious material incentives for the rich to ‘fail to see’ the situation as it is. But opening oneself to another is fearful in itself, even where one stands to lose no money from it—is it not? When you try to close yourself to someone, you may often imagine that what you most fear is being ridiculed and not taken seriously by them. But isn’t being taken seriously, having someone turn to you who really wants to know you, know what you think and feel, actually an even more daunting experience? After all, the only way in which your words and actions gain importance is by being addressed to someone who cares about you, and so about what you say and do, and who will, therefore, respond to you truthfully rather than politely or disdainfully passing it over, in turn forcing a response from you. That is, you’ll feel ‘forced’ to respond only insofar as responding frightens you; insofar as you welcome the other’s address, you will experience your response as being called forth and enabled by it. The central point is that acting, speaking and listening truthfully aren’t isolable acts that lead only to a particular, foreseeable effect, but rather truthfulness, wholehearted openness, sets a whole new dynamics in motion: when someone tells the truth in this eminent sense she is, as Adrienne Rich says, ‘creating the possibility of more truth around her’ (1979, p. 191). This possibility is precisely what we pervasively fear and try to obstruct.17

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6. Lived Confusion, Philosophical Mystification The self-induced blindness of repression isn’t a necessary feature of human relationships. It marks them only insofar as there is—as there pervasively, but not necessarily or always is—destructiveness and fearful distrust, be it intense or ever so slight, between people. Only then is ‘inner’ ambivalently split from ‘outer’, and an interminable uncertainty about their relation engendered. This split is the concomitant of one of us—contingently, in succumbing to our fear of openness—splitting off from the other, ‘I’ from ‘you’. The ‘inner life’ that I pretend is ‘only mine’ and that others do not or ‘cannot’ know—and with it, as the other side of the coin, the life that is ‘merely outer’, mere behaviour, are ambivalent semi-realities, fantasies that arise out of the rejection of the openness between us. They appear as we close ourselves to each other in suspicion, irritation, shame, self-pity, envy or some other fearful, self-centred and destructive attitude—and closing oneself to others is, indeed, a closing of oneself (to oneself ). ‘The’ mind, in the general singular as conceived by philosophers, is in fact an amalgam of aspects of our life as we imagine it from the perspective of self-centred, destructive fear, so that philosophers tacitly promote an alienated and deformed form of human experience and relatedness into the norm for experience as such—thus making its morally and existentially problematic character invisible. The alienated picture of the mind prevalent in philosophy mirrors the existential alienation and mistrust in life.18 And precisely because the latter isn’t some rare anomaly or pathology, but a pervasive feature of what we regard as normal, everyday existence; because the philosophers’ refusal to consider openness in their theorising mirrors our everyday refusals to be open, the framing of the problems that dominates—indeed, constitutes—philosophy of mind as we know it, may seem self-evident and self-explanatory. But it is not. Self-misrepresentation marks not only the philosophical theorisation of alienated forms of experience, but already the way they are lived. Fearful and destructive attitudes are characterised by the fact that they aren’t what we, when we are prey to them, make them out to be. Thus, in envying you, I pretend to despise you, although my very envy shows that

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I actually intensely wish to be like you; in fearfully distrusting you my distrust comes out in my (projectively) seeing you as not trustworthy and so on.19 However, the mirroring of the lived attitude in philosophical fantasy isn’t straightforward; the Cartesian-cum-materialist picture of the mind-body and self-other relation isn’t a simple replica of a suspicious mindset, say. As my discussion of the inconceivability of ‘inferring inner mental states’ from ‘colourless’ movements was meant to show, the philosophical picture is senseless in a way that a lived attitude isn’t. Nonetheless, there are crucial connections, for the senselessness of the philosophical view results from trying to formulate in a logically coherent picture certain aspects of the destructiveness that is lived rather than formulated in everyday attitudes, and that indeed cannot be coherently formulated, for what the destructiveness is set to destroy is precisely the sense of life, that is, the expressive openness and vital connection between ‘I’ and ‘you’, and thus also, by extension, between our statements and thoughts. Trying to make sense of destructiveness can, in the end, only produce senselessness; the only kind of sense the envious person, say, can make of their own demeanour is self-deceptive, a mere semblance of sense. While we can try to cut ourselves off from and close ourselves to others, we cannot finally succeed in doing so, nor can we produce a lucid account of what it is we’re trying to do. My discussion has aimed to shed some light on the topsy-turvy world that results, in philosophy and in life, from these doomed attempts.

Notes 1. Nykänen (this volume) argues that the subject-object problematic provides the form of philosophy as such—that is, of philosophy as almost exclusively conceived in our tradition—and that this form is morally determined precisely by the exclusion of the I-you-perspective. Leoni (this ­volume) underlines how the ‘subjective’ is always ‘objectified’, and vice versa, rendering the oscillation between them simultaneously inescapable and illusory. In my view, the deadlocks Leoni describes, which tend, as he notes, to turn comprehension into incomprehension, arise because the I-you-perspective is excluded, as Nykänen explains. My chapter aims to bring out aspects of this manufacture of confusion.

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2. ‘For the first several weeks after birth, the majority of the baby’s awake alert time is spent in and around feeding … What will he see? It turns out that … during feeding, mothers spend about 70 percent of the time facing and looking at their infants. Accordingly, what he is most likely to look at and see is his mother’s face, especially her eyes’ (Stern, 1977, p.  36). I don’t pretend to decide philosophical questions by appeal to empirical evidence; philosophical puzzlement concerns not what the facts are but how one understands them. Nonetheless, reminders of simple facts sometimes help loosen the grip of apparently ‘natural’, but actually quite crazy pictures. 3. I avoid the standard philosophical term ‘intersubjectivity’, for insofar as ‘subject’ and ‘object’ mutually define each other, one cannot conceive a ‘between’ subjects with no object involved. When ‘I’ and ‘you’ meet, we’re (primarily) neither subjects nor objects. 4. Philosophers have typically treated eyesight as a model for all perception and cognition, including the ‘vision’ of philosophical truth itself (cf. the essays in Levin, 1993), but I know of no extended philosophical discussion of the phenomenon of meeting someone’s eyes. The experience of looking at, and being looked at by, others, has been discussed, notably by Sartre (1966, pp.  340–400), who brilliantly reveals the aporias arising from trying to conceive interpersonal relations on the subject-object model. Seeing no other way of conceiving the matter, however, Sartre declares these aporias to be inherent in the human condition, rather than arising from confused philosophical fantasies about it. This illustrates the dominance of the quasi-solipsistic subject-object paradigm, or rather delusion, in philosophy, in which encounters between ‘I’ and ‘you’ are reduced to games the ‘I’ plays with ‘its’ perceptions or objects or meanings. For another illustration, consider that Plato, on the (to my knowledge) only two occasions when he mentions the phenomenon of looking into someone’s eyes (Alcibiades I, 133a; Phaedrus, 255d—both in Plato, 1997), fastens on the same curious feature, that when looking into your eyes I may see a small reflection of myself in your pupil! 5. This is the main idea of Backström (2007), which, exploring the perspective first elaborated by Nykänen (2002), traces some of the endless ramifications of this fact. See also Nykänen (2009). 6. For mainstream approaches, see, for example, Apperly (2010), Carruthers and Smith (1996), Davies and Stone (1995), Goldman (2006). There is of course also a diverse literature critical of the inferentialist mainstream,

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for example, Hutto (2008), Leudar and Costall (2009), and Ratcliffe (2007). Some of these critics—for example, Gallagher (2008), Krueger and Overgaard (2013)—think of themselves as presenting alternative, ‘direct social perception’ accounts of interpersonal understanding; see Spaulding (2015) and the other articles in the same journal special issue for a sense of the current state of this debate. As I’ll explain below, the crucial difference between this literature (further references below) and my approach, some obvious similarities notwithstanding, concerns its general neglect of the morally determined nature of interpersonal, and therefore also of philosophical, understanding. 7. Cook (1969) makes a similar point. 8. Indeed, the very idea of ‘colourless behaviour’ or ‘mere bodily movements’ is perplexing. It isn’t just that we don’t normally see it; it is hard to know what ‘it’ would even be. Cf. Ebersole’s discussion (1967) of the apparent impossibility of finding or constructing examples of ‘mere’ bodily movements that wouldn’t be involuntary, like spasms, and even a spasm is a particular kind of movement, not ‘mere’ movement. Summarising his discussion, Ebersole underlines the abstraction and specificity—contradicting the supposedly basic character—of the philosophical idea of the ‘body’; ‘A domino is a piece of wood seen from a special point of view. A person is not a body seen from a special point of view. Rather, a body is a person seen from a special point of view’ (1967, p. 303). 9. For further analysis of the ‘private language’ considerations, see Read (this volume) and Toivakainen (this volume). 10. On this debate, see, for example, Ekman (1989), Russell and Fernández-­ Dols (1997). 11. This is a crucial theme in Wittgenstein’s later writings, as is well brought out in Nykänen (2014b, 2018), with whose radically ethical understanding on the I-you-perspective I essentially agree. Let me note that the point about understanding not ‘consisting’ in anything, and my whole discussion, might seem to be (but isn’t in fact) ‘disproved’ by the fact that computer-­programs are, apparently, to some extent able to discriminate facial expressions, for example, to distinguish different kinds of smiles, telling smiles masking frustration from smiles of delight (Hoque, McDuff, & Picard, 2012). This is quite a feat of engineering, but hardly surprising as such, as there are certainly characteristic (although not exceptionless) differences between typical cases of different kinds of

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smiles; polite or frustrated smiles don’t usually include ‘smiling eyes’, for example, and the latter can be coded in terms of the movement of muscles around the eye. But the salient point is that it is only because we understand and care about each other, are moved by each other in all kinds of ways, for example, to smile, that we make, and can make, these distinctions, and that some of us may then be motivated to build machines that can simulate something like our ability here. And even if the machine tended (as reported) to be more reliable than untrained human observers in distinguishing certain kinds of smiles from others under certain conditions, that doesn’t show that it understood anything about smiles or people. How (on what criterion) did the experimenters decide the machine was more reliable than human subjects in discriminating between different kinds of smiles? By using their own understanding of the people smiling, obviously. And that the machine was programmed to discriminate cases (not: understand them) based on various measurable indications of muscle-­movement etc., doesn’t mean that our understanding works in the same way; my earlier discussion should have shown the hopeless paradoxes one gets into if one tries to conceive understanding of others as built up from discreet pieces of information of this kind. 12. This isn’t mere social decorum; people are often determined not to lose their cool, not to allow themselves to feel too much, even in situations where no one would mind, or where there is no-one to witness it. 13. This critical literature includes authors inspired by Wittgenstein, for example, Cockburn (2009), Hertzberg (2009), Overgaard (2007), and authors in the phenomenological tradition, starting with Scheler (1954) and Merleau-Ponty (2002) and comprising the ‘direct social perception’theorists referred to in endnote 6 above. For further ‘intersubjective’, ‘interactional’ or ‘second personal’ approaches in philosophy, cognitive science and developmental psychology, see De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), Foolen, Lüdtke, Racine, and Zlatev (2012), Hobson (2002), Reddy (2010), Satne and Roepstorff (2015) and the other articles in the same journal special issue; Thompson (2001), Trevarthen (1979), and Zlatev, Racine, Sinha, and Itkonen (2008). 14. Kristjánsson (2004), for example, distinguishes ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ in this way, but there’s no well-defined standard use of these terms in the literature.

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15. For more on conscience and its repression through destructively emotionalised and moralised responses, see Backström (2007, pp.  317 ff., 2015, 2019), Nykänen (2002, 2005, 2014a, 2015). 16. In repression, ‘collective’ and ‘private’ aren’t opposed, but two faces of the same depersonalising movement. One repressively privatises one’s responses, distancing oneself from the other by reducing her to the ‘object’ one ‘subjectively’ reacts to, but one does this precisely by representing the situation in general terms collectively available in the culture. For example, I turn viciously on someone and excuse my brutality towards her by saying ‘I couldn’t help myself [1]; when a person behaves so rudely [2], one just gets so angry [3].’ I thus [1] privatise/subjectivise my response, [2] objectivise the other, and [3] refer to collective ‘understandings’ of how ‘one’ responds in situations of particular kinds, and in each moment I disclaim responsibility for how I responded to the other; [1] claims that I can’t help my responses, [2] that the other was the cause of my response, [3] that everyone responds in the same way. For more on repression, depersonalisation and collectivity, see Backström (2014), Backström and Nykänen (2016), Nykänen (2009, 2014a). 17. For further discussion of the pervasive hostility to truthful communication and understanding, see Backström (forthcoming). 18. For discussion of how philosophical debates quite generally reflect existential confusion, see Backström (2011, 2013), and Nykänen (this volume). 19. For more on such essentially misfelt/misrecognised responses, see Backström (2019).

References Apperly, I. (2010). Mindreaders: The Cognitive Basis of ‘Theory of Mind’. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press. Backström, J. (2007). The Fear of Openness. An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Backström, J. (2011). Wittgenstein and the Moral Dimension of Philosophical Problems. In O.  Kuusela & M.  McGinn (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Backström, J. (2013). Wittgenstein, Follower of Freud. In Y.  Gustafsson, C.  Kronqvist, & H.  Nykänen (Eds.), Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture:

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Wittgensteinian Approaches. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Backström, J. (2014). Touchy Subjects: The Theme of Repression in Freud and Wittgenstein. European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2. Retrieved from http:// www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/ Backström, J. (2015). Of Dictators and Green-Grocers: On the Repressive Grammar of Values-Discourse. Ethical Perspectives, 22, 39–67. Backström, J. (2017). From Nonsense to Openness: Wittgenstein on Moral Sense. In E.  Dain & R.  Agam-Segal (Eds.), Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought. New York: Routledge. Backström, J. (2019). Hiding From Love: The Repressed Insight in Freud’s Account of Morality. In R.  Gipps & M.  Lacewing (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Backström, J. (forthcoming). Pre-truth Life in Post-truth Times. Nordic Wittgenstein Review. Backström, J., & Nykänen, H. (2016). Collectivity, Evil and the Dynamics of Moral Value. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 22, 466–476. Carruthers, P., & Smith, P.  K. (Eds.). (1996). Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cockburn, D. (2009). Emotion, Expression and Conversation. In Y. Gustafsson, C.  Kronqvist, & M.  McEachrane (Eds.), Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, J. (1969). Human Beings. In P. Winch (Ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Davies, M., & Stone, T. (Eds.). (1995). Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Blackwell. De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 485–507. Dennett, D. (2003). Freedom Evolves. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dennett, D. (2006). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ebersole, F. (1967). Where the Action Is. In F. Ebersole (Ed.), Things We Know: Fourteen Essays on Problems of Knowledge. Eugene: University of Oregon Books. Ekman, P. (1989). The Argument and Evidence About Universals in Facial Expressions of Emotion. In H. Wagner & A. Manstead (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychophysiology (Vol. 58, pp. 342–353). Chichester: Wiley.

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Epley, N., & Waytz, A. (2009). Mind Perception. In S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed.). New York: Wiley. Foolen, A., Lüdtke, U. M., Racine, T. P., & Zlatev, J. (Eds.). (2012). Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gallagher, S. (2008). Inference or Interaction: Social Cognition without Precursors. Philosophical Explorations, 11(3), 163–173. Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heal, J. (1995). Replication and Functionalism. In M. Davies & T. Stone (Eds.), Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Blackwell. Hertzberg, L. (2009). What’s in a Smile? In Y.  Gustafsson, C.  Kronqvist, & M.  McEachrane (Eds.), Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobson, P. (2002). The Cradle of Thought. London: Macmillan. Hoque, M.  E., McDuff, D.  J., & Picard, R.  W. (2012). Exploring Temporal Patterns in Classifying Frustrated and Delighted Smiles. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 3(3), 323–334. Hull, C. L. (1943). Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory. Oxford: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Hutto, D. (2008). Folk Psychological Narratives: The Socio-cultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kristjánsson, K. (2004). Empathy, Sympathy, Justice and the Child. Journal of Moral Education, 33(3), 291–305. Krueger, J., & Overgaard, S. (2013). Seeing Subjectivity: Defending a Perceptual Account of Other Minds. In S. Miguens & G. Preyer (Eds.), Philosophische Analyse/Philosophical Analysis: Consciousness and Subjectivity. München: Walter de Gruyter. Leslie, A.  M. (1987). Children’s Understanding of the Mental World. In R.  Gregory (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leudar, I., & Costall, A. (2009). Against Theory of Mind. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levin, D.  M. (Ed.). (1993). Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacIver, A.  M. (1964). Is There Mind-Body Interaction? In G.  Vesey (Ed.), Body and Mind. London: Allen & Unwin. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception (C.  Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Midgley, M. (2014). Are You an Illusion? Abingdon: Routledge. Nykänen, H. (2002). The ‘I’, the ‘You’ and the Soul: An Ethics of Conscience. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Nykänen, H. (2005). Heidegger’s Conscience. Sats—Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 6, 40–65. Nykänen, H. (2009). Samvetet och det dolda—om kärlek och kollektivitet [Conscience and the Hidden: On Love and Collectivity]. Ludvika: Dualis. Nykänen, H. (2014a). Conscience and Collective Pressure. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 21, 51–65. Nykänen, H. (2014b). Freud’s Dangerous Pupil. European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved from http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/freudsdangerous-pupil/ Nykänen, H. (2015). Repression and Moral Reasoning: An Outline of a New Approach in Ethical Understanding. Sats—Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 16, 49–66. Nykänen, H. (2018). Wittgenstein’s Radical Ethics. European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved from http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/ wittgensteins-radical-ethics/ Overgaard, S. (2007). Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. New  York and London: Routledge. Plato. (1997). Complete Works (J. M. Cooper, Ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking Commonsense Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Reddy, V. (2010). How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rich, A. (1979). On Lies, Secrets and Silence. London: Virago. Russell, J., & Fernández-Dols, J.  M. (Eds.). (1997). The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sartre, J.-P. (1966). Being and Nothingness (H.  Barnes, Trans.). New  York: Washington Square Press. Satne, G., & Roepstorff, A. (2015). Introduction: From Interacting Agents to Engaging Persons. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22, 9–23. Scheler, M. (1954). The Nature of Sympathy (P.  Heath, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Spaulding, S. (2015). On Direct Social Perception. Consciousness and Cognition, 36, 472–482.

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Stern, D. (1977). The First Relationship: Infant and Mother. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stone, T., & Davies, M. (1996). The Mental Simulation Debate: A Progress Report. In P. Carruthers & P. K. Smith (Eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E. (Ed.). (2001). Between Ourselves: Second Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Trevarthen, C. B. (1979). Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary Intersubjectivity. In M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1951). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (G.  E. M.  Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1982). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I (G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Ed., C. G. Luckhardt & M. Aue, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Zlatev, J., Racine, T.  P., Sinha, C., & Itkonen, E. (Eds.). (2008). The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

10 So Much Fuss About Nothing: The Moral Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem Niklas Toivakainen

1. Introduction ‘Human consciousness’, Daniel Dennett writes, ‘is just about the last surviving mystery […] a phenomenon that people don’t know how to think about—yet’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 21). Nevertheless, ‘thanks very little to progress in philosophy and very much to progress in science’ (Dennett, 2006, p. 1), this ‘mystery’ is now, supposedly, on the verge of becoming disenchanted as Dennett understands himself to be professing a theory that ‘will trade mystery for the rudiments of scientific knowledge’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 22). This is, one should note, a quite specific way of understanding the nature of the mystery of the ‘mystery of mind/consciousness’. Or perhaps more importantly, it gives voice to a specific form of self-understanding in relation to the mystery. What Dennett seems to suggest is that the mystery of the mind is akin to the mystery of the construction of the great pyramids. Here, in the case of the pyramids, our ‘bafflement and wonder’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 22) arises out of the perceived complexity, elaborateness, hardship and so on underpinning the construction of the pyramids, as well as from our ignorance as to how exactly the ancient N. Toivakainen (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_10

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Egyptians were able to ‘pull it off’. When, on the other hand, we are provided with a reasonable explanation, or even better, when someone is able to demonstrate to us how the pyramids were built, we might of course continue feeling a kind of wonder and bafflement with respect to the talent and industriousness of the ancient Egyptians. Yet, the mystery itself will fade away in proportion to our gain in, let us call it, technoscientific knowledge.1 This is what Dennett promises to deliver for us in philosophy of mind. But is the constitutive experience—the source—that originally triggers our wonder and bafflement—or anxiety and terror—about the nature of mind/consciousness and its relationship to ‘the objective world’ really one pertaining to a lack of knowledge—technoscientific knowledge? Let us just assume that what originally thematises the mind or the self in a problematic or mysterious light is rather akin to a kind of self-alienated experience, to something resembling, for example, an experience of alienation with respect to one’s own mirror image. Here the mystery that touches us, that concerns and discomforts us, is, for lack of better words, a moral-existential force that places our very being—the very mind or thought that produces knowledge—in an alienated or split light. Now if the ‘mystery’ of mind has its source in something like this, how then, one might ask, would a scientific, or more generally, a purely epistemological theory, be able to address, let alone resolve/dissolve, the existential core or source of such a mystery?

2. The Structure of the Chapter As I just now hinted, a central ambition of this chapter is to argue that the mystery of mind, or more exactly, the mind-body problem, is rooted in, underpinned by, a moral-existential dynamic, rather than by some form of technoscientific ignorance. Part three of the chapter begins with a depiction of what might be called the ‘hard’ or ‘scientific’ naturalist mind-body problem, followed by the claim that this ‘problem’ masks or hides its own sense, that is, its moral-existential dynamic, with(in) a kind of non-thought. I then proceed by rewriting the naturalist mind-body

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problem and provide a preliminary suggestion of the structure of the moral-existential dynamics of the split between the inner and the outer. The fourth part of the chapter then, as it were, works itself through this preliminary suggestion, beginning with a characterisation of the inner-­ outer split as formed by a tension between the individual on the one hand and social normative conventions on the other hand. Taking a cue from Wittgenstein’s famous ‘Augustinian picture of language’, I move on to reflect on Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity, attempting to illustrate that Lacan, although contributing with important insights, ends up in more or less the same impasse as the naturalists. Returning to Wittgenstein and especially his considerations on ‘private language’, the fifth part of the chapter attempts to show—and thus in a sense confirm the preliminary suggestion in part two—how the tension between, on the one hand, the individual and its inner (private) reality and on the other hand, the outer socially determined norms and conventions is in fact underpinned by a more constitutive moral-existential tension, namely a concern and longing for open expressiveness between individuals. Put otherwise, my suggestion is that the split between the inner and the outer, self and the social gaze, is in fact a kind of secondary split, underpinned by a more fundamental moral-existential difficulty. Finally, the sixth part constitutes an attempt to flesh out, in a sketchy and preliminary manner, some central elements of the moral-existential dynamics I suggest constitutes the mind-body problem.

3. The Naturalist Mind-Body Problem 3.1. What is the Naturalist Mind-Body Problem? The question we begin with then is: what is the source of the mystery of mind/consciousness? We approach this question by way of a more straightforward one, namely what is the so-called hard or scientific naturalist2 mind-body problem, to which Dennett gave voice? Although Dennett belongs to the so-called reductionist camp, that is, to those who claim that mind or consciousness can be given a purely

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‘third-person perspective’ account, without leaving anything essential behind (Dennett, 1991, 2006), he nevertheless shares a basic outlook on the nature of the mind-body problem with the ‘non-reductionist’ naturalists. It is this shared basic understanding of the problem, not the suggested solutions, which interests us here. At least three constitutive points of agreement can be identified. (i) Reductionists like Dennett, and non-­ reductionists like John Searle, Thomas Nagel or Colin McGinn (to name a few)—who hold that any objective depiction of mind will necessarily leave out the essence of it, namely the subjective qualitative character of experience usually called ‘qualia’ (McGinn, 1991; Nagel, 1986; Searle, 1992)—agree that mind is a ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ phenomenon like any other phenomenon occurring in the body, such as metabolism or digestion (Dennett, 1991; McGinn, 1991; Nagel, 1986; Searle, 1992). McGinn dubs this basic outlook ‘existential naturalism’ (McGinn, 1991, pp. 87–8). (ii) In addition to the existential naturalistic temperament, the field I term hard/scientific naturalism is united by the conviction that the ‘natural’ place to locate the mind is evidently the brain. As Searle puts it, consciousness ‘is entirely caused by brain processes’ (Searle, 2007, p. 99). In other words, for the naturalists the mind-body problem is a mind-­ brain problem—at least on the surface. (iii) Finally, naturalists hold that while we know that the brain generates/causes mind and that it is a natural phenomenon, this ‘truth’ is not apparent either in subjective conscious experience—‘introspection’—or in our perception of the objective world and specifically of the brain: subjective experience (as subjective experience) is ‘noumenal with respect to perception of the brain’ (McGinn, 1991, p. 11). This is so whether or not the constitutive experiential asymmetric relationship between the mind and ‘the world’ is, in the final analysis, reducible to objective terms, as the reductionists claim. For it is from this asymmetry, based in our pre-scientific experiences of ourselves and/ in the world, that the ‘problem of the mind’ allegedly arises and becomes a theme in our reflections on thought and experience. Hence the mind-­ body problem is ‘at root’, as McGinn puts it, ‘that we cannot see the mind’ (McGinn, 1999, p. 51; see also Dennett, 1996). And so the problem of accounting for how the ‘hidden’ or ‘private’ mind is generated by the workings of the ‘objectively perceptible brain’ is understood, in the

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general spirit of (post-Cartesian) modern philosophy, to arise out of an epistemological challenge pertaining to a structural source.3 In retrospect, then, ‘existential naturalism’ can be understood as the naturalists’ existential—or ideological—commitment to a secularised and disenchanted worldview, or more strongly, a commitment to a scientific worldview, where the prime oppositional target is the supernatural, otherworldly or transcendental (allegedly phantasmatic) dimensions of reality.4 But rather than causing the mind-body problem, existential naturalism could be characterised as the normative landscape in which the mind-body relationship is played out. As the brain has, so far at least, shown itself to be empirically the most technoscientifically fruitful place to locate mind-body correlations, and as existential naturalism requires that mind be placed in the natural world, the mind-body problem transmutes into a mind-brain problem. But, it is the basic, pre-scientific, experience of the asymmetrical relationship between mind and body, or rather mind and ‘world’—the inner and the outer—that sets everything in motion. What this in turn seems to indicate is that, despite its seemingly epistemological character, the mind-body/brain problem has its roots in a kind of self-alienation, in a curious existential split of the self. The following quotes exemplify this: My first year in college, I read Descartes’s Meditations and was hooked on the mind-body problem. Now here was a mystery. How on earth could my thoughts and feelings fit in the same world with the nerve cells and molecules that made up my brain? (Dennett, 1991, p. xi) How can we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, speech-act performing, rational agents in a world that we believe consists entirely of brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force? How, in short, can we make our conception of ourselves fully consistent and coherent with the account of the world that we have acquired from the natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and biology? (Searle, 2002, p. 1) Given our objective understanding of physical reality, the question arises, how does such an arrangement of basic physical materials, complex as it is, give rise not only to the remarkable physical capacities of the organism but

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also to a being with a mind, a point of view, a wide range of subjective experiences and mental capacities. (Nagel, 1986, p. 29) When we think reflectively of mental phenomena we find that we acknowledge them to possess two sets of properties: one set which invites us to distinguish the mental realm from the physical, the other which firmly locates the mental within the physical world. Among the first set of properties are subjectivity, infallible first-person knowledge, consciousness, meaning, rationality, freedom and self-awareness. These properties are not to be found in the world of mere matter, and so lead us to suppose the mind to be set apart from the physical body: we seem compelled to accord a sui generis mode of reality to mental phenomena. (McGinn, 1996, p. 17)

As we can see in these confession-like statements, they take as their point of departure the idea of a kind of basic alienated experience about the self ‘in the world’, which then gets, as it were, co-opted by the (ideological) commitment of existential naturalism. The self is somehow not there in the world of things, yet at the same time it, or traces of it, is somehow there—and for the naturalist, in contrast to, for instance, Descartes (1967), it has to be there. In short, existential naturalism portrays the mind-body problem as a self-alienation where the truth of the self is split or divided into two truths that seem to exclude each other—the one never finding itself (as itself) in the other. But how exactly is the assumed fact that one ‘cannot see the mind’— let us call it a structural necessity—supposed to generate such an existential experience? ‘One cannot see the mind’—as far as this is meant to be purely a structural or epistemic proposition—is not meant to express merely a certain inability that we at the moment happen to be doomed to. Rather, it supposedly expresses a structural condition of human thought in that there is, so the claim seems to go, no such thing as seeing the mind, since mind/consciousness is here defined—at least in its pre-­ scientific, ‘everyday’ occurrence—as that which can only be experienced subjectively, that is, privately by each individual: this is what it means— as far as it can mean anything—that mind cannot be perceived. In other words, mind—as it plays out in subjective experience—is not hidden from perception, but rather is simply not of the order of things in the

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objective world. Nevertheless, paradoxically, at the same time the epistemological question of naturalism—that is, how can mind be placed in the natural (perceptible) world—is built on the presupposition that there is something unseen, something hidden, that needs to be explained in terms of, or in relation to, that which is seen: this is why the two truths about the mind need to be ‘reconciled’, as John Searle puts it (Searle, 2002). But what exactly establishes the conditions, as it were, for this kind of split of the self in two, which then in turn can give rise to a longing for reconciliation, or reunification? Can an alleged structural asymmetry function as a condition for such an experience?

 .2. Conditions for Our Existential Split: Rewriting 3 the Naturalist Mind-Body Problem Naturalists are obsessed with the relationship between mind and brain— or rather mind and technoscience. At the same time it is obvious, as pointed out many times already, that in the notion that there is a philosophical mind-brain problem a differentiation, disassociation, alienation, on a macroscopic, everyday or pre-scientific level, is already presupposed—or intuited. Here, on the macroscopic everyday level, then a split between the inner and its expression is assumed, an assumption which predates the alleged structural impossibility of ‘seeing the mind’ in the brain. At play here is the experience of a split between the self and the other whose mind or soul one desires to see (or avoid), whom one wants to be close to (or take distance from), and with whom one wants to be open, transparent (or from whom one wants be shut off). Why think of the mind and the body in terms of a split between the inner and its expression? Well, think of it this way: if the mind of the other—that is, their intentions, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, desires and so on—were openly, transparently, immediately, present in the expressions of the other, it would be unclear what would motivate the, as it were, grammar of ‘one cannot see the mind’—unless, of course, there were instances when someone closed him/herself to such an extent that his/her mind became imperceptible. Under these conditions, it would not at all be surprising that one does not see the mind in the brain: the brain

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would simply not be ‘the right place’ to look for the mind (cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2003). What, in other words, would it be that would be left unseen, if the ‘inner’ would, as it were, travel all the way with its expression: why would we then still feel that something remained unseen— what would we still long for? So, before one can be baffled, anxious, about the seeming opposition between the mind and the ‘world’, or the ‘body’, there has to be a felt experience that the other’s and one’s own expressions—and the responses to those expressions—leave something concealed, that something remains hidden, as it were, behind the expressions—and the responses to them.5 And, if one follows the naturalist’s dictum, it, the hidden, does not remain hidden occasionally but always necessarily. But again, what exactly could establish the conditions for such an experience—since it seems that the mind-body problem somehow structures itself around this type of experience? Let us say that I see a person cry out in pain, or that my friend tells me of her intention to plant a flower. What makes it possible for me to feel, to cognise, that something of the ‘real’ of this intention or pain—that is, the mind of the other—remains unseen to me? What is it, in other words, that originally places a wedge between me and the other? Given the naturalists’ basic assumption, it cannot be because on some other occasion nothing was left unseen; I have, according to the naturalist, never experienced what it would be/mean to see the mind. Nevertheless, I must have some contrast to draw on here if I am to say—to feel, to experience—that something is left out and remains unseen: if no contrast is given, how could anybody be in a position to draw the conclusion that mind is not perceptible in expression? Perhaps this experience of alienation arises because I infer from my own case of pain, beliefs, intentions and so on that my pain, my thoughts, my intentions do not present themselves directly, undistorted, in my expressions and that the same applies for others? Or, do I know that others do not see my mind? Has my friend told me so? And again, how does she know, how could she know that she has not seen it? As I have tried to point out, the problem with the naturalist dictum that one ‘cannot see the mind’—or more precisely, with the claim that there is an experience of an unavoidable inability of seeing the mind which constitutes the ‘mystery of consciousness’—is that the knowledge

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that this is so assumes its (impossible) opposite, namely, the notion that ‘seeing the mind’ would entail being the other—or, alternatively, the other being oneself. That is to say, we (allegedly) know that one ‘cannot see the mind’ because we know that we (necessarily) cannot be the other. But how can this amount to anything? For the very notion of being the other—not just the sci-fi fantasy of being oneself in the head of the other— is a paradox, a non-thought: this is, as far as I can see, what the naturalist claims anyway. That is to say, the problem here is not simply that being the other—‘seeing the mind’—is factually impossible. Rather, the problem here is that we cannot even imagine it—we cannot really make sense of it: the notion of being the other cannot be made into a sci-fi movie. Consequently, the notion cannot even be an object of our fantasies, or of our desire. But now, if the notion of ‘seeing the mind’ is really supposed to be a non-thought—empty—then our (alleged) knowledge that we ‘cannot see the mind’ loses its footing as well. The problem with the naturalist self-understanding of the ‘mystery of mind’ is then not only that we really cannot know what the naturalists would want to base the whole mind-body problem on. The more constitutive problem is that the notion that ‘one cannot see the mind’ cannot, in the form suggested by naturalists, really be the actual source of that which constitutes our existentially felt alienation or split—and hence of that which gives rise to the mind-body problem—as this notion really isn’t anything that can as such be part of—thematised in—our experience or cognition, let alone our desire. In saying that the alleged structural asymmetry between the inner and the outer, mind and brain, does not have the potency to function as a condition for an experience of alienation, and in arguing that the alienation or split of the human self is grounded in a felt split between one’s inner and one’s expression in one’s relationship to the other, I am of course also implying that the very condition for this split is that we in fact do understand what it means to ‘see the mind’, that is, what it means, what it is, to express one’s inner directly and immediately and to respond to the other’s expression similarly. Put differently, what I am implying here is that the condition for there to exist an existentially felt split or alienation of the self is that we can see and exhibit mind just as well as we can and

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do know what it means to shy away from, and be shut out of, the expressive openness between self and other. Yet, while this might be so, there is surely reason to reflect on why most of the canon of Western philosophy (of mind), and more particularly contemporary naturalism, has tended to portray the mind-body problem as ultimately answering to a necessarily inherent structurally determined epistemological condition. A straightforward suggestion presents itself readily, namely, that the motive for masking our existential split or alienation as pertaining to a structural impossibility of ‘seeing the mind’ lies in this notion’s ability to provide a kind of justification for our desire to turn away, hide, from the openness between individuals: it acts as a defensive response to some deeply unbearable trait in our lives with each other. By this I mean to say, or suggest, that what we might call a ‘non-thought’—which takes the form of a proposition such as ‘one cannot see the mind’—can itself become expressive of a desire—while not itself being the (object of ) desire, while not itself being a thought. And so, if we examine the logic of ‘one cannot see the mind’—or rather the logic of its opposite, ‘seeing the mind’—we will, I think, find that it does not simply express a desire to shy away from the openness between individuals, but also contains its opposite desire, namely a desire for the other, that is, for open expressiveness. One might say that it expresses a split (in) desire. What does the impossible notion of ‘seeing the mind’ suggest, that is, what kind of desire does it express? Well, as already noted, it seems to express a desire to fully possess the other, or alternatively, to fully merge with the other: in order to see the mind one would have to be(come) the other, or the other would have to be(come) oneself. In both cases, if any real distinction between the two can be made, the outcome is annihilation of individuality, both of the other and oneself: annihilation of the relationship. But this annihilating desire must of course be understood in relation to another desire that this fantasy carries with itself. For the fantasy of possessing (or merging with) the other contains, nevertheless, a relational desire for the other: in order for the question of ‘seeing the mind’ to become thematised in the first place, one must first desire to see—to be with—the other and to be seen by the other. Without such a desire, there could be no problem, no question of ‘seeing the mind’. Yet,

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this relational desire simultaneously contains, as noted, a phantasmatic desire for a consummate relationship with the other, resulting in an annihilation of the relationship. So while the fantasy on the one hand functions as a way of making one’s (relational) desire for open expressiveness impossible, the ‘cannot’ of the ‘cannot see the mind’ nevertheless simultaneously signals a command to ward off the annihilating tendency of desire, arguably, in order to preserve, on some level, although in a distorted way, the relationship between self and other. Or, we might say that the ‘cannot’ signals the very impossibility of our desire for absolute non-­ relation, that is, signals that we in fact do not really, cannot really, desire an absolute non-relation wholeheartedly. Hence, the fantasy at work here unleashes an internal conflict, a splitting dynamic.

 . The Violence of Words and the Impotence 4 of the Inner Self 4.1. The Augustinian Picture of Language What I have attempted to do so far is, as it were, to rewrite the naturalist mind-body problem—to give it a new beginning, from which one will be able, I suggest, to start grasping the root-dynamic underpinning the pervasive self-alienation of human mindedness. Let us now attempt to explore the dynamics of this constitutive split between the inner and the outer in somewhat greater detail. We begin by rephrasing the problem: if the mind-body problem resides in a tension between a self and its expression in the relationship with the other, we might say that the ‘outer’, that is, expression is experienced as the ‘matter’ in which the inner must take form, and that there is something about this matter, in which the inner must travel, which manifests as a felt tension or conflict. In addition to the body, our expressiveness is of course centrally ‘mediated’ by normative conventions—at least this is implicit in the idea of the tension which we are trying to diagnose. And as so much of our thoughts, intentions, emotions and so on and their expressions are constituted in language, language also seems to make up

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the ‘matter’ in which our inner must fit. But, as the language we use, with its norms and conventions, is not created by us, how is it then that our inner is supposed to travel with our words, undistorted? It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1958; henceforth Investigations) is centrally concerned with such an anxiety between a self and an other, especially if we here take the notion of the other (or Other) to stand for society, a network of conventions and norms, which poses a kind of determining and restricting threat to the individual’s innermost, let us call it, ‘real self ’. The tension or question is already there latently in the opening paragraph of the book, in the famous Augustinian picture of language: When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (Augustine, 1952a, Book I, 8; Wittgenstein, 1958, §1, p. 2e)

This picture of language portrays the individual, the infant, as equipped with its own independent desires and will, having their origin in God rather than in the interplay between the child and its parents. Furthermore, as Augustine explains, this picture of language presupposes an inherent understanding in the child, independent of its relationship to the parents, bestowed by God: ‘I, longing by cries and broken accents and various motions of my limbs to express my thoughts, that so I might have my will, and yet unable to express all I willed, or to whom I willed, did myself, by the understanding which Thou, my God, gavest me, practise the sounds in my memory’ (Augustine, 1952a, Book I, 8).6 In other words, this picture of language portrays the child as a self equipped with desire, independent of and prior to its relationship to the parents, as well

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as independent of and prior to the language through which it becomes able to, or forced to, express itself, that is, make itself understood. But there is a latent tension dwelling in this picture; the innermost ‘real self ’ must always use the words given by the parents, by the society or culture, by the language community in which it must speak, if it is to speak to others. As the child does not create its own language, as this language with which it—the independent and non-relational ‘real self ’— expresses itself is not its language; as it does not, cannot, stem immediately from the desire or will of the child, what then, one might ask, allows an undistorted relation between the ‘real self ’ and its linguistic expression? If the individual’s own inner reality does not, cannot, determine the grammar and criteria of the language by which it must express itself, is it then only and always the parents, the language community, that possesses the conditions, possibilities, of the meaning of what one says? And where does this leave the inner, real, self? Is there, as Leibniz (1985) suggested, a kind of miraculous synchronisation or harmony guaranteeing that the ‘real’ of the individual always coincides with linguistic conventions—or with the object world of the ‘body’? Does the, as one might put it, ‘real of the linguistic community’—the rules of its language (cf. Hacker, 1986)—absolutely coincide with, or absolutely guarantee, the ‘real’ of each individual? How on earth could it? Those familiar with Wittgenstein’s Investigations will know that these are not explicitly the initial questions and concerns set in motion as a response to the Augustinian picture of language. Nevertheless, the matter emerges as the Investigations proceeds exactly, I would claim, because it is there from the very beginning, setting the stage. Take for instance remarks 143–7 where the question of how one teaches and learns the series of natural numbers is discussed. The focus of these remarks is on what one might call ‘public training’ (Eldridge, 1997, pp. 242–90), a training that goes gradually from helping the child to copy the series from 0 to 9 to the drawing of the child’s attention to the recurrence of ‘the first series in the units; and then to its recurrence in the tens’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §144, p. 57e). In every step of the learning process ‘the application [of the series] is a criterion of understanding’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §146, p. 58e). And here the anxiety arises:

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Now, however, let us suppose that after some efforts on the teacher’s part he [the pupil] continues the series correctly, that is, as we do it. So now we can say he has mastered the system.—But how far need he continue the series for us to have the right to say that? Clearly you cannot state a limit here. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §145, p. 57e)

And how many times, we might add, must the child apply the series correctly before we can, with certainty, say that he/she has understood?—we cannot state a limit here! And because we cannot state any limit to how many times the series must be applied correctly, it seems that we completely lose hold of any certainty about who is and who is not applying the series according to the ‘right reasons’, the ‘right rules’—given, that is, that we are principally looking at things from the perspective opened by the Augustinian picture. Consequently, we also seem to lose hold of how to determine, or understand, the criteria for what counts as the ‘right reasons’. So it seems that we are left with two opposing options. One option is that ‘real’ understanding and meaning is something that is hidden in the mind of the individual and revealed only indirectly through his or her ‘behaviour’ and/or expressions, and which hence always essentially require interpretation: ergo, the real, as it were, of the meaning of one’s utterance is always private. The other option is that that which determines the correct application has nothing to do with the individual(’s real), but only with how a collective, a community, that is, an ‘outer’ authority, judges the situation. The tension we find here is, then, one between the ‘outer’ or ‘publicly’ determined rules on the one hand, and the individual’s own determination of meaning on the other; a tension, one might suggest, regarding who has authority. Or, put differently, the picture suggests that it is not we who command language but rather, that we are at the mercy of something other, something outer which, in order for us to be part of this language community, to speak meaningfully, has to be accepted. In turn, this would also mean that it is not only we who must accept this ‘Other’ but just as much the ‘Other’ must accept us as part of ‘it’. It is as if some ­linguistic conventions or a community could demand or determine what we (must) mean, as though our ‘real’ understanding were nothing independently of the authority of the Other. The authority would in this case

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not simply rest with the authority of a specific other person, but the Other as the social gaze that defines the ‘rules of our language’ and subordinates each individual person under its rule. It is, arguably, under the pressure of this tension that the associated anxiety, later in the Investigations, gets translated into a wishful fantasy of a ‘private language’—the basic structure of which is expressed (already) in remark 1477—a fantasy, in other words, of a ‘language’—meaning—that stems from and only refers to the individual’s ‘immediate private sensations’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §243, p. 88e), saving or securing the authority and self-sufficiency—the meaning and existence—of the individual’s ‘real’. I will come back to Wittgenstein and his ‘treatment’ of this wishful fantasy and connect it to Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. But first, I will bring Lacan into the picture on his own.

4.2. Lacan and the Phantasmatic Nature of the ‘Real’ Those acquainted with the works of Lacan will surely already have noted thematic similarities between his work and the discussion so far. I will here use selected elements from Lacan’s huge body of work as tools for making an intervention into the tension I have tried to point to between the individual and his/her social, symbolic community. In order to get the target into focus, let us go back to Augustine’s ‘picture of language’. As we noted, for Augustine the subject, the self exists before and independently of its relationship to the parents and its initiation into a language community. Moreover, the individual self is equipped with a will and with meaning and sense, before and independently of its ability to express itself in words. The child has something to say before and independently of language, that is, independently of the social norms and conventions structuring ‘our language’. It is precisely here that Lacan suggests a radical break with the strong tendency in Western philosophy to postulate a ‘real self ’ beneath the very matter of the ‘body’. For, ­according to Lacan, the notion of a self-subsistent and consistent ‘self ’ is a phantasm or ‘misplacement’ (Lacan, 2004). The point here is not that the self, the ‘real’ of the self, cannot in principle express or find itself in

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language, a language that always comes from the Other; that its own meaning is necessarily inexpressible in words; that there is no ultimate synchronisation or harmony between the real and the norms and conventions of language. Rather, what is placed into question is the very notion of a self-­endowed with its own, independent, self-sufficient ‘existence’ (Lacan, 2016, p.  115), ‘meaning’ (Lacan, 2016, pp.  50–1) or ‘sense’ (Lacan, 2016, p. 97). So for Lacan, especially in his later works, it is not that there exists a real that is lost or hidden through the introduction of language—or as he more generally calls it ‘the symbolic’—but rather that the symbolic, culture, in which the subject and meaning are structured, marks a complete or absolute break with ‘Nature’. I shall say that what specifies Nature per se is that it is not a nature, hence logical process as a means of broaching it. Through the process of calling Nature that which you exclude by the very fact of taking an interest in something, this something becoming differentiated on account of being named, Nature ventures nothing save to affirm itself as a potpourri of what is not the nature of anything. (Lacan, 2016, p. 4)

The inevitability or necessity of this break between the symbolic and the real, or culture and Nature (cf. Ragland-Sullivan, 1991), should then be understood as internal and as unavoidable for subjectivity. Nature, or the living body of the organism—not the ‘body-image’ of the subject—is what is exclusively, authentically, the organisms own real, that is, not determined by the Other (Lacan, 1998; Verhaeghe, 2009).8 Yet, at the same time this Nature is not, cannot ever be, ours, as we are always already—as subjects, as speaking, meaningful, beings—split from the (alleged) organism’s own independent Nature. That is to say, according to Lacan’s theory, as soon as one speaks, or more fundamentally, as soon as what one feels or experiences is dependent on and arises out of one’s relatedness to the other(‘s touch)—or rather the Other—one’s Nature, one’s real, cannot find itself anymore: Nature becomes—always already—an object for the self/subject through the Other. Nature or the real, is, in other words, completely incommensurable with meaning. Let me make a brief note here on the notion of the Other. It is important to emphasise that although the subject is, in Lacan’s theory, always

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relational, this relationality always remains ‘intrapsychic’ (Fielding, 1999). For while it is actual persons who introduce the symbolic to the subject and hence structure it, the actual other person is in the same position as the self/subject: its real is trapped by the same social normative conventions—the symbolic order—that it introduces to the child/subject. And so we never meet or see the (real) other, but only that which is structured by the symbolic. Hence, the Other is not the same as another person or being, but rather the bearer of the symbolic order, while the other (person) ‘is what remains most foreign to each of us’ (Chiesa, 2015, p. 61). Turning back to the main structure of Lacan’s theory, we might exemplify it with the help of the Lacanian notion, as articulated by Lorenzo Chiesa, of ‘the real impossibility of representing sex’ (Chiesa, 2016, p. 5). What makes the representing of the real of sex impossible in the symbolic is that the real is there only ‘before we think of it’ (Chiesa, 2016, p. 24); that is, it is only before we think of it that sex can remain ‘pure difference’ (Chiesa, 2016, p. 70). The real is always, necessarily, retrospectively thematised for the subject. Further, this ‘pure difference’ of the real or Nature is itself utterly ‘in-different’ to the differences between the sexes that are attributed through the symbolic. ‘What is “most real” as pure difference’, Chiesa writes, ‘is the point of in-difference (i.e. there is no sexual relationship)’ (Chiesa, 2016, p. 70). Hence, ‘little boys and girls start off their ontogenetic—linguistic and sexual—process of subjectivation from a traumatic encounter with the indifference of the anatomical “little difference” (as “not part of a logic”) with respect to the symbolic difference of sexuation, which instead always-already surrounds them through adults’ (Chiesa, 2016, p. 26). The real is not then ‘lost’ (cf. Verhaeghe, 2002, 2009) through the intervention of the symbolic, so the claim goes, but rather simply does not ‘translate’ into the symbolic register: the subject has never been this real/Nature. This basic, let us call it ontological structure of Lacan’s theory, suggests, then, that the fundamental split of the human subject arises because the subject’s very constitution (meaning, existence) comes from the Other, which in turn gives rise, in the subject’s psyche, to the idea that the subject in itself ‘lacks’ something, that it is not whole, that the real is always somewhere else, lost somewhere beyond the symbolic. The subject is, in

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other words, possessed by a ‘fundamental fantasy’ (Lacan, 1981) of becoming total or unified (once more) (cf. Lacan, 1992). More specifically, the fundamental fantasy boils down to a notion of an ‘absolutely self-enjoying substance’ (Chiesa, 2016, p. 8; cf. Lacan, 1998). And it is a fantasy exactly because there is no such thing for the subject as being a complete unity, that is, being absolutely self-sufficient, non-relational.

 .3. Can the Lacanian Real Be the Source of the Inner-­ 4 Outer Split? Lacan’s theory of subjectivity seems to suggest that while the subject’s longing for complete unity, that is, for absolute self-sufficiency, non-­ relation, cannot but always be a misplacement, can never be what(ever) the subject thinks it is, this longing is nevertheless supposed to have its origins in the real: the real Nature of the organism is supposed to unavoidably produce its continuous effects on the subject. As Chiesa put it, the constitutional ‘trauma’ of the subject is the individual’s ‘encounter with the indifference’ of the real/Nature. But why, we might ask, does the subject care about the real? Why does it long for the real, for absolute self-­ sufficiency, for non-relation? Why does it matter, for the subject, that it (supposedly) lacks something? Why do subjects have fundamental fantasies? Why the ‘trauma’? One issue that immediately announces itself here is that all the terms we utilise here, ‘longing’, ‘caring’, ‘fantasy’, ‘lack’ and so on, are in no sense neutral, but rather loaded with a moral-existential charge: there is no neutral way for us to say that a subject ‘lacks’ or ‘longs’ for something, that it has a ‘fantasy’, that something (be it a fantasy) ‘addresses’ it. And if there is no neutral way for us to say such things, then this means, arguably, that we must understand all of these things as arising out of the moral-existential life of the subject—or rather person—and not from outside of it (him/her); from the Lacanian real Nature. Let us approach this from a somewhat different angle by asking what exactly it is that the subject, in its fundamental fantasy, is fantasising, desiring. For if the real or Nature is always a misplacement in thought and itself ‘able to contain nothing’ (Lacan, 2016, p. 10), it seems to be quite unclear what it is that we in fact are fantasising when fantasising

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about the real. Or more to the point, if the real is never what we make it out to be, if we in fact never can make any sense of the real, what is it then that actually touches us and evokes a sense of conflict with the symbolic: what is it that creates the conflict in our psyche? Lacan’s theory seems to suggest that human self-alienation is produced by a kind of magic: namely, that it is nothing, a non-thought, something utterly meaningless, which stands in conflict with the symbolic. In other words, Lacan’s theory seems to suggest that it is a non-thought, that it is nothing that could actually be thematised in thought or experience, which nevertheless causes in us the experience of alienation. Take for instance the following quote: ‘The flame is the real. The real sets fire to everything. But it’s a cold fire. The fire that burns is a mask, if I may say so, of the real. The real is to be sought on the other side, on the side of absolute zero’ (Lacan, 2016, p. 102). Now there seems to be two ways in which one might come to reason, or at least imagine oneself to be reasoning, about the nature of the real. (i) One sticks to the idea that behind words, behind meaning and existence, there still remains something, which is really a nothing, that is, of which nothing can be said, thought or made any sense of. Yet it (what?) nevertheless is there, affecting us, marking the very core of our existence. Or (ii) one takes this to signal that the very unthinkability of the object of the fantasy is what constitutes the ‘mask’ of the fantasy, that is, that the fantasy masks its real object of desire with the very impossibility of itself. Put otherwise, we might read the very impossibility of the fantasy as signalling that it cannot really be about what it makes itself out to be about, that is, that what one actually fantasises about is not absolute non-­relation, and consequently, not at all the Lacanian real. Lacan, and Lacanians, seem to opt for (i) although Lacan arguably continuously struggles to work his way out of the impasse he keeps finding himself in—there is an important insight, I would claim, attached to his claim that the real is always phantasmatic, although he himself does not seem to accept it fully. But now, what we clearly need to ask ourselves is how Lacan(ians) could ever be in such a position (as subjects themselves) as to know that there is a Nature/real which functions as the source to our self-alienation, our split between the inner and the outer? How, in other words, is the individual supposed to ‘encounter the indifference’ of the real/Nature, if the real/Nature is itself a non-thought, even as a theoretical term or pos-

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tulation. That is to say, how is the theory supposed to hit any target at all with its ‘pure difference’, as it itself postulates that whatever it is that is there cannot be known, cannot be thought—we have no way of knowing what Nature is like, or, for that matter, whether there is any Nature at all there which the individual traumatically ‘encounters’ with respect to the symbolic. Put differently, how could Lacan’s own theory itself ever escape misplacing whatever it says about the real or Nature or even analytically postulates as it? Must not the notion of the real/Nature always arise out of the life of the subject, and if so, how could it ever manage to refer to something outside of meaning: what even makes us think that there is something ‘outside’ of meaning, something completely in-different to it, as we cannot, by definition, make any sense of such a thing? The immanent problem I am trying to point out here is that if the split between the inner and the outer is tied to a felt conflict in the face of the symbolic order, then there has to be something, not a nothing, a non-­ thought, which actually conflicts with the symbolic.9 There has to be, in other words, a real, which is not the Lacanian real, and which does not reduce itself to the symbolic order. My point here is, then, not that Lacan is wrong to identify human self-alienation as in someway grounded in an existential experience of lack, or alternatively, in an experience of a longing for a real self in the face of a social gaze. Rather, my point is simply that the notion of a real absolutely outside of meaning, existence, sense, cannot constitute any base or sufficient conditions, as it were, for such an experience, as this notion in the end attempts to make itself absolutely meaningless within meaning. It hits the same wall as does the naturalist’s dictum that we ‘cannot see the mind’. And so the force that touches us, and hence splits us, should, arguably, be identified, conceptualised, differently; this is my point.

5. Relocating the Real  .1. Private Language and the Desire for Open 5 Expressiveness If Lacan(ians) seem to opt for postulating a Nature in the nothing— option (i) above—in order to explain the split in the human psyche, I

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have been arguing that this attempt is doomed to fail and that we rather need to start thinking of the fantasy of the nothing as a mask in itself— option (ii) above. More specifically, what I mean to say by this is that since the very notion of the Lacanian real must always remain a misplacement—this is what Lacan’s theory, rightly one might say, keeps insisting on—and we cannot hence really desire ‘it’—something Lacan himself only half-heartedly comes to accept—it is better to say that we desire a kind of non-relation in our relatedness. We do not, in other words, really desire, wholeheartedly, to give up our relatedness, but rather we want to bring the ‘real self ’ into our subjectivity, that is, into our relatedness to others; the annihilation of subjectivity, meaning, sense, and our relation to the other is never actually, wholeheartedly, desired—just as the annihilation of individuality is never actually, wholeheartedly, desired in the naturalist’s mind-body problem. On the other hand, the opposite of the real, the social norms and conventions of the symbolic—the Other—cannot be what we really, wholeheartedly, desire either, nor what our subjectivity is grounded in. For if there is an existentially felt split at the centre of our soul, that is, if the subject is not the subject of the phantasmatic real (self ), but nevertheless feels unable to be completely reduced to, determined by, the symbolic, the tension between the real and the symbolic, as well as the ‘function’ of the real and the symbolic, must be understood differently. In short, if there is to be a problem with the symbolic then there must be some real, although not the Lacanian real, which actually is the source of a conflict with the symbolic. It is at this point that I want to return to Wittgenstein’s Investigations. Earlier I portrayed the tension between the individual and its self-­ sufficiency on the one hand, and the linguistic community and its ­authority on the other, as a central driving force in the Investigations. And my suggestion was that it is centrally this tension that gives rise to the fantasy of a private language, and that the fantasy of a private language is in effect akin to the Lacanian real. Now I want to try and illustrate how, in the Investigations, this picture of a private language breaks down, and that there is something else than a non-thought, a nothing, that is, something else than a meaningless ‘lack’ that becomes exposed in the ruins.

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Let us now go back to remark 243, which was quoted earlier and in which the notion of a private language is explicitly put on the table. After having briefly imagined different ways in which humans might speak to themselves privately, but nevertheless within the reach of common language, Wittgenstein continues: But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, and the rest—for his private use?——Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language?—But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §243, pp. 88–9e)

There is a sense in which this remark already indicates that the notion of a (necessarily) private language is in fact a fantasy. That is to say, the private language is certainly not the de facto language that we speak, but something very special, which we are invited to try to imagine. So more or less as in the case of Lacan’s theory, what we are asked to imagine is something, not only different from but radically opposed to what we understand to be the language and/or meaning of relational human beings, that is, of ‘subjects’. We are, in other words, invited to imagine ‘something’, although we do not know what it is. Yet, we allegedly do desire exactly this ‘something’. In remark 261, we then encounter the frustration and anxiety surrounding the doomed pursuit of finding a way of articulating, naming, the subject’s real, the ‘something’ which we are convinced we desire and which ‘we’ feel must be recognised and affirmed. What reason have we for calling “S” [the sign supposedly used in the private language to refer to the speaker’s sensations] the sign for a sensation? For “sensation” is a word of our common language, not of one intelligible to me alone. So the use of this word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands.—And it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes “S”, he has something—and that is all that can be said. “Has” and “something” also belong to our common language.—So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the

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point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.—But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §261, p. 93e)

As in the Lacanian framework—from which Lacan is unable to free himself—the (phantasmatic) real struggles to bulldoze some ground for itself in meaning/language—we may recall here the notion of ‘Nature’ and its complete ‘in-difference’—only to find the ‘common language’ under every rock and stone. The inarticulate sound, a piece of gibberish, is all that seems to present itself as a viable option; at least this is not part of a ‘common language’—why did not Lacan, for example, try to whistle it! Yet, what would make this sound an expression; what is the condition for its meaning, the context or language-game in which it is uttered? And so we come to remark 293 where an attempt is made to ‘describe’ a private language-game. Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!——Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-­game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §293, p. 100e)

If, that is, we are determined, tempted, to think of our ‘inner’ lives in relation to language, that is, in relation to our lives with other people, as ones where our expressions—our address to others—must refer to a private, independent and non-relational ‘real’—or again, conversely, simply to a system of socially determined normative conventions—then this real has no relevance for what happens in language, that is, between me and

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the other.10 All of this is of course quite tautological. For all that is said here is, as far I can see, that if we desire to be with and speak to each other, and if we desire our ‘soul’ to reach all the way to the other’s soul— and vice versa—we cannot at the same time desire our soul, our real, to be absolutely non-relational (‘the beetle in the box’). Yet, despite its tautological character, what is revealed here is that as long as there is something upsetting, that is, a tension, generated by the insight that in a private language the inner would be irrelevant with respect to one’s relationship to the other, this tension must stem from a desire for an open and transparent expressiveness between self and other, and not from a desire for, or a fantasy of absolute non-relation or self-sufficiency. For if one in no way desires to have one’s soul expressed to the other, that is, if one actually desires absolute self-sufficiency and non-relation, then there is no problem here and one can gladly accept that one’s soul is simply an irrelevant ‘beetle in the box’ and that language, that is, one’s relatedness to others, is nothing but formal linguistic conventions where no one really meets anyone else.11 Conversely, as long as one actually does experience a tension in the face of normative conventions and experiences a kind of loss of self, and as long as this real self cannot in the end be a phantasmatic self, the normative conventions—or rather the way one’s relationship to the other structures itself around these normative conventions—must somehow be in conflict with open expressiveness. And so, one might note, the breakdown of the fantasy of a private language does not serve as a confirmation of the social essence of language (cf. e.g. Kripke, 1981), of the self and its relation to the other; an annihilation of the individual into the collective. The only thing revealed, as it were, is a desire for a unity of meaning and expression in one’s relationship with the other, beyond the conflicting and oppositional authority of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. It is this desire, the effect it has upon reason, which fundamentally sustains the power of the ‘argument’ we find in Investigations 293; it is what makes the private inner irrelevant.12

5.2. The Primary Split and Its Justification Now the crucial point I am aiming at is this: for there to be any existential conflict or concern in/with subjectivity there must also exist a reality—let

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us call it the real of the relationship—in which the ‘inner’ does travel all the way to the other’s soul in expression. In other words, the open and transparent relatedness to the other is the condition for, the reality from which, the existential anxiety with the real and the Other/symbolic derives its force, and which is, as I have suggested, the home of our desire. It seems to me then that the primary split of the human soul is a split between the open relatedness between individuals, on the one hand, and the way in which this openness is somehow also that which we shy away from, on the other. It is, in other words, a split in desire between, on the one hand, the open and transparent expressive relatedness to the other, and on the other hand, the reactive desire for non-relation, that is, the reactive desire to hide or mask the way we do see and understand each other. Or perhaps it would be best to characterise it in the following way: there is something about the way the self, and the other, respond, as responsible individuals, to the openness between individuals, which constitutes the split. But why, if this is the primary split of the human soul, does the split then seem to be understood within philosophy—and more generally as well—as one constituted by a tension between a real, self-sufficient, self on the one hand, and a network of socially established and determined conventions and norms on the other? Let me give a preliminary suggestion: if the primary split, which in some constitutional way concerns the individual’s response to and responsibility for the openness between self and other, then it seems, to some extent, understandable that this primary split is transmuted into a kind of secondary split, or a split within the split, as an internal attempt to justify one’s desire for non-relation. Put differently, there is a sense in which the mind cannot sustain the primary split by itself as this would mean that one would have to sustain it while fully acknowledging that one is on a fundamental level responsible for it. Rather, sustaining it becomes bearable by characterising, that is, misrepresenting, the real (of the relationship) as a self which must necessarily remain beyond the grasp of the overwhelming authority of the Other. One might say that the impossibility of the real, or the necessarily distorting nature of the Other—the body, language and so on—is presented to thought/reason as the justification of one’s own impotence, or rather lack of responsibility. Moreover, it seem

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to me that to the extent that we try to justify the primary split, that is, to the extent that we tell ourselves that we desire or long for—have lost—the non-relational private real, we will also be destined to desire—in a split manner—the ‘common language’, the law and authority of the Other. This is so because once we fantasise our real as the non-relational private real, the Other, the ‘common language’, will present itself as the only viable way to uphold a relatedness to other individuals. Yet, at the same time, or conversely, as we retain our primary split, we allow ourselves to dwell in the fantasy that our real/true desire cannot find itself in a relationship with the other, which is determined by the Other, and so presents itself with  the fantasy that the private real is the only viable resource by way of which the authoritarian and determining character of the ‘common’ can be warded off; the only ground on which a real of desire can be kept alive, albeit in phantasmatic, distorted, fashion.

 . The Moral-Existential Dynamics of the Inner-­ 6 Outer Split: Three Cases 6.1. The Imposition of Identity It is important to stress that in my critique of Lacan and of the naturalists, I am not denying that our subjectivity is split, that the anxiety about the relation between the individual and the other—as well as the Other— is real. Nor do I deny, and this is an important point, that the split in human subjectivity is original, always already there, insofar as we do in fact split ourselves—more or less from the very beginning. For, as it seems to me, there is no way in which the split could be derived from something else: it is only a split that can cause a split.13 Yet, while I claim that the split in humans is original, this nevertheless does not mean that it is inevitable, irresolvable, necessary. My central point is simply that the split is internal to our responses (our responsibility) as individuals to our lives with others, which on some fundamental level is characterised by a primary expressive openness.

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Now in the last part of this chapter I will attempt to enrich the picture I have been drawing through a short discussion of three different modes of the emergence of self-alienation and its moral-existential dynamics. I begin with a typical case of a conflict with gender identity, that is, a case in which social conventions and norms are imposed on and become part of the life of the child through the parents’—and other people’s—own internalisation of and obedience to them. Let us begin by asking what it is that makes this kind of imposition possible? First of all in order for a gender norm to be an imposition, it must in fact mark an intrusion in the relationship between the child and the parent. That is to say, and in contrast to what Lacanians seem to suggest (see Sect. 4.2 above), simply becoming accustomed to certain ways of expression, to a certain taste, to certain habits and appearances cannot, despite the fact that we might be able to identify these as belonging to specific normative conventions, just as such be in conflict with the child’s own reality, since the child does not have any ‘real’ beyond its relatedness to others. It is, rather, only in relation to an actual conflict in the relationship between the child and the other that something stemming from a ‘social convention’ can become an ‘imposition’ and cause a trauma, a split, or self-alienation. Let’s imagine that a child and its parent are playing around in an open and loving spirit. Now despite the open expressiveness between child and parent, no matter how the child comes to express itself—regardless of how it moves, dresses and so on—these expressions are formed in relation to the parent and consequently in relation to the social and normative conventions of a given culture. Yet, this formation will not be a straightforward replication of some norms and conventions in that, as Lacan notes, every single one of us, from one instant to the next, ‘gives a little nudge to the tongue we speak’ (Lacan, 2016, p. 114), and more importantly, we might add, in that the very meaning of what is expressed comes to life in and through the expressive relationship with the other person. We speak, express ourselves, to other people and not to norms and conventions—although we might, as we all know, restrain and manage the open expressiveness between individuals by pretending to be simply replicating or following seemingly impersonal social conventions and standards. In short, there is no reason why the social norms and conventions

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have to, unavoidably, distort or restrain the open expressiveness between the parent and the child. But now let us suppose that the child, which in this case would be a boy, notices his sister’s dress and wants to put it on. It is, I think, quite likely that the parent will immediately feel the weight of collective identity norms. These norms might, yet do not have to, effectively translate themselves in varying degrees into the parent’s response to the child’s desire. The parent might for instance say to the child: ‘But dresses are for girls and you are a boy’. Here, as Lacan rightly notes, the anatomical ‘little difference’ in children becomes transmuted into essentialised identities. Or put otherwise, a difference, let us call it a ‘pure difference’ between the sexes, which as such does not in any given manner imply the type of significance suggested by the parent who retorts to a social norm, now nevertheless becomes, by way of suggestive hints or more brutal measures, a—or even the—difference, which in turn conflicts with the child’s open expressiveness. And so the child’s desire becomes split into, on the one hand, a desire to be with the parents and share their mutual desire for each other, and on the other hand, his/her desire for free, open and transparent expressiveness, exactly because the parent, through his/ her normative intervention, distorts the non-split relatedness between him/herself and the child. This is what creates the conflict, not the symbolic order, the normative conventions just as such—for if the parent would not respond by denying the child’s open expressiveness, then there would be nothing essentially distorting about the social convention of (in this case) dresses.14 This split in desire between the parent and the child’s self takes on the form of an encounter with, and consequently an anxiety with, what we might, with reference to the psychoanalytical tradition, call authority and law: the parent’s desire becomes an authoritarian law that ‘must’ be abided by in order for the child’s desire for the parent’s desire to be realised. That the effective force of law and authority—as opposed to brute (mis)use of power—hinges on desire should be clear: in order for the parent’s desire to become a law, a norm—and note that it need not do so (see below)— the parent’s desire must itself be desired to such an extent that affirmation by the parent outweighs the child’s desire for, for example, the dress, or more precisely, the child’s desire for open expressiveness. Yet, the reverse

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is also true. Namely, the exercise of the authority of the parent rests just as much on the parent’s desire for the child’s desire, that is, for the child’s affirmation of the parent/authority. There is then a kind of reversal of ‘power’ hidden in every acknowledgement of authority and law, at least on this level. For one might in a sense just as well say that the parent’s authority is itself dependent on the child’s authority over the parent, in that the parent needs the recognition of the child, a recognition/affirmation which is no one else’s to give but the child’s. Or we might say that the language-­ game of authority presupposes a mutual address and desire between the ‘master and the slave’, where who is essentially master and who is slave cannot determinately be settled. Is it not quite easy to understand why the child, that is, the individual, is split in two in the face of such circumstances, and given the immense vulnerability of children? Or should we say, rather, that it is easy—that it comes naturally or impulsively—to sympathise with the child’s response to such circumstances? For are we not after all obliged to ask why the child does split its inner from its outer, ‘assuming’ (cf. Lacan, 2004) or imitating a quite (for the child) incomprehensible socially determined and inevitably self-alienating identity (in this case a gender identity)? For although the child desires the parent’s desire, there seems to be no necessity or automatism forcing the child to abandon its open and transparent relatedness to the parent, that is, to assume an imposed identity trait as the cost of affirmation. To be sure, through this abandonment, the child gets the parent’s affirmation. Yet, only in a distorted, or phantasmatic sense, for in this affirmation the child him/herself nevertheless does not acquire the desire of the parent since the child has already separated its inner from its outer, its appearance from its ‘real’—or, we should say, the child has created an (in the end phantasmatic) ‘real’ or ‘inner’ by structuring its ‘outer’ in accordance with the law/norm of the Other. Likewise, since the initial problem, in the case we are discussing, is that the parent does not seek the desire of the child him/herself, but rather of the child as normative conventions prescribe, a desire which can be given only as the child assumes the norm and splits its inner from its outer, the child him/herself does not really receive, wholeheartedly, the desire of the parent. One might perhaps say that it is the appearance, the social/normative identity the child assumes that receives the (distorted/split) desire of the

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parent; while, similarly, it is not really the parent him/herself that desires this desire, for this desire (this object of desire) is determined by the Other, that is, by social norms and conventions, and not by the parent him/herself—in his/her expressive openness with the child—although the parent utilises these norms and conventions in distancing him/herself from the very openness he/she feels threatened by, for whatever reason. By this I mean to say that on some shadowy level all of this must involve a certain recognition or understanding on the part of the child and the parent alike that such approval or affirmation of one’s ‘appearance’ cannot in the end really fulfil one’s desire. Obviously, all of this also has to do with vulnerability, especially on the child’s side. In order to avoid scorn, dissatisfied hints, accusations, mistreatment, perhaps even abandonment, the child seeks the desire of the other the only way it can: through approval or affirmation, forming its outer to please the loved one. But, one should ask, does this not exactly show that the dynamics of the split self centres on the immense responsibility that open expressiveness between individuals comes with; the fact that one cannot by oneself guarantee love between persons (‘it takes two to tango’), that love so often involves conflict, conflict perhaps to the point of separation, abandonment? In other words, does this not show that the split of the self is the inability, in some fundamental sense the unwillingness, to take on this responsibility of love? We might of course say that we cannot demand such responsibility from a child, and so this makes no sense. And it is true, I believe, that the parent, I, cannot demand such responsibility from a child, nor from anyone else. But what does his/her demand, or my demand, or the lack of it, have to do with the issue? How do we imagine ourselves to be in the ­position to demand anything at all from others? And of what matter is to the dynamics of life what we demand of it? If again the issue here is that we could not imagine a small child refusing to assume distorting identity norms because of his/her vulnerability, aren’t we then imagining that other people would in fact abandon the child, or mistreat it, in one way or another, until the norm is assumed? Perhaps we think that the process of natural selection has simply eliminated this option from evolution: those who refused to turn away from love or open expressiveness simply did not survive. But is this true? Would we really abandon those who

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tried to love us fully? Would we do it so systematically that loving wholeheartedly simply would become impossible—and is this our reason for saying that one ‘cannot see the mind’? Perhaps it is not hard to imagine that this might happen, or does happen all the time. But would you do this to your child, or to anyone else? Whatever way we may be inclined to think of this issue, and this is my essential point, we cannot think of it in morally neutral terms. For if we say that it is human vulnerability that causes humans to (inevitably) split themselves—and even if we simultaneously think that this split is unavoidable, necessary—then we are in fact acknowledging that the problem here is our own evilness, that is, acknowledging our own inability to love or care for each other, not because we necessarily ‘cannot’ love, but because we are morally unable, that is, unwilling to do so.

6.2. The Desire for Social Identities Adults surely introduce into the child’s life their own narcissism and internalised, socially determined normative identities. Nevertheless, children themselves are also eagerly in ‘jubilant’ pursuit of affirmation of themselves as seen by the other, that is, in search of affirmation of themselves as (phantasmatic) essential unities, attempting to make of themselves the ‘One’, as Lacan would have it.15 In short, children carry with themselves their own original narcissistic impulse qua primary split. It is with a mixture of amusement and discomfort that one observes the child’s (or the adult’s just as well) jubilant and enthusiastic search for affirmation of its own self as ‘great’, ‘loveable’, ‘strong’, ‘funny’, ‘cute’ and so on. The amusement and discomfort relates directly to the obvious and to some extent self-aware pretentiousness of the child’s ‘look at me’, ‘applaud’, ‘I am ... (some hero or what not)’, ‘look at my penis’. It is a narcissistic desire for the ‘One’ raw and untamed. What the child in a sense plays with here is the double nature of authority, noted above. That is to say, in the child’s calling out for affirmation of itself the parent is ascribed the position of authority, without the parent necessarily desiring it: the child is in need of an authority, for it is only an authority—the Other—that can affirm, provide, the (phantas-

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matic) ‘One’. Yet, although the parent is ascribed the position of authority—the one who possesses the power to bestow the sought for affirmation—the child’s jubilant narcissism seems to be attempting to challenge, destabilise or even invert the power-hierarchy, the position of authority. It is as if the child tried to own or overtake the meaning of the word that the phantasmatic Other possesses; as if the other could not but mean, by this word this child; as if the child would almost force the parent (as the ‘Other’, as the authority of law) to have invented this word/symbol because of the child him/herself: finally, the word/symbol finds its home in the child, the (chosen) One: the child him/herself is the (lost) object which the word names. The central observation here is, and again in contrast to what Lacanians seem to suggest (cf. e.g. Lacan, 2016, p. 78), that it is not, in such cases, the parent, nor society, the Other, which imposes words and identities on the child, but rather the child seduces the parent to take on the role of the ‘big Other’: the child, in and through its primary split, attempts to impose essentialised words and identity on itself, as it were. Obviously, parents’ responses depend on their own desire and self-understanding, but it is nevertheless quite hard not to find the child’s seductive attempt— how adorable are not children; and they know it, or they learn it very quickly!—discomforting, even to some extent, or on some level, uncanny. For what one witnesses in these situations is a quite intrusive break in one’s relationship with the child, as one perhaps would like nothing else than to not be the authority of law, but rather explore the relationship— the other and oneself—in an open, let us call it, anarchical spirit. So although Lacan, and Chiesa, might be right in saying that all kinds of socially determined normative identities always-already surround ­children through adults, that is, can be found there in the collective, historically conditioned, milieu of ‘the world’, this does not mean that children assume these identities simply because the parents, or society, demand it of them—indeed, the parents may even actively attempt to counteract the assumption that there is such a demand and suggest an openness between them and their child—but rather because children themselves have a primitive, distortive and defensive, desire invested here. Whatever the reason might be for this seductive search for affirmation—whether it is a fearful attempt to reduce the vulnerability of open

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expressiveness or whether it simply expresses ‘raw narcissism’—the central point here is, again, that this can cause an internal split in the subject—a split between an inner and an outer—only to the extent that the search for this type of affirmation actually stands in tension with a real of the relationship in which there is open, non-distortive/non-split, expressiveness between individuals, whatever this in the end means.

 .3. The Desire for the Authority of Law 6 and the Denial of Moral Understanding The narcissistic jubilance with which the child immerses itself in the phantasmatic, but effective, power-relation between authority and the subject is not the only instance in which the function of authority is ascribed to the other/parent, rather than directly imposed on the child. Think of a situation where a small child hurts another child, for whatever reason. Despite its inability to (as yet) comprehend the full meaning of moral concepts, the hurting as such cannot be separated from an understanding of moral reality. In hitting the other child, although the other child might have nothing to do with the anger of the hitting child, the mere understanding that one can do harm to the other and thus express one’s anger, fury, frustration, implies that one understands the other as someone who can be hurt, who can suffer, and, consequently, as someone who is hurt, suffers, is wronged. Without this, there is no ‘hitting’.16 Now it quite regularly happens that a child who has wronged another does not him/herself directly take responsibility for the evil done by asking for forgiveness and showing care for the one who is hurt. Rather, the intervention of an adult is involved. This involvement might take all kinds of forms and directions, but unfortunately it is all too often conducted in a ‘lawful’ spirit, whose character I’ll try to explain presently. It can be contrasted with an admonishment17 where the parent simply attempts to have the child see or face what it has done, that is, its own moral understanding, and take responsibility for it.18 As we all know, even after the admonishment (in the sense I’m referring to here), the child often has difficulties with actually facing its own deeds, that is, openly facing the person wronged. Instead, the child is prone to make

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apologies to the one wronged precisely in a lawful spirit, that is, as a function of answering to a principle, a rule, a law that has been broken. It is as if the wrong one has committed relates to, or originates from, something else than the suffering of the other. Now while this obviously is a way of dealing with the moral reality of the situation, it deals with it in an indirect and unavoidably misplaced fashion. For what it in effect does is to provide an escape from direct confrontation with one’s moral understanding—which is due to the open expressiveness between individuals—by construing the situation as if the wrong one has committed is that one has broken a principle, a law—given by an authority that represents original desire. And, again, this might not at all be what the admonisher wants the child to do. Rather, it is the child that ascribes to or projects onto the admonisher this role: the child needs an authority in order to escape its own moral understanding and the responsibility such an understanding involves. This in turn constitutes—and is constituted by—a split in the self where one’s moral understanding is, more or less, suppressed or even repressed deep into one’s ‘inner’, while one’s ‘social behaviour’, one’s ‘outer’, answers to a law originating in the Other—that is, in one’s own desire for, or construction of, the Other—instead of answering to the direct relationship between the wrongdoer and the wronged—or the wrongdoer and the admonisher. Or alternatively, one’s moral understanding, in being hidden deep in the soul, surfaces as an alienated principle that originates only from the outer, the Other, that is, not from the real of the relationship. Nevertheless, I think is worth noting that the difficulty and resistance with which children (and adults as well) apologise to others is, in a sense, a healthy sign. Imagine a child, after admonishment, jubilantly ­apologising to the one wronged. This would be moral blindness if there ever was any, for it would indicate that the child is exclusively concerned with having itself affirmed by the ‘authority’—which the child himself has construed. The difficulty and resistance with which a child apologies, on the other hand, indicates a moral sensitivity; that it is not solely a question of affirmation but rather there is a moral reality involved here that bears the weight of one’s existence: it is, at least partly, the moral reality of the wronging that makes even an apology—in contrast to asking for forgiveness and caring for the other—so difficult.19 In short, the difficulty of

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simply construing oneself along the lines prescribed by the logic of affirmation signals that one does not only desire affirmation of one’s ‘outer’, but that there is a moral reality—the real of the relationship—which unavoidably ties together one’s desire and one’s moral (self-)understanding.

7. Final Remarks It might perhaps be said that this chapter has been overambitious. At least, that is, if we think that a philosophical text, in order to be ‘successful’, needs to ‘knock down’ its opponents—as if philosophy was a combat sport. And there is no reason to fool ourselves here, for we all know well how deeply the pressure to combat runs in philosophical thought, or the culture of Western philosophy. After all, one of the founding text of Western philosophy, namely Plato’s Apology, places philosophy, that is, the philosopher (Socrates) in a court of law forced to defend himself against all kinds of accusations—although Socrates, arguably, tried to undermine the logic of the trial and replace it with the ‘pursuit of truth’. Despite all the virtues of the normative requirements internal to the practice of reason in law, the obvious problem with having philosophy placed in these courts is that, well, law equates truth with itself—or is unable to wholeheartedly care about truth. That is to say, the courts of law demand that a determinate statement be found. They are not places where ideas are explored, tried out and perhaps drawn back without end. Now I would like these final remarks to indicate the spirit in which I hope this chapter will be understood. For while much of what I have written has been in the tone that I claim to have shown, definitely, that the naturalists or Lacan get it all wrong, I think of this chapter as attempting to suggest a way of relating to the conflict between the inner and the outer that, in the best case, may help us gain an understanding of ourselves and others that does not force us to attempt to integrate paradoxical, meaningless, empty, ideas in it. And more importantly, what I hope the perspective I have tried to elaborate can do is to help us place the very problems or conflicts we have been discussing closer to our actual lives with others, that is, to help us find ourselves in our difficulties so that they become something that we can take responsibility for, and thus indefinitely free ourselves from.20

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Notes 1. For an account of what I mean by technoscientific knowledge, see Toivakainen (2015, 2018). 2. When I speak of naturalism, I will exclusively be referring to so-called hard or scientific naturalism, of which I give an outline in the text. This form of naturalism can, to some extent at least, be differentiated from so-­called soft naturalism (e.g. McDowell, 1994). See Wallgren’s chapter in this volume for a critical discussion of the problems of naturalism. 3. It should be noted that the naturalist field also divides along another axis than the reductionist-non-reductionist one. For instance, the non-­ reductionist John Searle who holds that the mind cannot be reduced to an objective third-person account nevertheless agrees with Dennett’s aspiration to elaborate a rigid scientific theory of how the brain causes mind because, he says, since ‘we know in fact that brain processes do cause our states of consciousness’ we ‘have to assume that it is at least in principle discoverable how it happens’, although he at the same time admits that we are currently completely ignorant of what such a theory should look like (Searle, 1997, p.  197). Non-reductionists like Nagel and McGinn, on the other hand, argue that while we know that the brain causes mind, we seem, due to a kind of ‘cognitive closure’ (McGinn, 1999, p.  51) that characterises the human (epistemological/cognitive) condition, to be incapable of giving a scientific (objective) explanation of how it does this. 4. Note that the so-called soft naturalists share the ‘existential naturalist’ commitment with the hard naturalists. Nevertheless, we should add that soft and hard naturalist might have different views on how ‘nature’ is to be defined or described. Wallgren’s chapter in this volume is, among other things, an excellent attempt to challenge the rationale of such ‘existential naturalism’. Charles Taylor’s (2007) A Secular Age is an elaborate attempt to illustrate the historical and ideological forces that have given birth to existential naturalism. 5. My suggestion is, then, that ‘the world’ in the mind-world dichotomy is originally the relationship to the other, and not the ‘world of objects’. This is a notion we can find developed by thinkers such as Martin Buber (1996) and Emmanuel Levinas (1969), but in a way closer to my own stance by Hannes Nykänen (2002) and Joel Backström (2007). See also Nykänen’s and Backström’s chapters in this volume.

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6. It should be noted that Wittgenstein does not cite this section in the opening remark of the Investigations. I do not claim that Wittgenstein reasoned the way I do. 7. In remark 147 of the Investigations, the preliminary structure of a private language, of a reactive defence against the totalitarian authority of the Other, saving the ‘real’ of the individual, is expressed as follows: ‘But how can it be? When I say I understand the rule of a series, I am surely not saying so because I have found out that up to now I have applied the algebraic formula in such-and-such a way! In my own case at all events I surely know that I mean such-and-such a series; it doesn’t matter how far I have actually developed it’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §147, p. 58e). 8. Lacan’s equation of the real with ‘Nature’, inverts, arguably, in a kind of Nietzschiean (Nietzsche, 1996) fashion, the Platonic-Cartesian dualistic idea that it is the body or nature that alienates the soul from its real home, namely reason. Lacan’s theory suggests that the individual—its real—is originally the body, although not of course the object body, but rather the ‘living body’, while it is reason, meaning and so on that constitutes the organism’s split into self and body, inner and outer, that is, constitutes the subject. 9. Compare this point with remark 249 in the Investigations: ‘Are we perhaps over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence?—And on what experience is our assumption based? (Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one)’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §249, p.  90e). In what sense could the infant’s smile ‘always’ be a pretence? How could we know, distinguish, it as ‘pretence’ as opposed to a genuine/true smile? Such ‘pretence’ would lack its own conditions. One might also think of remark 251: What does it mean when we say: ‘I can’t imagine the opposite of this’ or ‘What would it be like, if it were otherwise?’—For example, when someone has said that my images are private, or that only I myself can know whether I am feeling pain, and similar things. Of course, here ‘I can’t imagine the opposite’ doesn’t mean: my powers of imagination are unequal to the task. These words are a defence against something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition, but which is really a grammatical one. But why do we say: ‘I can’t imagine the opposite’? Why not: I can’t imagine the thing itself? (Wittgenstein, 1958, §251, p. 90e)

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My point here is similar: If ‘misplacement’, ‘lack’ and so on, like pretence, is all that is the case, it loses its own conditions for being what it (phantasmatically) professes to be/mean. 10. By this I mean, more specifically, that here we find a conflict between expression and meaning: what relevance could the ‘inner’ as the true meaning have if it cannot reach beyond being more than a source or reason for expression; if it cannot go any further, travel with the expression: if my expression cannot embody the meaning? 11. Whether one can desire such a thing is what Wittgenstein’s Investigations keeps on attempting to find out—or combat. In this sense, one might read the Investigations as a succession of indefinitely repeated—and failed—attempts to again and again—after every failure—find a home for this narcissistic desire (for a more detail account of this, see Toivakainen, 2017). 12. I want to note here that I have not said much about how exactly the discussion in the Investigations, and particularly in remark 293, has ‘done the job’. Rather, I have simply tried to pinpoint ‘the conclusion’ as it were. For a slightly more detailed discussion of the structure of the treatment, see Toivakainen (2017) and also my unpublished draft ‘Problems with grammar—problems with oneself ’ available at: https://www.academia.edu/35435346/Problems_with_grammar_problems_with_ oneself. 13. This is something I believe St. Augustine captures well in his interpretation of Original Sin. Namely, as he notes, the only true source of Adam’s and Eve’s fall from Paradise was their will to ‘live for themselves’ (Augustine, 1952b). The devil, disguised in the form of the serpent, could only draw upon this trait and utilise it but could not create it. It was already, originally, there in humans, as part of their free will. 14. There obviously remains the question as to why a given culture has certain norms and not others, and what the inherent problems with these norms are, a question that cannot of course be reduced to a singular child’s relationship to his/her parents. Nevertheless, my point here is simply that any given socially/collectively upheld norm establishes its effects and affects in the individual through his/her relationship to others. 15. Here I am more or less referring to the type of trait in humans that Lacan identifies in what he calls the ‘mirror stage’ (Fink, 2016; Lacan, 2004). That my account differs on a fundamental level from Lacan’s should be

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evident by now. Nevertheless, this does not mean that I do not appreciate Lacan’s work and his many illuminating and sharp observations and analyses. 16. Hannes Nykänen’s and Joel Backström’s chapters in this same volume discuss this issue in more detail. 17. Here again see Nykänen’s chapter in this volume. 18. Importantly, I would like to add, this means that the parent’s focus should not simply be on his/her own child, fixated on having him/her apologise. For what the child then comes to see is that the parent is first and foremost concerned with how the child behaves (what principle it abides by) and not at all directly with the suffering of the other. So the parent had best be concerned directly with the one who suffers, that is to say, care for the one wronged, in conjunction with the admonishment (i.e. the admonisher him/herself had best be concerned with the other and not with the ‘Law of the Other’). 19. Obviously, what also makes apologies hard is the shameful light one is inevitably cast in by accepting that one has something to apologise for. Yet, while shame might make it hard because one is seen in a bad light by the authority one wants to be affirmed by, I believe that this does not reduce the immanent pang of conscience which one’s moral understanding causes in the face of an evil deed. Rather, if this is the right way of putting it, these two—shame and bad conscience—work in parallel in the split mind and desire of the wrongdoer. 20. I would like to thank the Academy of Finland and Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth foundation for financial support enabling the research for this chapter. I also want to thank Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen and Thomas Wallgren for their comments and support.

References Augustine. (1952a). The Confessions. In R. M. Hutchins, editor in chief, Great Books of the Western World: 18. Augustine. Chicago: William Benton. Augustine. (1952b). The City of God. In R. M. Hutchins, editor in chief, Great Books of the Western World: 18. Augustine. Chicago: William Benton. Backström, J. (2007). The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press.

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Bennett, M., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Buber, M. (1996). I and Thou (W. Kaufman, Trans.). New York: Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster. Chiesa, L. (2015). Psychoanalysis, Religion, Love. Crisis and Critique, 2(1), 57–71. Chiesa, L. (2016). The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Dennett, D. (1996). Kinds of Minds: Towards and Understanding of Consciousness. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Dennett, D. (2006). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Descartes, R. (1967). Mediations on the First Philosophy. In E. S. Haldane & G. S. T. Ross (Ed. and Trans.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes (4th ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Eldridge, R. (1997). Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fielding, H. A. (1999). Envisioning the Other: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity. In D.  Olkowski & J.  Morley (Eds.), Merleau-Ponty, Interiority, Exteriority, Psychic Life, and the World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Fink, B. (2016). Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hacker, P.  M. S. (1986). Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kripke, S. (1981). Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lacan, J. (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII (J.-A.  Miller, Ed., D.  Porter, Trans.). New  York and London: W.W. Norton & Co Lacan, J. (1998). Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (J.-A. Miller, Ed., B. Fink, Trans.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2004). Écrits: A Selection (B. Fink, Trans.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.

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Lacan, J. (2016). The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII (J.A. Miller, Ed., A. R. Price, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Leibniz, G. W. (1985). The Monadology. In R. Latta (Trans.), The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGinn, C. (1991). The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards a Resolution. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. McGinn, C. (1996). The Character of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGinn, C. (1999). The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books. Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1996). On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (D. Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nykänen, H. (2002). The ‘I’ the ‘You’ and the Soul: An Ethics of Conscience. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1991). The Sexual Masquerade: A Lacanian Theory of Sexual Difference. In E. Ragland-Sullivan & M. Bracher (Eds.), Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York and London: Routledge. Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Searle, J. (1997). The Mystery of Consciousness: Exchanges with Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. London: Granta Books. Searle, J. (2002). Consciousness and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (2007). Putting Consciousness Back in the Brain: Reply to Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. In M.  Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, & J. Searle (Eds.), Neuroscience & Philosophy: Brain, Mind & Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Toivakainen, N. (2015). The Moral Roots of Conceptual Confusion in Artificial Intelligence Research. The American Philosophical Association Newsletter: Philosophy and Computers., 14(2), 20–31. Toivakainen, N. (2017). To Think for Oneself—Philosophy as the Unraveling of Moral Responsibility. In M. A. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education (pp. 729–741). Singapore: Springer Nature.

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Toivakainen, N. (2018). Automation Technology in the Dynamics of Modernity: An Essay on Technology, Social Organization, and Existential Concerns. In S. Tzafestas (Ed.), Information, Communication, and Automation Ethics in the Knowledge Society Age (pp. 237–270). New York: Nova Science Publishers. Verhaeghe, P. (2002). Lacan’s Answer to the Classical Mind/Body Deadlock: Retracing Freud’s Beyond. In S. Barnard & B. Fink (Eds.), Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (pp. 109–139). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Verhaeghe, P. (2009). New Studies of Old Villains: A Radical Reconstruction of the Oedipus Complex. New York: Other Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (G.  E. M.  Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

11 Who Wants to Be Understood? The Desire for Social Affirmation and the Existential Challenge of Self-Understanding Fredrik Westerlund

1. Introduction In the history of philosophy, there has from the outset been a strong tendency to avoid digging into the existential concerns and motives that are involved in—obstruct, distort, enable—knowledge and understanding. Aristotle’s assertion at the beginning of his Metaphysics that ‘all men by nature desire to know’ (1984) gives paradigmatic expression to the penchant of philosophy to accept as its unquestioned starting point the idea that human beings are driven by something like a will to truth or a hunger for knowledge. Throughout the history of philosophy, different versions of this comfortable yet fundamentally unclear belief in an unproblematic desire to know have functioned as a pretext for not raising the question concerning the existential motives and challenges of knowledge: What does it mean to want to know? What might make us fear and dislike knowledge? What makes us want to deceive ourselves, to see what we want to see and to repress what we don’t want to see? What existential challenges are involved in knowledge and understanding? One result of F. Westerlund (*) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_11

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the general failure to interrogate the existential challenges of knowledge and understanding is that philosophers have primarily conceived of the difficulties of understanding as cognitive in nature, as difficulties having to do with cognitively accessing and analysing the matters in question. Of course, the tendency indicated above has not been all-pervasive. As is well-known, the tradition of philosophy has included a heterogenous array of thinkers who in different ways have questioned the dominant belief in our will to truth. At the beginning of the tradition, Socrates already points to the connections between knowledge, will, and emotions. More recently, thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud have proposed that what presents itself as disinterested thinking driven solely by a will to truth may in fact be motivated by a will to repress unwanted or painful truths, and to picture the world in a way that serves particular existential desires and goals. The general inclination of philosophy to dodge the question concerning the existential challenges of understanding also comprises the issue of self-understanding. At least since Descartes, it has been common to think that whereas we have direct access to our own conscious experience, understanding other persons poses basic difficulties. Since we do not have direct access to other minds and since understanding others is always a matter of making indirect inferences and conjectures on the basis of their outward appearances, such understanding is difficult and imperfect. Furthermore, there is the entire discussion about the problems involved in understanding alien cultures and epochs. In this picture, the task of understanding oneself or one’s own culture appears as a comparatively unproblematic and easy task. However, even when the difficulties of self-­ understanding have been thematised—as has increasingly been the case in recent debates—they have primarily been conceived of as cognitive in nature. For example, naturalistically inclined philosophers have claimed that our reflective access to our own first-person experiences is fundamentally deficient—because it is unable to establish objectively verifiable empirical knowledge and/or because it does not reach the basic neurological domain that explains our experiences—and that only empirical research into the neurological workings of the brain and the body can give us basic and objective knowledge of the mind (cf., e.g., Dennett, 1991; ­ henomenological Churchland, 1988; Churchland, 2013). Moreover, p

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philosophers have argued that self-reflection is cognitively demanding. Whereas we are normally directed outwards towards the intentional objects of our experience, self-reflection requires that we—in an unnatural and awkward manner—turn our attention from the objects of our experience towards our own experiencing self (cf., e.g., Husserl, 2014 [1913]; Heidegger, 1962 [1927]). In this chapter, I will not deal with—or assess the standard conceptions of—the possible cognitive difficulties in understanding ourselves.1 Instead, I will delve into the existential difficulties and challenges of self-­ understanding. More precisely, I will attempt to demonstrate and articulate the immense potential of our desire for social affirmation to obstruct our understanding of ourselves, mostly in a covert manner. To be sure, it has not been uncommon among philosophers to allude, in a more or less implicit and self-serving manner, to the idea that people in general have a desire to conform to the opinions of their group and that in order to attain knowledge one must achieve independence from collective pressure and prejudice. However, although there is clearly some truth to this idea, it has mostly been left vague and unclarified. My objective here is to show that our urge for affirmation goes deep into our self-understanding and that its potential to influence and distort our seemingly independent thinking is much greater than we usually recognise and acknowledge. This implies that self-understanding is essentially an existential challenge. Whatever the cognitive demands of understanding and our ability to meet these demands may be, I want to suggest that we can never understand more about ourselves than we are existentially willing to face and acknowledge.

2. Are We Sure We Want to Be Understood? Listening to our everyday speech and thought, it is easy to get the impression that there is nothing we want more than to understand ourselves and be understood by others. We often declare—to others and to ourselves— that we long to be understood and to be seen as we really and truly are by others. This wish to be understood concerns both our significant others and the community we live in. We bitterly lament it when we feel that we

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have not been understood or seen. Sometimes, we may even be overcome by the dark and self-pitying thought that nobody will ever understand us. If one takes this way of thinking and talking at face value, one is presented with the bewilderingly happy picture of the human being as a creature who passionately desires to seek and hear the truth about herself and who longs for interpersonal relations characterised by mutual open understanding. This sounds too good to be true. Indeed, it sounds as if some kind of self-deception and illusion was at work here. So, what do we as a rule want when we state that we want to be understood and seen? What wish comes to expression here? My suggestion is that very often, perhaps for the most part, our avowed will to be understood is in fact an expression of our will to be affirmed. In so far as this is the case, what we wish for is not unqualified understanding. Rather, what we want is to be understood in a certain way, namely in a way that in some sense affirms us and supports a conception of ourselves as socially affirmable and respectable. If, by contrast, we would encounter somebody who actually saw and understood us beyond this wish—and who did not refrain from shining light on our problems, self-deceptions, and shames—we would likely react with pain and anxiety. In fact, it is not improbable that, precisely at the moment of being understood, we would feel misunderstood and unfairly judged. What is this desire to be affirmed? Why does it regularly present itself as a will to understanding, although unqualified understanding is not what we seek here? How should we understand the immense power of our urge for affirmation to induce repression and self-deception?

 . Love, Social Self-Consciousness, 3 and the Desire for Affirmation During the last decades, many philosophers, psychologists and sociologists have highlighted the need and desire for social affirmation and recognition as essential to our psychological well-being (cf., e.g., Honneth, 1996; Taylor, 1991).2 It has been repeatedly emphasised that social affirmation is crucial to our self-respect and self-esteem—to our ability to

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respect and value our own self, to relate with trust and hope to our surrounding social world, and not plunge into debilitating shame, anxiety, and depression. The emphasis on the psychological-existential importance of social affirmation has gone hand in hand with a heightened moral sensitivity to the need and demand to affirm others. In particular, the moral demand to respect and affirm others has been stressed in relation to people belonging to groups that are devalued or oppressed by the social elite or majority. Now, I think it is obvious that our experience of being socially affirmed or not affirmed tends to have immense impact on our psychological welfare. It is also clear that relating to others with contempt or hatred is a paradigmatic form of evil in which we close ourselves to, depersonalise and harm others. However, despite the emphasis and attention given to our urge for social affirmation, not much has been done to try to understand and critically reflect on the ethical and existential sense of this urge. Indeed, it is not unlikely that the governing sense of the moral and political obligation to meet and respect this psychologically central urge has suppressed the impulse to inquire in this direction. How so? Well, I want to suggest that our desire for social affirmation is ethically-­ existentially deficient and problematic in many respects. In so far as we are dominated by this desire, our attitude is fundamentally self-concerned and closed to others.3 Moreover, the urge for affirmation motivates a kind of self-assessment that is inherently distortive and deceptive. In this chapter, I will mainly focus on the second aspect. So, what is the desire for social affirmation? The ensuing depiction will of necessity be sketchy and provisional. However, I hope it will suffice as background for my analysis of the internal tendency of this desire to hold down and distort our self-understanding. Let me begin by naming two basic human concerns that, I contend, ultimately motivate our urge for social affirmation. First off, I want to insist that, in a very fundamental way, we care for and desire the company of other people. I will call this basic care and desire for others ‘love’, although I am aware of the potential misunderstandings this brings with it, given that the term can refer to a plethora of different emotions and attitudes. When I talk about love, I thus refer to our care for others as

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individual persons who concern us, and our longing to be together with them in a manner of loving and open contact—not wearing social masks or relating to them as a means to some external purpose. In addition to this, we are concerned about others for quite self-­ concerned and instrumental reasons. We are vulnerable and mortal creatures who can get hurt and who can die, and we are always conscious of this predicament. Out of this apprehensive self-awareness, others are present to us both as a potential threat and as a potential aid. While we know that they can hurt and even kill us, they are also there for us as our most central means for achieving safety, control and well-being. My suggestion is that both these motives form the source which animates our desire for social affirmation. To understand the desire for affirmation, we need to see how the motives get invested in and shaped by our social self-consciousness, that is, by our ability to sense how others see us and how we appear in their eyes. As human beings, we have the basic ability to sense and understand— more or less astutely—how others see, think, and feel about us. Looking into their eyes, seeing their gestures, and listening to their speech, we can sense the movements of their soul and how they relate to us: their fear, their joy, their love, their pretence, their hatred, their contempt. However, we do not only have a sense of how others relate to us; we also have an equally basic sense of how we appear in their eyes: as frightening, attractive, powerful, disgusting, despicable, etc. What I call the desire for social affirmation is nothing but our intense desire to be affirmed—liked, esteemed, respected—by, and to appear affirmable—likeable, worthy, respectable—to others. Correspondingly, we dread the prospect of being seen by others as non-affirmable, unworthy, despicable. This means that in so far as we are driven by the desire for affirmation, we are hypersensitive to how others see us and to the appearance we present to them. It seems to us that our ability to gain affirmation is decisive for our possibilities of achieving safety, power, and—above all—love. To comprehend the nature and force of our desire for affirmation, it is crucial to recognise that it goes deep into our self-understanding. In desiring social affirmation, we are not only concerned with how others see us and judge us in contrast to how we see and assess ourselves. Rather, we also have a direct sense of ourselves as we appear in terms of

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our capacity to achieve affirmation. We have always already to some extent internalised the values and norms that regulate the valuations of our group and we can see and judge ourselves directly in the light of these values. This means that regardless of whether anybody else is present—in person or in imagination—we have an emotionally charged and very concrete consciousness of ourselves as objects of social evaluation. The judging self-consciousness does not only target our outer appearance but our entire being. Is the person that I see and who I am beautiful, intelligent, good—that is, capable of achieving affirmation? Or is he ugly, stupid, corrupt? Our affirmation-seeking self-consciousness constitutes the centre of what is often called our ‘self-conscious emotions’, to which belong, for example, pride, self-esteem, embarrassment, and shame. All these emotions can be understood as our reactions to how we see ourselves in the light of our urge for affirmation. For instance, whereas in pride we see ourselves as affirmable and admirable, shame is the agonising perception of ourselves as non-affirmable and despicable.4

4. Potential for Obstruction and Distortion So how does the desire for affirmation affect our self-understanding? In what follows, I will argue that this desire is a primary source of obstruction and distortion when it comes to our understanding of ourselves. In our dealings with other people, the desire for affirmation makes us want to act and talk in ways that make us appear affirmable and likeable in their eyes. It makes us prone to be sensitive to and internalise the values and norms of our group as the measures we need to live up to in order to achieve affirmation. It motivates us to do and say things that we think others will value whereas we try to suppress everything in ourselves that threatens to undermine this goal by soiling our appearance. Instead of openly saying and expressing what is on our mind, we hold back the thoughts and emotions—the anger, the tears, the love, the joy—that may cause aversion. In addition to driving us to present ourselves as affirmable to others, the desire for affirmation is a desire to see and conceive of ourselves as

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affirmable. We are directly conscious of our own affirmability and it seems to us that the image we see is decisive for our prospects of attaining respect and affirmation. Hence, the desire for affirmation is a force that influences how we see ourselves. How does it do this? Obviously, the desire for social affirmation is not in itself a desire for understanding. When it comes to self-understanding, it is, precisely, a desire to conceive of ourselves as affirmable. When our self-understanding is moved by this desire, we are not interested in openly understanding ourselves or the world. Rather, we are interested—in an emotionally fraught manner—in assessing our own affirmability, such that we hope to see ourselves as affirmable and dread the view of ourselves as non-affirmable. In so far as we are driven by our desire for affirmation we are interested in and attentive to matters—to ourselves and to the world and people around us—only with respect to how they might affect our social worth. Moreover, the desire for affirmation motivates a will and an effort to conceive of ourselves and our affirmability in as positive a manner as possible. That is, it prompts us to try to interpret ourselves in a way that makes us emerge as affirmable and socially worthy. This pull towards idealisation goes along with an inclination to repress and interpret away anything that threatens to undermine our conception of ourselves as affirmable. Although our capacity to see what we want to see and repress what we do not want to see is formidable, we can of course fail, which means that we come to perceive ourselves as non-affirmable and socially worthless persons. Depending on the severity and quality of our negative self-­ assessment, we are overcome by emotions such as shame and depression. However, the fact that shame and depression spell failure to our effort at idealisation and repression does not mean that they would reveal the hidden ugly truth about ourselves. Given that we are here merely concerned about our affirmability, the negative self-assessment is merely a measuring of our social worth that has little to do with self-understanding. Indeed, just as our will to appear affirmable makes us prone to interpret ourselves in an idealising manner, our anxiety and depression tend to incline us to attend to things that threaten and dirty our self-conception.5

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Let us—to take a readily available example—think about how the desire for affirmation might influence the self-understanding of an academic philosopher. To bolster my sense of my affirmability and to avoid the continuously threatening menace of emerging as non-affirmable and worthless, I might, for example be tempted to do the following. Regardless of the truth, I might feel pulled to think of my own field of research as of great importance and to evaluate my own philosophical theses and arguments as positively as possible; I might be inclined to evaluate the scientific group that I belong to and that appreciates my work as especially enlightened; I might want to think of the philosopher as playing an important role in society and in history and I might feel a pull to think of the virtues and capacities that I think I possess as a philosopher as supremely valuable. Correspondingly, I might feel inclined to repress and dismiss all views and utterances that threaten the conceptions in which I have invested my urge for affirmation as in some sense irrelevant: unconvincing, shallow, unscientific, unjust, stupid, unintelligible, etc. In case I would fail to live up to the values and virtues that I have appropriated, I might try to come up with a new understanding of what is important. In case I would fail to achieve recognition within my research community, I might be tempted to write off these people with envy and contempt as shallow idiots, instead succumbing to ressentiment and putting my faith in a group—perhaps a dreamt-up or future group, perhaps God—that understands my genius. The  potential of our urge for social affirmation to affect different areas of our understanding is in the end limitless. This is because our assessment and view of our own affirmability essentially involves and is dependent on our understanding of others and of the rest of reality. Everything is potentially relevant here, which means that everything can become the object of our effort to interpret things in a way that confirms—or, as in the case of anxiety and depression, disconfirms— our affirmability. Hence, our urge for affirmation may affect our understanding, for example, of what is ethically-existentially valuable, of which people are important and insightful, of how the social, economic, and natural worlds work, of what others think and feel, of

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whether God or gods exist, of what amounts to knowledge and truth and true science, of how history should be written, of which jobs and tasks are important, of how to conceive of ­sexuality, gender, religion, skin colour, money, refugees, luck, illness, climate change, art, culture, and so on.

5. We Do Not Know What We Want Ultimately, I want to suggest that when driven by our urge for affirmation we are fundamentally confused and deceived about what we desire. Above, I claimed that the desire for affirmation is centrally rooted in our desire for love and contact with other persons. We long for being together with others in an open and loving manner. When in the grip of our urge for affirmation, it seems to us as if appearing affirmable would condition and secure our possibility of attaining love, and as if failure in this respect would sentence us to a life without love. Perhaps one could say that what the desire for affirmation promises us is something like a power or capacity to attain love. This, however, is a momentous self-deception. Why? The basic problem is that in so far as we give way to the desire to achieve affirmation—and, in the end, love—we abandon, precisely, love.6 That is, we do not relate to others in an open and loving manner. We do not welcome them and care about them as the persons that they are, and we do not reach out towards them and express ourselves to them in an unqualified manner. In short, we do not venture the possibility of being ourselves and encountering each other without social masks. Instead, succumbing to our anxious urge for affirmation we are intent on appearing affirmable and likeable to the other. In this, we do not openly speak our minds in the hope that the other will welcome us as the persons that we are. Rather, we strive to present an image of ourselves as affirmable while repressing anything in ourselves that might threaten this image. Furthermore, while dominated by the desire for affirmation, we do not care for and open up to others as persons. Rather, we are egocen-

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trically concerned about our own affirmability, whereas the others figure as the audience that observes us and judges us. Here, we only care about them as the look that judges us. We do not relate to them as persons to care about and encounter in an open way. This also means that, despite our assurances to the contrary, we are certainly not interested in hearing the honest opinions of others or in being understood by them in an unqualified manner. Rather, we want others to conceive of us in ways that bolster our sense of ourselves as affirmable. When they do this, we tend to feel and think that we have been seen and understood. By contrast, when others think or say things that threaten our sense of ourselves as affirmable, our anxiety makes us prone to resist their opinions or to disqualify them as persons. We may, for instance, react with anger, heatedly accusing the others of interpreting us in an unjust and fraudulent manner; or we might react with contempt, conceiving of the others as worthless or insignificant characters whose opinions we can safely ignore. So no, when we are driven by the urge for affirmation we do not want others to speak their mind and we do not want them to see and understand us if this does not serve this urge. To be sure, we tell ourselves that we want others to be honest and to mean what they say. After all, what would be the point of their flattery if it was obvious that they were lying? Still, we only want their honesty in so far as we want to hear what they have to say. Everybody is familiar with the tragicomedies that are regularly played out when somebody professes to want to know the truth without really wanting it. Hence, when I sense the falsity of my friend’s praise, I do not say ‘Please, tell me what you really think! I want to know it—even if it hurts!’ Instead, I say: ‘Do you really mean that? Are you sure you don’t just say it because I want to hear it?’ And my friend, who knows what I want and who does not want to hurt me, assures me that she meant what she said. To get a sense of the fundamentally deceptive nature of our desire for affirmation, consider what it would mean if our dream of achieving affirmation came true. What would this mean? What happens when we try to envision the end goal of this desire? What would it mean if I would unexpectedly be hailed as the greatest philosopher in the world and if, moreover, I would be firmly convinced

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of the truth of the splendid image of myself as a philosopher of superior social worth? Well, strictly speaking, this would merely mean that a large amount of people—including myself—would like and admire my image and persona as a great thinker. However, this perfect success would not by itself have brought me one millimetre closer to love. The audience would be mesmerised by my image—not by me—and I would be taken in by their admiration—not by them as persons. Behind the apparent splendour of my success I might still be living a lonely and alienated life without love. Perhaps one could say that realising one’s dreams of affirmation while lacking love in one’s life would be like being praised and admired as the hero of a play that has nothing to do with oneself and one’s deepest longings. The paradox is that it is precisely the desire for affirmation—and our effort to enhance our capacity to be loved—that makes love so immensely difficult and threatening. Love requires us to drop our social masks and encounter each other in an open and loving way. Hence, from the perspective of the urge for affirmation love itself appears as the definite threat to our effort to secure love. In addition to being fundamentally confused about what it assesses, our affirmation-seeking self-assessment is an inherently unreliable and distortive measure of how others see and judge our social value. In self-­ consciously assessing our affirmability we tend to be conscious of ourselves—of how we appear—while not being very open and receptive to how others actually see us. Given this closedness to the views of others and given the emotional character of our self-consciousness, our self-­ assessment is likely to be highly influenced by the emotional atmosphere—our anxiety versus our effort at idealisation—of the assessment. Moreover, in assessing our own appearance, we tend to apprehend others as the anonymous and homogenous audience of this appearance. Hence, our self-conscious assessment of our social worth standardly takes the form of a reifying assessment of how we appear and are seen by ‘the others’, which is strongly influenced by our sensitivity to traits and signs that confirm our present emotional disposition, and which is only loosely connected to what particular others actually think about us.

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 . The Shine of Truth and the Question 6 of Personal Identity However, if I am right that our urge for affirmation is a prime obstacle to self-understanding, how come we nevertheless tend to conceive of the self-assessments issuing from this urge as true self-understanding? In fact, the desire for affirmation itself constitutes a central motive for conceiving of the assessments that corroborate our sense of our affirmability as true and insightful. Naturally, we feel inclined to think of these assessments as true and to think of understandings that threaten them as false. Conceiving of our affirmation-driven understandings as true provides a kind of normative framework that legitimises our own perspective and puts certain demands on others. If we conceive of our affirmation-­seeking understanding of ourselves as the truth about ourselves, then clinging to this understanding is a mark of our insight and will to truth. In this, we can also think that others have an epistemological-moral obligation to acknowledge our self-understanding as true. Moreover, whether positive or negative, it belongs to our evaluating self-perception that we have a very concrete quasi-perceptive sense of our own appearance and value. We do not only grasp in an abstract manner how others might think about us. We directly feel and perceive our own self as impressive and attractive or as shameful and repulsive. In short, it is not difficult to understand that our affirmation-seeking self-assessments tend to masquerade as true understanding. In this connection, we should briefly attend to the issue of our personal ideal identity. The reason for this is that we tend to conceive of our identity as our true self although it tends to be rooted in our desire for affirmation. We generally develop and maintain a personal identity that is constituted by the values and ideals that define who we, ideally, are. What needs to be seen is that the desire for affirmation tends to get heavily invested in our identity. Beyond our day to day struggle to present ourselves as affirmable and avoid disgrace and shame, we develop an ideal identity that carries our hopes for achieving affirmation. In so far as our

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identity is motivated and fuelled by our urge for affirmation, it is an ideal conception of ourselves as socially affirmable. It is precisely on account of its rootedness in our urge for affirmation that our identity functions as a central determinant of our self-conscious emotions. We strongly feel that we need to live up to the values of our identity in order to retain our self-­ esteem and achieve the affirmation we long for. By contrast, if we violate or fail to live up to our identity, we are bound to feel shame and to lose hope in our ability to be affirmed. The values and ideals of our identity may be of all kinds. They may concern our ethical-existential character, our societal task and work, our worldly success and prosperity, our skills and talents and character traits, our sexuality, our gender, our skin colour, our religion, and so on.7 So, what about our inclination to conceive of our identity as our true self that we want others to see and recognise? Clearly, the desire for affirmation is a strong motive for wanting to believe in our own identity as in some sense true and realistic, and we want others to recognise and confirm it as such. Our conception of our identity is emotionally loaded. After all, we sense that our prospects of achieving affirmation depend on it. However, to say and believe that our identity constitutes our true self is deceptive. In so far as our identity is rooted in our urge for affirmation it is nothing but an ideal picture of ourselves as affirmable that we have developed and maintain and that we strive to live up to as our promise of and path to affirmation. The values and ideals constituting our identity may be more or less rooted in genuine understanding and they may be more less ethically-existentially good or corrupt: being loving, courageous, cunning, ruthless, rich, sexy, strong; being a philosopher, a Nazi, a businessperson, a gang member; being black, white, gay, hetero, etc. Moreover, our conception of our own capacity of living up to our identity may be more or less realistic. Still, to the extent that we are here moved by our urge for affirmation, we are not interested in openly understanding ourselves. Rather, we are drawn to the values and ideals of our identity and to the relevant traits in ourselves as materials for an ideal picture that can carry our hopes for affirmation. In this, we are strongly inclined to endorse whatever helps us build and believe in our identity and to pass over and repress all disturbing elements.

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In the end, if the urge for affirmation is what drives me, my understanding of the meaning of my identity will be deceptive. Far from being the vehicle that will help me be myself in an open and loving relation to others, it essentially remains another social mask that promises to secure the possibility of love although it in facts holds it down. It may be good to note that here I focus exclusively on our identity as rooted in and playing a key role in our desire for affirmation. I do not claim that all understandings of who we are and want to be would be reducible to this function. Thinking about who we are and how we want to live our life may mean many things. We may—beyond and against our urge for affirmation—actually try to understand our own motives, feelings and problems in our relations to others. Also, we may attempt to picture the life we want to live and the work we want to do in the world, not just on the basis of our urge for affirmation but from the point of view of other motives—such as love, responsibility, inclination—and of a vision of what is needed and possible in the present world. Nevertheless, I do think that the desire for affirmation is an immense force that tends to pervade our conception and talk about who we are, very often in a way that we fail to acknowledge. The question of when and where it is this force that propels us is a question that each of us has to think about and answer for himself or herself.

 . The Existential Challenge 7 of Self-Understanding The main objective of this chapter has been to lay bare and articulate the massive potential of our desire for social affirmation to obstruct and distort our self-understanding—usually without our noticing, or wanting to notice, this. Let me sum up. Given that the desire for affirmation is one of our strongest motives and given our social self-consciousness, we are always and everywhere concerned about and drawn to assess and attend to matters in terms of how they affect our social worth. Hence, we are also drawn to conceive of ourselves in ways that confirm and bolster our

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affirmability and repress whatever threatens it. Since our assessment of our affirmability also involves our understanding of others, of the social world, and of reality at large, the potential of the urge for affirmation to affect our understanding is limitless. Ultimately, I suggested that in desiring social affirmation we are basically confused and deceived about what we desire, such that in desiring and pursuing affirmation we are in fact counteracting the possibility of love and affiliation that we hope affirmation will bring us. In all this, the urge for affirmation also motivates us to conceive of our affirmation-seeking self-assessment as true self-­ understanding in a way that covers up its deceptive nature. The analysis conducted above suggests that self-understanding is essentially an existential, not just a cognitive, challenge. Recognising the immense capacity of the desire for affirmation to affect and distort our understanding, we can see that being existentially ready and willing to understand is a prerequisite for understanding ourselves in an open and unprejudiced manner. Meeting the possible cognitive demands of self-­ understanding—say, engaging in self-reflection, attending to and withstanding prejudices, striving for clarity and distinctness, and surveying the relevant literature—is not enough for attaining understanding. Without a basic willingness to acknowledge and see the matters at stake, no amount of purely cognitive ability will by itself grant us understanding. In fact, without such a willingness, we will be drawn to put our cognitive skills in the service of our desire for affirmation, developing understandings and arguments that—more or less directly—serve this urge and repress what we experience as threatening to it. Hence, it is only when motivated by the right existential spirit that our cognitive abilities and skills can play their possible roles in enabling and advancing our understanding. Above, I have tried to describe in general terms how the urge for affirmation works in and influences our self-understanding. However, it is important to stress that this general description eventually points towards the deeply personal task of reflecting on how this desire is present in oneself and in one’s understanding. Needless to say, it is the personal task that is the crucial and difficult one. In fact, attaining a general understanding of the workings of our desire for social affirmation may be easy enough since this does not necessarily pose a threat to this desire. Perhaps elabo-

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rating this kind of understanding merely boosts our sense of our own insightfulness. What is existentially demanding is to actually interrogate the understandings of ourselves and our identity in which we actually have invested our desire for affirmation. Even more demanding is to try to lessen the grip that this desire has on us and try to relate to others and to ourselves in an open and loving manner without thinking about how what we do or say affects our affirmability.

Notes 1. As concerns the cognitive difficulties of self-understanding and the traditional propensity to focus exclusively on them, suffice it to say the following: In contrast to Dennett and other naturalist sceptics, I have no doubt as to our basic openness to, and our ability to phenomenologically access and understand, ourselves and others. Within this framework, I think there are indeed some cognitive challenges involved in self-understanding. However, in so far as one turns away and abstracts from the ethical-­ existential setting in which all self-understanding takes place—that is, from all the interpersonal concerns and motives that make self-­ understanding an emotionally charged and existentially challenging affair in the first place—and focuses entirely on the cognitive difficulties of understanding, one will be prone to misrepresent and exaggerate the cognitive difficulties themselves. Finally, it is important to recognise that the inclination to interpret existential difficulties as cognitive difficulties can in itself be motivated by unacknowledged existential desires, for example, by the desire to find intellectual solutions to personally demanding ethical-­existential problems that we do not dare to acknowledge and face as such. 2. Both Honneth and Taylor draw their principal inspiration from Hegel’s thinking about recognition. 3. I present my view of the moral deficits of the urge for social affirmation in more detail in Westerlund (Forthcoming). 4. In Westerlund (2019), I offer a phenomenological analysis of shame as rooted in the desire for affirmation and conditioned by our capacity for social self-consciousness. For other accounts of shame that emphasise the central role of social self-consciousness, see Sartre (2003 [1943]); Rochat (2009); Zahavi (2014); Montes Sánchez (2015).

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5. Bernard Williams (1993) has famously argued that shame, due to the sensitivity to the opinions and views of others that goes along with it, has an important role to play in our moral self-reflection. However, this idea seems misguided. As I see it, the problem with shame is that in shame—as in all self-assessments that are rooted in our desire for affirmation—we are not interested in openly understanding ourselves or others; rather, we are merely egocentrically concerned about measuring, and, if possible, enhancing, the affirmability and social worth of our appearance. This means that shame, by itself, cannot bring us self-understanding. For two recent attempts to defend the potential of shame to contribute to moral self-critique and self-understanding, see Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni (2012) and Thomason (2018). 6. For a kindred view on this matter, see Backström (2007, pp. 466–81) and Nykänen (2009, pp. 166–82). 7. For more about the role of identity and values in shame, see Westerlund (2019, pp. 76–82).

References Aristotle (1984). Metaphysics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2 (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Backström, J. (2007). The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Churchland, P.  M. (1988). Matter and Consciousness (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Churchland, P. S. (2013). Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Dennett, D.  C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Deonna, J. A., Rodogno, R., & Teroni, F. (2012). In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Honneth, A. (1996). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (J. Anderson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Husserl, E. (2014 [1913]). Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (D. Dahlstrom, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Montes Sánchez, A. (2015). Shame and the Internalized Other. Etica & Politica/ Ethics & Politics, 17(2), 180–199. Nykänen, H. (2009). Samvetet och det dolda—om kärlek och kollektivitet. Ludvika: Dualis förlag. Rochat, P. (2009). Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (2003 [1943]). Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (H. Barnes, Trans.). London: Routledge. Taylor, C. (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomason, K. K. (2018). Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Westerlund, F. (2019). To See Oneself as Seen by Others: A Phenomenological Analysis of the Interpersonal Motives and Structure of Shame. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 50, 60–89. Westerlund, F. (Forthcoming). Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, B. (1993). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12 This Thing with Philosophy Hannes Nykänen

1. Introduction There is a sense in which philosophy is the most unscientific discipline there is. In no other discipline do judgements about what is valuable and what is rubbish differ so wildly as in philosophy. A philosopher who for some academics represents a high-point in Western thinking may in the opinion of other academics be considered so inadequate as to not even qualify as a philosopher. (If there are disputes in other disciplines that come close to the hostility of philosophical debates, this is because they touch upon underlying philosophical or moral issues.) Whatever school they belong to, most philosophers swear by the name of objective knowledge.1 Yet, philosophers seem utterly unable to recognise rigorous philosophical thinking when it differs from their own. It belongs to the order of the day in philosophy that philosophers make ridiculous overestimations of colleagues that belong to their own camp and horrible underestimations of philosophers that belong to a foreign camp. These are the kind of misjudgements that the champions of objectivity are making on a daily basis. How can it be that philosophers disagree so wildly about what is reasonable? Should not the faculty of reasoning be the paradigm of clarity? H. Nykänen (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_12

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And why are philosophers not perplexed by this chaotic state of affairs? It seems that there is something in philosophical questioning itself that touches upon personal issues in a way in which problems in other sciences do not. And after all it is not surprising that the question concerning the nature of reasoning raises problems of a personal kind, for it is always someone who does the reasoning; someone for whom reasoning is a concern. In this chapter I will try to illuminate the character of the difficulty that goes with this connection between thinking and what seems to be deeply personal. I imagine that most philosophers would say that philosophy’s occupation with reasoning has its source in an effort of trying to establish the grounds for true knowledge. But why would a pursuit of knowledge as such generate such heat? Socrates’ answer to this question would be that the issue of knowledge as such is connected to self-knowledge, and self-­ knowledge is an ethical concern. However, self-knowledge for Socrates is not a concern only for one’s own mental states but necessarily involves another person as interlocutor.2 But how should the connection between knowledge as such and self-­ knowledge be understood and how does the other enter the picture? Irrespectively of the school they represent, philosophical theses typically try to locate something that prevents us from seeing things as they are. This something seems to be closely connected to thinking in that it has a tendency to obscure thinking. Can there be a single thing behind all philosophical obscurities? What could it be? Whatever it is, I will assume that becoming clear about it is as urgent as anything can be. Now let me try to approach this urgent something by giving a short account of what I think is involved here. In this connection I will utilise certain themes from Socrates, Kant and (the early) Wittgenstein. If one thinks that the most important task of a human being is to know herself, then obviously there is something about this task that is terribly difficult in an unexpected way. For ‘normally’ one would be inclined to think that ‘knowing oneself ’ is both the easiest thing there is and a precondition for knowing others. Since, as Socrates thinks, the other is necessarily connected to the problem of knowing oneself, there must also be something terribly difficult about the relationship between the self and the other, between ‘I’ and ‘you’. This is why the task of know-

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ing oneself is an ethical task. Nevertheless, the issue of knowing oneself together with knowing the other is for some reason connected to the concept of knowledge as such. So on my interpretation of the Socratic outlook we have here the following questions: first, what does it mean to say that knowing oneself is necessarily connected to knowing the other? This is in my view the same as asking ‘what is ethics?’ Second, in what sense is the philosophical question concerning knowledge as such connected to the question of ethics? It seems to me that philosophy has not dared to address this Socratic problematic. To be sure, Kant did think that the question of knowledge as such, its possibility, is related to ethics in the sense that his main task was to show that freedom is theoretically speaking possible and practically speaking necessary. (Kant in fact says that it is the ‘Socratic method’ that silences ‘for ever’ those who question morality and religion, see Kant, 1979, p. 18.) It is not only that his basic division of reality into phenomenality and noumenality is motivated by moral concerns; the division in question is intelligible at all only from the point of view of practical reason. But despite the centrality ethics has in Kant’s philosophy, it is hampered by the fact that the other is in a certain sense completely absent. The central concern for Kant is ‘duty’—not the you. In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus too, ethics was all-important, but as something that according to him could not be included in the book; ethics was, as he said, all between the lines. Here ethics cannot be present in philosophical discourse at all. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought that he had dissolved philosophical problems but in fact he just ignored their ethical aspects. It did not strike him that philosophical confusions are unavoidably intertwined with ethical confusions. When this is not seen, what remains for philosophy (insofar this term is still applicable here) are just things that can be completely clearly expressed, and then nonsense. It certainly is true that if you just focus on what can be clearly expressed, there will be no philosophical problems. The problem is that this does not do anything to illuminate the character of philosophical problems; it rather involves simply abandoning them. Perhaps it was a vague insight about this that inspired Wittgenstein to take up anew what he thought he had already left behind.3

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2. The Consequences of Denial In this chapter, I am going to show why I think that ethics lies at the centre of philosophical thinking. What I say involves that the more flawed our account of ethics is, the more flawed is our response to the question what philosophy is all about. Clarifying what philosophy is all about goes hand in hand with clarifying what ethics is all about. The sense in which my investigation makes contact with philosophy of mind is that my way of characterising philosophical problems takes its departure from a point of view—if that is what it is—that has features of both ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology though not in the sense these terms are usually understood. My reason for coupling philosophy with ethics is of course unclear so far, but it already allows us to form a vague idea why philosophy has always been in such a miserable state: the differences between philosophical schools could have their source in unacknowledged differences in moral outlooks. This would explain the odd fervour of philosophical discussions. The Socratic constellation involves the thought that the temptation to misdescribe ethics arises from the difficulties of knowing oneself in a sense which is inseparable from knowing the other. Further, the temptation to misdescribe ethics is internally connected to the birth of fundamental philosophical problems concerning knowledge. My aim is to reveal certain central features of these connections. I will try to show how a refusal to understand arises and acquires a fundamental philosophical role. This refusal, which shows itself as scepticism, acquires a methodological manifestation in that a certain construal of the concept of object serves as an ideal for thinking. This model is then used to imply that forms of understanding that ‘lack’ this allegedly robust relation to objects are inherently questionable. (Logic is seen as central because it provides formal proofs of the validity of different ways of assessing relations between objects.) The philosopher is a sceptic and sees it as her intellectual duty to question any account in every intelligible way. The assumption is that in this way one will find some supposedly basic object-related facts that cannot be questioned (Descartes undoubt-

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edly has a key role here). Whatever those facts are taken to be, they are supposed to show that statements that do not conform to these facts are rationally questionable. More essentially, this objectivist ideal of philosophical reasoning means that understanding other persons becomes so uncertain that ‘strictly speaking’ one cannot even know whether other minds exist, ‘other’, that is, than ‘mine’. The other side of the transcendentalisation of both the ‘I’ and the object is the estrangement of the ‘you’. But as will become clear, also the thinking person is here separated from his/her own understanding. Now, let me introduce an everyday situation where an analogue to the above outlined philosophical refusal to understand takes place. Imagine a situation where one person is about to do something terribly wrong and another person, a friend, tries to make the potential wrongdoer come to her senses. Imagine, further, that the admonisher is not attacking the wrongdoer in a moralising way, but instead just asks whether the wrongdoer really thinks that she can live with her conscience if she acts according to her plan. Assume further, that the wrongdoer perfectly well understands what the admonisher says because in fact her conscience does trouble her. In her temptation she nevertheless resists the admonisher: ‘So you think that I am about to do something wrong and that I am being heartless. But why are you so sure that the feelings of your heart express the truth of the matter? I feel differently about it. Can you give me a good reason for thinking that your judgement would be the right one and mine the wrong one?’ No matter how common or uncommon cases like this are, they are quite possible, and this is the kind of case I am going to discuss. The case may seem too specific to shed much light on moral issues. However, my aim is precisely to question this kind of marginalisation of conscience. Second, the way I present the case may seem objectionable from the start because it is so, as one might think, biased: the one person is presented as an evildoer and the other as one who hearkens to her conscience. However, for reasons that I hope will become clear, this constellation is important. And the question concerning bias will turn out somewhat awkwardly for the philosopher. It is important to pay attention to a certain asymmetry in our case: the admonisher takes it for granted that the wrongdoer understands her. She does not understand herself as making abstruse points but rather as trying

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to emphasise something that the wrongdoer is well aware of. However, it is equally clear that this is precisely what the wrongdoer denies. The whole issue here is about what is involved in this asymmetry. The way I have presented the issue, the disagreement is not genuine, for the wrongdoer denies her own understanding. I will discuss this kind of case because it will reveal certain philosophical dimensions of what is repressed in this denial. The wrongdoer denies understanding the admonisher. This entails that she claims that she simply does not understand the admonisher’s point of view, or that she understands the situation in another way than the admonisher. That is, the wrongdoer argues as if she were in genuine disagreement with the admonisher—and this is of course what she must do given her attitude. Still, there is a sense in which the wrongdoer herself believes that she is in disagreement with the admonisher. In denying that she understands the admonisher, the wrongdoer believes that she is ‘really’ disagreeing with the admonisher. I will call such behaviour ‘repression’ though, without going into it, what I mean by this concept differs considerably from the psychoanalytic concept. We have an odd constellation here: the admonisher takes it for granted that the wrongdoer understands her while the wrongdoer denies that she does. This means that the wrongdoer also denies that the problem concerning understanding has got anything to do with denial or self-­ deception or anything of the sort. We see that the admonisher’s understanding expresses an understanding where moral issues are about wanting or not wanting to understand what is at stake, while the wrongdoer’s position involves that this is not true at all; that what is at stake is really nothing but two different ways of conceiving an action. We have a very important finding here: if you deny your moral understanding, this involves that you will deny that you deny it and instead claim that you simply have a different understanding. Thus, when you deny your moral understanding this means that you will think of moral problems as intellectual problems, as different ways of conceiving the issue at hand. That is, when you deny your moral understanding you will think of it in a similar way as moral philosophers usually do. It should be noted that to assume that the wrongdoer really does not understand the admonisher involves adopting a moral position where conscience is

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ignored. This of course is precisely what the wrongdoer refuses to admit. Thus, the wrongdoer’s claim that she has a different understanding of ethics is a claim that harbours repression and it is precisely the intellectualising aspect of it that harbours the repression. Here we have another important finding, namely that if one wants to say that ‘objectively speaking’ we just have two different ways of understanding, taking this allegedly independent and neutral point of view cherished in philosophy coincides in fact with the view of the one who denies her moral understanding and conscience—and, in that, also denies that she denies anything. The philosophical point of view shares these denials and is hence not morally neutral at all but identical with the denier’s perspective. The admonisher takes it for granted that the wrongdoer understands her and only pretends not to understand her. In trying to talk the wrongdoer to her wits, the admonisher tries to reach to the wrongdoer personally and hopes that the wrongdoer will be open with her. But the wrongdoer refuses to do this. And again, the wrongdoer would deny that she refuses to be open with the admonisher. The wrongdoer cuts off the personal connection with the admonisher in that she denies that she understands the admonisher. In doing this, the wrongdoer appeals to a general argument that, according to her, anyone would have to accept quite apart from personal feelings: ‘Can you give good reasons for thinking that your judgement would be the right one and mine the wrong one?’ The wrongdoer denies that she understands the admonisher and instead asks the admonisher to come up with an argument that anyone would have to accept quite apart from any personal opinions. That is, when the wrongdoer denies understanding the admonisher, the denial takes the form of a demand for an impersonal argument. The wrongdoer, though denying this fact, does not want to understand the admonisher. In closing off understanding the wrongdoer replaces it with the concept of an ­argument that anyone would, in the name of rationality, have to accept whether she wants it or not. The wrongdoer demands an argument that is independent of what she or the admonisher thinks; an argument that would by virtue of pure rationality prove that her acting is evil. The idea of neutrality that figures here is repressed and hence devious. It hides the

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fact that the whole point of the idea is to conceal that the wrongdoer does not want to understand the admonisher.4 Another aspect of the estrangement introduced by the wrongdoer is the idea that moral responses are expressions of personal interests and emotions. ‘Personal’ means here that interests and emotions are taken to arise from subjective impulses that are only mediately connected to understanding others. We see how denying one’s conscience involves denying that one understands the other and how one, in this denial, appeals to objective reasoning. Moral philosophy sides with the wrongdoer all the way, for it takes for granted that, insofar as moral philosophy is possible, it must be a form of neutral reasoning—though there are of course different opinions about what this is supposed to mean. In our case-study, ‘rational’ and ‘neutral’ acquire their meaning as a result of repression: it is the impersonality of these concepts that is secretly called for. Their ‘point’ is to cover over the understanding between I and you and instead make it seem as if understanding is some kind of intellectual process where two persons who are fundamentally isolated from each other rationally assess the meaning of their ‘subjective representations’ in order to decide whether and to what extent they understand something in similar ways, whether or not some instance of understanding is rationally supportable, and so on. The idea of neutrality of reasoning has its home here, for on this account all understanding involves rational comparison and assessment of representations. (Of course, moral ‘guilt’ can be assigned also in this rational scenario, but for reasons that are, as I will show, obvious such a verdict is, from the wrongdoer’s perspective, much ‘preferable’ to the understanding that goes with conscience or, more broadly, with I-you understanding.) The demand for neutrality makes nonsense of morality. Seeing the point of a moral remark is an expression of one’s preparedness to listen to one’s conscience; of one’s ‘wanting to have conscience’—to use an expression of Heidegger without otherwise endorsing his account. Needless to say, this cannot happen ‘whether one wants it or not’. In other words, it is confused to speak about a moral argument that one for intellectual reasons would have to accept whether one wants it or not. And as my case has shown, heeding one’s conscience is not a neutral matter while, conversely, taking a neutral stance with respect to repressing one’s conscience is anything but morally neutral. Now, let us see how the transcendental

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object enters the picture. This object is the other side of the ‘natural’ object. These two sides of the coin are what I refer to as the Thing. The Thing harbours both the transcendental and the naturalising inclinations. In fact, it harbours anything that represses I-you understanding, including god(s), but here I will focus on the philosophical aspects of the Thing.

3. The Necessity of Non-understanding Two interconnected things take place in the case we are discussing. The wrongdoer unconsciously (for she can deny it without consciously lying) attempts to break the I-you relationship by isolating herself from the admonisher alleging that, just as the wrongdoer herself, the admonisher is only one isolated person with such and such subjective thoughts and feelings. There is, according to the wrongdoer, no reason to assume that the thoughts and feelings of one particular person would, subjective as they are, be truer than those of another person. Insofar as there are true moral claims, this would have to be established by objective reasoning, by a reasoning that does not depend on the ‘transient’ thoughts and feelings of particular persons. We see how the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity arises when one denies that one understands another person. It should be noted that the other side of this involves denying one’s own understanding; the understanding that one actually has of, or rather ‘with’, the other. The metaphysical idea that she cannot understand other people—just as other people cannot understand her—is an important aspect of the perspective of the wrongdoer. The wrongdoer recognises in a repressed kind of way that understanding oneself and understanding the other are interdependent. Another thing to note is that the concept of object acquires a function and meaning that is, as far as the repression goes, constitutively ­indeterminable. ‘Objectivity’ is here not simply about viewing things without letting blinding affects influence one’s judgement; it has the additional function of securing the claim that moral understanding is merely subjective or, correspondingly, that if it is to have any validity at all, it must be objective in nature.

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However, this additional function is not something that the wrongdoer acknowledges, quite the contrary: she denies, or rather represses, it. In her view, what is at stake is simply pointing out some features of understanding and rationality. Hence, whatever moves that she makes with the concepts of objectivity, rationality, reasoning and so on, they are all determined by this unacknowledged function and meaning of objectivity. This unacknowledged aspect of the concept is all the time ‘active’, for the moral anguish—after love the strongest human motivational force there is (insofar as love can be understood as a motivational force)—that underlies it is always there, unless the wrongdoer begins to acknowledge her wrongdoing. The concept of objectivity is hence determined by a hidden motivation. This is what makes the concept so hopelessly elusive. Metaphysics arises when concepts acquire this kind of hidden motivation. As to the metaphysics of ‘object’, its meaning does not simply refer to physical objects but to a very strange kind of thing. (This obscurity is particularly visible in Kant’s metaphysics and Heidegger’s ontology, but analytical philosophers suffer equally from it.) It is invested with an obscure meaning that is as obscure and as elusive as the meaning of ‘philosophy’—and as ‘meaning’ in philosophy. The other side of the metaphysics of objectivity is the metaphysics of subjectivity. The importance of subjectivity in the metaphysical sense is as important to the wrongdoer as is objectivity. For the wrongdoer, imputing subjectivity to the admonisher and to herself functions as an intellectual justification for denying understanding. For it is with reference to having a different intellectual view that the moral understanding of the admonisher is rejected: ‘I think about these things in another way than you do.’ The metaphysical idea of subjectivity forms the basis of this rejection: it is the idea that human beings have fundamentally idiosyncratic ways of experiencing things that is taken to justify the professed difference in reasoning. It is the idea that persons have different ways of thinking about the ethical that is crucial; the question whether or not subjectivity is coupled with ‘unique’ qualia is insignificant in my perspective. Whether my having a certain feeling is unique in a way inaccessible to science or whether it is just a particular constellation of purely objective processes does not matter, for either way I ‘just have it’ in a way that is taken to function as a justification for my reasoning. That is, the

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repressed ‘point’ of ‘having moral reasons for acting’ is that it cuts off, in the sense in which this is possible, the understanding relationship between ‘you’ and ‘I’. Whatever kind of moral reasoning a philosopher might be speaking for, virtually everyone accepts the ‘fact’, as it is taken to be, that it is in terms of moral reasoning that moral understanding must be understood. This belief is shared by most ordinary people.5 It is this escape route that the wrongdoer is seeking for in her anguish.6 She does not want the admonisher to ‘see’ her in her misery, which has its source in her temptation to fulfil her terrible plan, so she makes herself, as she thinks, unreachable to the admonisher. She creates a self that ‘does not at all understand’ why the admonisher is so upset. Instead the admonisher should, according to this self, acknowledge the ‘fact’ that they have different views of moral issues. This self that does not understand and does not want to be understood can be sustained only to the extent that the idea that people have different ideas about ethics is granted and it is in fact taken to be self-evidently true by most people. Thus, from the point of view of an ethics of conscience, the idea that the difference of moral reasoning has its origin in ‘different subjectivities’ is not importantly different from the idea that we should assess the validity of moral reasoning by objective methods. One could say that subjectivity and objectivity collapse into each other here. The difference of outlook between subjectivists such as Thomas Nagel (2000) and objectivists such as Daniel Dennett (1991) is here without significance. The wrongdoer is inclined to create a ‘position’ because if she would say that it is only in this particular case that she does not understand the admonisher, this opens up the risk that a further discussion would expose the wilfulness of the wrongdoer’s acting. For instance, it might become obvious that on the grounds of other things that the wrongdoer has said in other connections, she would have to acknowledge the wrongness of her acting. If she wants to make sure of not running into the predicament of Socrates’ opponents, she must from the start deny that there is any spontaneous understanding between her and the admonisher and also deny any possible previous cases of mutual understanding. Therefore her default, metaphysical, idea is that one person cannot ‘really’ understand the heart (feelings, experiences and thoughts) of another person.

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Understanding occurs only on those exceptional conditions where two persons explicitly feel and state that they understand each other. In this way one can prevent oneself from running into situations that might intensify one’s moral anguish. Persons whom one trusts and dares to speak more ‘freely’ with are persons whom one expects not to raise moral questions of a troubling kind. The important point to note here is that subjectivism, often in the form of moral particularism, plays a very distinct role when one protects one’s moral anguish from being interfered with. Subjectivity and objectivity reciprocally underpin each other: objectivity is constituted by facts and thoughts whose validity can be assessed by rational, that is, objective, methods. That is to say, by methods that will efficiently stand in the way of moral understanding, of ‘me’ understanding ‘you’. Subjectivity again is constituted by the supposedly ‘inscrutably/ inevitably particular experiences’ of each individual. It is of course possible to prioritise or deny the one or the other of these two concepts (e.g. the way Fichte or Nagel prioritise subjectivity and Dennett rejects it) but this does not change the fact that they create a specific space of reasons; a space which is structured by the opposition between reason-giving and subjective experience. Subjectivists (for instance moral particularists) ‘need’ objectivity as a concept that given its formal detachedness is supposed to prove the truth of subjectivism while, conversely, objectivists need subjectivity as a concept that in its inscrutability proves the truth of objectivism. Or then the truth is taken to be dependent on some kind of synthesis between subjectivity and objectivity. Either way, the very role of subjectivity and objectivity is to repress moral understanding. Therefore, and contrary to what philosophers often think, no mix of subjectivity and objectivity can make sense of human understanding, nor of rationality. These concepts are in fact secretly designed precisely to prevent the frightening understanding that opens up between human beings. The unacknowledged point of objectivity and subjectivity is that they exclude I-you understanding and when it comes to this unconscious ‘task’, they complement each other. Objectivity gives a model for what any understanding would have to be like in order to be intelligible and as I have pointed out, I-you understanding is not objective. But neither is it subjective and so the concept of subjectivity also excludes it.

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Seeing this makes it obvious why it is unimportant whether or not philosophers agree that finding objective criteria, truth, certainty and so on is the central task of philosophy. The important thing to see is that repression occurs in that questions concerning objectivity, subjectivity, truth, certainty, deconstruction, representation, language, Being and so on come to occupy the centre stage of philosophy. The heated debate between the rationalist and the postmodernist is in this perspective a charade; like two lawyers fiercely arguing about whether justice speaks for hanging or poisoning the victim, while both ignore the obvious fact that the victim is framed. When the wrongdoer demands that the admonisher give an independent reason that shows why she would be doing something evil, the very point of this demand for objectivity is to deny that she understands the admonisher. What the wrongdoer demands is a reasoning that she from the start very well knows will make it impossible to articulate any moral understanding. This is her reason for demanding it. Her most acute perception of this effect of moral reasoning is that in eclipsing I-you understanding, it creates the illusion that she is not seen. Whether or not she is guilty or innocent in terms of this reasoning is less important. The important thing is to escape that perspective; the I-you understanding, where one’s deserting one’s conscience is nakedly to be seen. Nothing in life is as painful as when one’s meanness is exposed. This is why the wrongdoer ‘must’ repress conscience and I-you understanding.7 One of the many treacherous things here is that the wrongdoer presents objective reasoning as something that could potentially ‘threaten’ her subjective position while, in reality, objective reasoning is the other side of her striving for moral immunity, of her escape from the I-you understanding. Subjectivation and objectivation are the two sides of the wrongdoer’s effort to hide that she denies the moral relationship with the admonisher.8 Moral philosophy, once again, sides with the wrongdoer in the sense that it gives an intrinsic value to theoretical thinking and in that subjectivity and objectivity are taken to name the inescapable poles of any rigorous thinking.9 The way the wrongdoer construes subjectivity makes understanding between persons impossible. Instead, human beings can on this view have only the hypothesis, based on actions, facial expressions and state-

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ments of the other person, that she thinks in such and such a way about a given issue. Understanding is here taken to consist of human beings making similar judgements and being hence able to make correct predictions about each other’s behaviour. It is the hypothetical nature of this account that gives room for scepticism, which is an aspect of the separation that the wrongdoer craved for. It is a huge task to get sight of the scope and the problematic character of this ‘inferential’ construal of understanding. Concerning this issue, a profound confusion reigns in philosophy (and psychology and neuroscience). Thus, thinkers who explicitly criticise the mechanistic tendencies of Western thought and even thinkers who realise that we do not need any explanation of human understanding, still express themselves in ways where they fall squarely into the kind of mechanistic thinking that they criticise. When for Iain McGilchrist (2013), who otherwise is critical of Western ‘left-hemisphere’ rationality, thinks that we need a theory of mind in order to understand each other, he makes a presupposition that is essential to the mechanistic thinking that he otherwise efficiently criticises (see for instance pp. 94 and 140). John McDowell again would probably, rightly, reject the idea that we need any theory of mind in order to understand each other. However, he thinks that we need conceptuality in order to understand each other and this, though he does not recognise it, amounts to the same as presupposing a theory of mind. The wrongdoer seeks for objectivity because it causes an alienation between her and the admonisher. (Western rationality has often been taken to be alienating in character,10 but in my view we are talking about a universal, human problem that takes on different forms in different cultures.) The wrongdoer wants to escape from an understanding relationship with the admonisher and this means that, given her desire to act in evil ways, she tries to escape her conscience. The appeal to objective reasoning, together with the claim about subjectivity, is a strategy for doing just that.11 Denying the conscience-relationship with the other involves constructing an idea of knowledge and reasoning that makes it seem as if there would not exist any such thing as conscience or I-you understanding. This, very obviously, could not be the task of any reasoning that

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would really be concerned only with knowing objects. The repressed character of this form of reasoning shows itself in the fact that when that reasoning elaborates on its own possibilities—when it reasons philosophically—it ‘finds’ that it cannot even know with certainty whether there exist any other minds at all apart from that of the thinking subject. To find out whether or not other minds exist is taken to be a problem. But of course this apparently objective proof-problem makes sense at all only against the background of a universalised subjectivism. That this problem arises is not surprising of course since denying the understanding ‘between minds’; I-you understanding, is the repressed main goal of this reasoning. It should be noted that philosophers who reject the problem of other minds out of hand, just like philosophers who would not say that understanding between persons is hypothetical, mostly account for human understanding in a way where it is nevertheless conceived as something hypothetical. I hope I can make it clear why it is precisely the standard way of doing philosophy that is the problem; not the particular arguments and claims that are made within philosophy. It is here that I think (the later) Wittgenstein has made a stronger critical move than any other philosopher. (For more on this, see Nykänen, 2014, 2019). When the wrongdoer claims that the remedy for the idiosyncrasy of subjective opinion is objective reasoning, she appeals to a reasoning that is familiar to us all, namely a reasoning that we use in our practical and theoretical encounters with objects and phenomena in the world. In the metaphysical outlook that the wrongdoer creates, the contrast between things that happen regardless of our opinions and forms of understanding that are what they are because they express how we think is used to convince ourselves of the ‘fact’ that it is the former that shows us what ‘certainty’ means. The point of this picture is to create the impression that understanding between ‘you’ and ‘I’ is based on communication of idiosyncratic preferences that sometimes ‘happen to coincide’ and sometimes not. In the end, we cannot know whether we mean the same thing with our words, even in cases where our preferences ‘seem’ to coincide. Some philosophers, particularly Wittgensteinians, would say that the vehicle of communication; language, constitutes what ‘we’ can mean in the first place. Thus, what we say to each other is not hypothetical. But how, one wants to ask, has language acquired this striking feature? Here the

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Wittgensteinians are split between an objectivising tendency à la Peter Hacker, a collectivist tendency à la Norman Malcolm (1986) or Theodore Schatzki (1996) or a hybrid between these two, as exemplified by John McDowell. In all cases I-you understanding is repressed. It should be noticed here that, though it is repressed, the whole point with the wrongdoer’s picture is to make claims about the ‘uncertain’ character of I-you understanding (and in my view it is this claim that Wittgenstein is beginning to deconstruct in the second part of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: The Inner and the Outer). That the point is repressed means that the wrongdoer does not address the I-you understanding directly and as such—this would involve bringing the painful ‘thing’ to attention—but instead creates a discourse where there is no place for it at all. And ‘objective reasoning’ is a construction which leaves out I-you understanding altogether. But since our very understanding each other is at stake, it cannot of course be simply left out. What happens is that where this understanding cannot be simply ignored, it is misdescribed. Objective reasoning is secretly determined by the task of repressing I-you understanding. More specifically, it is determined by the certainty that it was supposed to exemplify. In fact, it is because objective reasoning excludes I-you understanding, that it causes the unacknowledged comfort that goes with the conviction that objective reasoning gives us certainty. But this cannot of course be recognised as such. It is here that the problem of certainty concerning knowledge acquires its at once obsessive and elusive character (and judging from what he says in On Certainty, Wittgenstein did not seem to have seen this). The concept of objective reasoning, too, becomes distorted by the metaphysically motivated exemplary function that is assimilated into its meaning. It is this distorted meaning that figures in the sceptic’s thinking. And part of my point has been to show that the philosopher is essentially a sceptic. Someone might wonder what I have to say about the many other things that a wrongdoer might say in her defence. Here I just want to point out that I could equally well have chosen to discuss any kind of evasive response. What I try to reveal could be characterised as the dynamics of denial; a dynamics that can take as many forms as denial can. The more radical the scepticism that goes with this denial is, the more radical

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is its construal of objectivity and the more radical is the subjectivity of its outlook. The most radical sceptic is the most radical subjectivist (‘I can really only know my own mind’) and she needs the most radical notion of objectivism there is in order to defend her position, for it is (the supposed impossibility of attaining) this objectivity that is supposed to prove the validity of the scepticism (and there may be reason to point out that Dennett’s notion ‘intentional stance’ is an extremely radical form of subjectivism). There are infinitely many possible halts along this track and one can only discuss one at a time, but once the dynamic is seen, one will see the repressive function of all the concepts involved. When ‘human being’ is construed on the model of objective reasoning, it is understood as a thinking thing. This Cartesian conception is shared also by contemporary neuroscientists who otherwise usually understand themselves as anti-Cartesians. Once the metaphysical concept of object is established, this means that ‘moral reasoning’ is expected to assess its truths in essentially the same way as truths about empirical and logical objects are assessed. What is that way? There is no consensus about that nor even about whether there exists any such thing as moral reasoning. However, there seems to be an almost total consensus about the idea that insofar as there is such a thing as moral reasoning it would have to be objective. Philosophers who reject objectivism claim instead that moral reasoning is subjective—or, in a fruitless effort to avoid subjectivism, ‘personal’.12 (Some try to escape this problem by talking about intersubjectivity but on my view this takes us nowhere for it amounts to trying to establish a relationship between two instances of a form of self-­ understanding that is characterised by denying understanding the other. The prefix ‘inter’ does not remove this problem, nor does it clarify anything.) By what method does the idea of the transcendental object repress I-you understanding? This is the theme of the next section.

4. The Object When, in our example, the wrongdoer denies understanding the admonisher, she denies the unmediated understanding between her and the admonisher. The wrongdoer has a strong urge to hide the evil of her

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intention and she does it by trying to create an abyss in the understanding between her and the admonisher. As I have shown, this happens by pointing to the ‘independent certainty’ of phenomena connected to objects. But there is a further sense in which the logic of objects represses I-you understanding, namely in the sense that it creates a need for a medium that is supposed to make understanding possible. Of course, since that medium supposedly mediates the ‘absolute certainty’ of objectivity, the mediating character of this medium must itself be an instance of objectivity. The medium is assumed to be a ‘something’ whose intelligibility relies on objects, on the objectivity of objects.13 What is such a something like? As I see it, it is this something that Wittgenstein has in mind when he says of the sensation of pain that ‘It is not a Something, but not a Nothing either.’ (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 304). The essential thing about this Something is that it involves the idea that human beings cannot understand each other unless there is something that mediates their understanding. There must be brain states, rationality, states of affairs, conceptuality, grammar, Being, noema—just something— if people are to understand each other. If no such something is there, the fact that people understand each other appears as a piece of magic. Donald Davidson, though he puts a certain emphasis on the I-you relationship, thinks that if two ‘creatures’ are to understand each other this must occur with reference to common stimuli. It is only by seeing each other’s responses to features in the world that two creatures can understand each other—presupposing that they have similar reactions to common stimuli (see Davidson, 2004, pp. 211–13; see also Quine, 2000, pp. 1 ff.). If that objective frame of reference is lacking, understanding another creature is pure magic, ‘mind reading’: ‘If the interpreter could […] directly individuate the attitudes of someone else, the problem would be solved, but only by assuming the interpreter is a mind reader.’ (Ibid., pp. 210–11). What Davidson voices here is just the typical presupposition that has always dominated philosophy and that shows itself in the attitude of the wrongdoer of my case: human beings cannot understand each other; they necessarily need a medium. John McDowell, who despite his Wittgensteinianism is an outspokenly traditional philosopher, shares this idea with Davidson. McDowell has profound difficulties with coming to

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grips with what Wittgenstein says about objects and object-language. It is particularly the paragraphs 293 and 304 of the Philosophical Investigations that disturb McDowell. McDowell’s basic worry is that in his efforts to reveal the problems of the myth of the given, Wittgenstein overstates his case (performs an ‘overkill’) so that one gets the impression that he thinks no object, such as the sensation of pain, is needed for the intelligibility of ‘pain’—a suggestion that McDowell finds absurd. My approach in this chapter could, on a very general level, be said to be a demonstration of the way in which McDowell entirely misses Wittgenstein’s point. McDowell makes many confused moves in his desperate efforts to secure the role of the ‘object’ without appearing all too dismissive of Wittgenstein. Let us take a look at one of the many twists and turns he performs. McDowell says that what is pre-conceptually given ‘is not in conceptual shape and therefore not capable of standing in rational relationships to anything.’ (McDowell, 1998, p. 280). This remark can perhaps be given a sensible interpretation, but a few pages later (p. 283) the obscurities that are present already here become rampant. In the later passage McDowell says that what is ‘pre-conceptually given’ still can be thought of as a ‘substratum on which the capacity for concept-carried awareness is constructed’. But is not this a rational relationship? Is not the whole ‘point’ of the assumed connection between the pre-conceptual given and concept-carried awareness precisely conceptual? How else could what is pre-conceptually given be the substratum on which concept-­ carried awareness is constructed? Without going further into the swamp of confusions that is brewing here, I just want to say that McDowell here tries to spirit away the abyss between I-you understanding and objectivity that his view has from the start affirmed. In order to reveal the confusion we are dealing with, I would have to discuss the concept of causality at length and show, for instance, that causality and the kind of perspective it places on the world is fully ­conceptual and intentional; it is in no sense ‘closer’ to reality than any other concept—to put it in the confused terms characteristic of philosophy—but this would take me too far from my topic. Neither can I in this connection discuss all of McDowell’s twists and turns; it suffices just to note that his main concern is to secure the idea that an object and object-­

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language is needed for intelligibility. Wittgenstein questions this, and this is something that McDowell cannot accept. Why is the object so important? ‘It is part of intelligibility’, McDowell and others might say.14 What intelligibility? Obviously the concept of intelligibility that arises when conscience is denied. In terms of I-you understanding, objects are nothing more than just objects. The wrongdoer-philosopher’s intellectual need for a transcendental object arises because otherwise understanding between persons appears supernatural. For her, I-you understanding, the fact that we understand each other—not some mediating discourse—appears as magic. As the wrongdoer-philosopher says, we need objectivity; concepts with generally agreed upon meanings, in order to assess whether and how far the moral views of two persons differ. But this appears so only in the repressed perspective of denying one’s conscience. In this perspective, we want to think that only the objectivity of a discourse makes understanding possible. Without it, so the story goes (unless you are a hard naturalist and substitute ‘empirical data’ for ‘objective discourse’), no assessing and no meaning. McDowell (2003, p.  677): ‘[S]urely one could not have the concept of intersubjectivity first, without yet having the concept of objectivity’. Objectivity is taken to constitute a precondition for intelligibility. How this should be spelled out further is a matter of debate—and even hostile rivalry—among the proponents of different views. From the point of view of the perspective that all these different views share, it appears as a piece of mysticism to say that human beings primarily understand each other rather than concepts, behaviours, facial expressions and so on. As expressed by Davidson in the quotation above, this appears as pure magic from the point of view of the wrongdoer-philosopher. To avoid this imagined threat of magic, Davidson opts for his ‘triangulation’ where understanding is grounded in the similarity of causal events taking place in the nervous systems of two persons observing the same object (Davidson, 2004, pp. 210–11). As we have seen, McDowell has similar worries as Davidson. He wants to avoid a situation where rejecting the myth of the given instead invites supernaturalism (see for instance McDowell, 2009, pp.  260–2). Objectivity and object-language indeed creates the whole notion of supernaturality and—where this is the case—the feeling that it must be

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avoided. (Without being able to say much more about it, I just want to point out that I am not making any exception for the religious notion of supernaturality.) In this delusive perspective it appears that in order to avoid supernaturalism, objects must be construed as natural objects. This is also how McDowell construes ‘object’. His is an ‘objectivism as naturalism’ though, remaining a philosopher, he does not accept ‘bald’ naturalism, a naturalism whose only viable form is taken to be scientific naturalism. How should one understand the interdependence between the natural and the supernatural? In Kant’s days religion still influenced people’s thinking to such extent that the concept of the supernatural seemed rationally acceptable—something that is impossible in contemporary, scientifically underpinned metaphysics. This means that today the concept of object ‘cannot’ be understood as transcendental. For instance, it cannot be seen as a noumenon. In the modern conception everything must in the end be natural. McDowell thus rejects traditional transcendentality (which is ‘supernatural’) in favour of naturalism. One of McDowell’s main concerns is to show that this does not mean that rationality and morality can be understood in the terms of natural science. As might be clear by now, this ‘soft’—or perhaps ‘toupee’—form of naturalism is in my view every bit as metaphysical as its bald version, and as the concept of noumenon. When philosophy goes about the ‘problem’ created by the wrongdoer it of course faces precisely those difficulties that the wrongdoer wanted to create in order to escape I-you understanding. Philosophy shares at every turn the repression of I-you understanding. Philosophy cannot deal with the fact that people understand each other—not concepts or something else that is believed to mediate understanding between an I and a you. The something that is supposed to mediate understanding is the mysterious object of philosophy; the Thing, or the ‘Something’ that Wittgenstein (2009) exposes in pp. 293 and 304—and in the whole discussion that these paragraphs are part of. This imagined Thing has been assigned a quite remarkable task: to account for human understanding. But of course no one would want to make the task of this thing explicit. That it has been assigned this task is

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something that shows itself in what philosophers expect from objects and objectivity and in what they ignore and deny. I-you understanding is not supernatural, not natural and not metaphysical, but there is this ‘odd’ thing about it that it involves human beings having an unmediated understanding with each other. This makes evil acting unbearably painful. Just consider what it would mean to be ruthless while allowing oneself to fully realise that another human being completely understands the way you are deserting your conscience in favour of your selfish desires. When you desert conscience you will feel unbearably naked in the face of it. This is why you ‘have to’ repress it, to act, in part, as if it did not exist. The hidden, moral motivation behind the idea of a mediator is that it creates the soothing illusion that no one can see one directly. When someone comes threateningly close, one hides behind subjectivism: one thinks that no one can see one,15 that what the other sees is ‘just an interpretation’ of the visible signs of one’s ‘real’ feelings. She sees ‘just signs’, not me.

5. The Herd Wrongdoer-philosophers who are critical of objectivism take another route in their efforts of accounting for intelligibility; they appeal to sociality. Some of them, like Rorty, defend a bald version of this idea and claim roughly that truth is what a given sociality says is true. Others are more careful with the role they give to collectivity. The problem at stake is particularly visible among Wittgensteinians, for whom the collectivist account of meaning is, given a certain interpretation of Wittgenstein’s concept of life-form and the so called private language argument, particularly important. I cannot address this issue here, but I will in a moment show how the problematic character of collectivist accounts mirrors the problems of objectivism. You can opt for a strong form of objectivism, say like Peter Hacker, a strong form of collectivism like Rorty, or a hybrid of not too strong objectivism and not too strong collectivism like McDowell. This play between objectivism and collectivism has the character it has because

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these concepts serve the function of repressing conscience in different ways. A collectivism can be ‘strong’ whether or not the proponent wants it to, if the logic developed rests explicitly on collectivism. This is the case with for instance Brandom (who even introduces a completely collectivised form of the I-you perspective, see Brandom, 2001, pp. 599 ff.) and Quine. The case of Quine is instructive in that he exposes the inadequacies of objectivism more nakedly than most others. In being further away from the I-you perspective (more about that below), Quine becomes careless in a way that would be unthinkable for, say, McDowell. Quine speaks about society having ‘methods’ for teaching words by ‘rewarding’ and ‘penalising’ uses of words and about society ‘training’ the individual. That this is not just an unfortunate figure of speech becomes clear when he posits the ‘critic’ as society’s agent. The critic’s cue in teaching for instance the colour word red is the ‘red irradiation of his own retina.’ (Quine, 2013, p. 5). When the critic approves of the subject’s utterance ‘Red’, this is because the critic has this red irradiation of the retina and assumes that the subject has it too. So the critic is ‘society’s agent’. If this is to make sense on Quine’s terms, it would have to mean that the phrase ‘the critic’s retina’ is interchangeable with the phrase ‘society’s retina’, which, I assume, very obviously is not the case. How is it possible that Quine makes this completely nonsensical substitution? And how is it possible that it has been largely accepted? What becomes visible here is the repressing force of collectivity. Quine does not seem to notice this repression, even if he speaks about unconscious mental processes that are outcomes of the ‘perfection of our socialisation’ (2013, p. 7). (Let me note in passing that Quine’s philosophy is built on an interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, the former being the pole of inscrutable individuality while the latter is the pole of intelligibility, which only means that the subjective utterances have social currency: ‘Uniformity comes where it matters socially’ (2013, p. 7).) Collectivity enters the issue between the wrongdoer and the admonisher in the following way: from the collective point of view, the point of view of common sense, a third person that enters the dispute between the wrongdoer and the admonisher is taken to be impartial if she takes the wrongdoer’s claim that she has a different view of morality than the admonisher at face value. This means that this third person relates to the

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case in a spirit that can be expressed with the words ‘So, let us see what your conflict is all about’. In this way collectivity sides with the idea that forms the very core of the denial performed by the wrongdoer. And as I have noted above, philosophy too, takes this stance. This is so whether we speak about analytic philosophy, phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, critical theory or something else.16 Either philosophers try to solve the problem posed by the wrongdoer; they take the wrongdoer’s claim to be a genuine, intellectual problem, completely ignoring the fact that the whole point of the claim is to avoid conscience, or then they, like the postmodernists, claim that the currently most fashionable account is the best response to the problem. In both cases the problem posed by the wrongdoer is accepted. Philosophers of the postmodernist cut have come to the conclusion that the problem of objectivity and truth is not really a problem but a misunderstanding. These philosophers do not try to account for the problem of objectivity; they are satisfied with what ‘we’ say is true and objective. Of course most of them would probably, like Rorty, say that this amounts to the same as pursuing a truth that is supposed to be independent of what we say (see Rorty, 2000, pp. 125 ff.). But is it really? It seems to me that those who have criticised Rorty have not been very convincing. Still, there is something true about the general feeling that the postmodern stance is cynical. But what is it that is cynical about it? The vague feeling that postmodernism is cynical constitutes a repressed awareness that it gives up something important. What has been given up is the idea that the intellectual integrity of the outlook of the wrongdoer depended on the thought of a justified demand for an objective reason, that is, a reason that would show why the wrongdoer’s ‘point of view’ is not just a random avoidance but a demand that is grounded in the nature of Things. This ‘justified demand’ also gives a third party her intellectual integrity when she accepts it and sides, without wanting to acknowledge it, with the wrongdoer. Even if the idea of a justified demand is self-­ deceptive it still retains a connection to conscience in that it arises from the feeling that you have to justify yourself in the face of conscience; you cannot simply ignore it. It is this demand that postmodernists, just like Quine and other bald naturalists, seem to be less sensitive to.

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What has been given up in Rorty’s, let me call it bald collectivism, is the feeling that one must justify oneself in the face of something that is not reducible to collectivity. This something is, as I have shown, conscience or one’s inescapable relationship to the other. In collectivism this ‘external’ factor has been identified with common opinion: ‘What we think is right, is what we mean by “right”’. But those who are not prepared to go that far in ignoring conscience are not prepared to say that truth is simply what we say is true. The vague feeling behind this inclination has its source in a repressed moral worry that there is something that cannot be simply ignored, though the significance of conscience is not explicitly acknowledged. If you take it to be an important task to try to solve the problem of objectivity—if you try to establish a metaphysical, objective truth—you have at least some contact with conscience, namely in the sense that you try, even if you do not acknowledge it, to justify yourself in the face of it. If you give up this effort you ignore conscience even further than the wrongdoer is prepared to do. The feeling that Rorty and his likes are cynical has its source in a repressed awareness of this fact. The reason why the critics of Rorty rarely manage to reveal the cynicism in his position is that they do not see its source. Thus, they try to show that Rorty is wrong about the Thing. But to discuss on these terms is to play into the hands of Rorty, for the idea of the centrality of the Thing is a repressed response to our difficulty with understanding. The Thing is what ‘cannot’ be discussed. Thus, it is not possible to show that Rorty is wrong. Rorty thinks that to reject, as McDowell does, the thought that there are only causal relations in the world is to keep ‘alive the pathetic Kantian question about the “transcendental status” of the world’ (Rorty, 2000, p. 124). However, to account for the understanding and difficulties of understanding between I and you in causal terms is just ridiculous. But since McDowell and the other critics of Rorty stubbornly focus on the ‘truth’ of the Thing, instead of asking Rorty about matters of conscience, they are doomed to fail in their efforts to reveal where his inadequacy lies. And when Rorty attempts to show the emptiness of McDowell’s transcendental idea of truth, he constructs—how else?—a case where he is in communication with a you (Rorty, 2000, p. 126). In this way he manages—‘of course’ I would say—to reveal the emptiness of McDowell’s idea. And—equally ‘of course’—he, after having put the

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I-you understanding to work, totally misdescribes it and represses it by construing it as something social that has its ground in the kind of facts that Davidson claims are the case in his triangulation. In the end, Rorty has nothing else to offer except a deceptive feeling of comfort—and perhaps even of ‘humility’—with the ‘fact’ that transcendentalism is superfluous. And transcendentalism would indeed be superfluous if the issue at stake would really be about our understanding of the things in the world. But it is not. And in not seeing this, Rorty really has a blind spot—but not the one McDowell imputes to him and that he, probably ironically, admits having. Yet it is true that no dose of transcendentalism can make that blind spot go away, for transcendentalism has a similar blind spot—only a slightly smaller one. It is when we consider the kind of situations that have a relation to the kind of problem that the wrongdoer has with the admonisher that the anomalous ideas about objective knowledge become visible.

6. Conclusion Some readers might wonder what relevance my analogy between the wrongdoer and the philosopher can possibly have for assessing the general character of philosophical problems. My chapter is as a whole dedicated to showing precisely that, but a short response to the direct question would perhaps be illuminating. First, it might be wondered why I want to make claims about philosophy in general rather than speaking of certain tendencies in philosophy. Here I want to say that I do not see myself as making claims that I try to prove by way of argument. What is at stake here is the way I understand philosophy. And the way I understand it, philosophy systematically sides with the wrongdoer and reasons in the same way she does, repressing conscience and distorting understanding. But do not the philosopher and the wrongdoer have completely different motives for what they are saying? In a ‘direct’ sense, yes. But still it is completely false to assume that what the philosopher says has no important connection to the problem of the wrongdoer. For instance, the philosopher accepts, point by point (including the tendency to ignore the concept of repression), the wrongdoer’s way of reasoning and, as we are

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talking about philosophers, this attitude of acceptance is certainly not an innocent attitude. I have discussed elsewhere the question as to what is involved in this acceptance. In the present chapter my aim has been to show just that what the wrongdoer and the philosopher say amounts to the same. As to the question how my analogy touches upon questions specific to philosophy of mind I would say, first, that I take myself to have indicated why I do not think that there are any distinct problem areas in philosophy. Second and connectedly, what I have said here could be said to consists of observations that, when seen in classical, philosophical terms, touch on themes from a number of areas—not least on what might be seen as issues concerned with the human mind. Finally, my critique of the Thing aims at revealing the central, philosophical confusion that creates also the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Back to the Thing. The character of the object that is taken to manifest the meaning of objectivity is fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, the very ‘point’ of objectivism is that it is supposed to concern quite ordinary objects. On the other hand, it seems impossible to understand why our dealing with ‘merely natural’ objects would cause us any philosophical problems at all. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Quine’s naturalism and Rorty’s postmodernism exemplify different possibilities within the general attitude of pretending not to see why there would be any particular problems with talking about objects. But to have such an attitude is to simply ignore the problems that give rise to the Thing; the kind of problems I tried to reveal with the constellation between the wrongdoer and the admonisher. It is from out of this constellation that the problems that enter our dealings with objects acquire the character of being metaphysical; the very being of objects becomes an ‘ontological problem’. The objectivity of objects, their being there regardless of our experience of them, constitutes a problem whose character is obscure. In sum, the very point of objectivity; the purportedly self-evident and ­epistemologically exemplary ‘fact’ of the objects being there, is after all precisely what throws us into obscurity. How extraordinary that what was expected to be the rigorous foundation of truth and meaning in fact creates all the problems! But this of course was the secret function of the Thing.

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In the face of the transcendentality that this confusion creates, naturalism arrives as a ‘solution’. One simply makes up one’s mind and states that objects and phenomena simply ‘are’ natural entities, that there is nothing transcendental. The impulse to naturalism amounts to disregarding the problems that create a need for the transcendental. ‘Soft’ naturalism involves maintaining some aspects of the transcendental object while hard naturalism involves a wholesale rejection of transcendentality. Both approaches are equally futile. (One might say that hard naturalism is hard in the sense that it is about to lose touch with that human difficulty from which the idea of the Thing is wrung.) In our refusal to accept our conscience-related understanding of each other, we depersonalise ourselves and the other. This could in itself be characterised as a special case of objectification. Moreover, the depersonalisation involves appealing to an impersonal ideal of reasoning; the kind of reasoning that is used to account for phenomena in nature. This idealisation not only represses I-you understanding but also confuses our conception of nature. The traditional way of doing philosophy is defined by what one could call The Gap; by the hopeless and endless urge to try to bridge an abyss of one’s own making, the abyss between living understanding and the dead objects (signs, concepts, rationality, episodes of consciousness, phenomena, noema, Being, behaviour, grammar, logic etc.) behind which we hide in our fear of living understanding.17 Though the living understanding, I-you understanding, is largely repressed it is nevertheless there, ‘giving’ the meaning that is ignored by all philosophies. We want to avoid the idea of immediate understanding because we want to decide whether and to what extent we understand each other. In xenophobia and, even more so, in the difficulties between men and women, we can see the depth of our will not to understand and not to be understood. What I have called the Thing is a complex; an open-ended web of concepts that in their different ways repress I-you understanding. Here I have focused on the analogies between some of the main concepts of this web and the logic of a person who denies her conscience. To acquire a clearer idea of this web one would have to discuss collectivity at length.

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However, I hope that, supposing our strong tendencies to project ourselves into collectivity are obvious to everyone, the reason behind the deep hostilities between different philosophical schools becomes surmisable. Someone like Quine projects himself onto collectivity in a way that is different from the way someone like Heidegger projects himself onto collectivity. The frightening ‘obscurantism’ of Heidegger’s philosophy is connected to the magic of the Thing. Still, the following words of Heidegger are obscure in a typically philosophical way: ‘Dingend sind die Dinge Dinge. Dingend gebärden sie Welt.’ (1990, p. 22).18 These words are a manifestation of depersonalised thinking. Such manifestation occurs in the thought of McDowell, Davidson, Quine and countless others and it is surrounded by obscurity in that its secret purpose is to hide. Philosophy is divided by different predilections for how to both utilise and hide the magic of the Thing. For the one obsessed by science any explicit talk of magic is unthinkable. The magic of the Thing is here secretly transformed into ‘scientific rationality’ which cannot support its claim to rationality. The glaringly obvious character of this inability is well brought out in Wallgren’s chapter of the present volume. Heidegger, critical as he is of science, has no problems with the magic of the Thing and so, in a dialogue about the essence of language, he has his Japanese dialogue partner say: ‘A mystery is a mystery only when it does not even come out that mystery is at work.’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 50).19 It is hard (not: ‘intellectually demanding’) to get sight of the mythological features of one’s thinking. The philosophical cults that feed on different mythologies hate each other because in their difference they expose each other’s secret, understanding-repressing magic. In order to be tricked by a specific illusion you must stand in the ‘right’ place. But though it can be repressed, I-you understanding cannot be erased. It is everywhere present, though repressed to various degrees. I-you under­ eanings standing is not a neutral, objective capability to rationally assess m but rather an understanding that, as this understanding, is of greatest concern to us. In question is the concern that human beings have for each other. But this concern is not only something ‘wonderful’. For some reason, all our most terrible problems arise from this concern. However, we do not want to admit this. Thus, all the problems we have with each other

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are projected on this understanding. All the distortion, avoidance, belittling and repression that we are capable of are manifested in the Thing; the thing that is secretly supposed to hide our understanding from ourselves. This is why the Thing is the greatest secret in philosophy, the whole Thing with philosophy. Thinging comes quite naturally. Nevertheless, it is terrible; it is a denial of I-you understanding which now becomes thingking.

Notes 1. And those who do not, swear by some other thing, such as sociality, Being, dialectics, etc. 2. See Tschemplik (2008) and Wallgren (2013) for lucid accounts of this. 3. I do not wish to involve myself in a discussion of how the Tractatus with its notion of nonsense should be understood, but what I say in this chapter constitutes an implicit criticism of the Tractarian view of ethics and, consequently, of all views that affirm it. 4. Should one not grant Kant’s point and instead say that it is practical reasoning that is referred to here? No, for Kant’s point is imbued with the same problems. I hope this will become clear even if I do not discuss Kant specifically. 5. This is not an unsubstantiated, empirical claim. Rather, it is an observation based on my cultural inheritance; it is not only about my familiarity with what people mostly say in connection with moral problems; it is also about how I have been taught to understand moral issues. 6. For more on this, see Nykänen (2015). 7. Wittgenstein seems to have seen some of this when he says ‘Hate between men comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other. Because we don’t want anyone else to look inside us, since it’s not a pretty sight in there.’ (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 46e). 8. But could it not be the case that the wrongdoer really does not understand the admonisher, and that my case at best shows only the development when she does? No. It can be shown that such lack of understanding is unthinkable. In my view Wittgenstein’s main thrust in Last Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II points in this direction: ‘It is only in particular cases that the inner is hidden from me, and in those cases it is not hidden because it is the inner.’ (p. 33). Without here justifying my inter-

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pretation, I take this to mean that when I fail to understand a person it is because she does not want me to understand her or because I do not dare to understand her—not because I cannot understand her innermost ‘subjective’ feelings. And at any rate, what I show here reveals minimally that the trickiness of ‘moral understanding’ is of a quite different scope than has usually been assumed in philosophy. 9. See, for example, Davidson (2004, p.  206) and McDowell (2000, p.  186). As I hope will become clearer, what I mean by objectivity is wider than its standard meaning in philosophy. For instance Heidegger’s concept of Being is objective in my sense of the word, while Dasein is subjective. 10. See for instance Adorno and Horkheimer (1997). 11. I am—of course—not questioning the validity of objective reasoning, but only the normative and metaphysical meaning that it has acquired, which is what I am discussing here. It is part of the problem that we do not allow objective reasoning to be what it is but, instead, place destructive and distorting expectations on it. To believe that ‘objective reasoning’ is an untarnished pearl of human reasoning would be as naïve as believing that it could be the case that a terribly efficient technical devise were never to be used for military purposes. 12. I think for instance of Peter Winch’s idea of moral particularism, see Winch (1972, 1987). 13. It could be shown, though I cannot do it here, that the distinction, much cherished by philosophers, between logical and psychological issues is just one of the many consequences of denying I-you understanding. When this understanding is denied, language appears to be the ‘objective’, logical, medium through which we can communicate at all, while the feelings and experiences of the subject appear to be just strange mental occurrences that, just as all other ‘natural’ phenomena, must be studied by empirical methods. 14. In that Davidson opts for the causal idea of similarity of response to stimuli as the ground of understanding, he does not think that language is needed as a mediation for understanding. This is according to McDowell completely untenable. Something must ‘play the role of a medium’ since it is impossible to imagine that human beings could understand each other ‘without benefit of anything like my appeal to initiation into a shared language and thereby into a tradition.’ (McDowell, 2000, pp. 185–6).

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15. Contrary to what is said in The Who’s song ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, everyone knows what it’s like to be the bad man. 16. In his Alterity and Transcendence Emmanuel Levinas says that justice arrives with sociality. With the third person comes justice, that is, comparison. One must judge who is the object par excellence of my moral concern. For all his emphasis on the I-you relationship, Levinas here affirms, point by point, the sociality and repression of conscience that I criticise, though I do not here have the space to show this in any detail. Comparing what Levinas says in chapter 6 of Alterity and Transcendence with my aim in the present paper should make the clash of thoughts rather evident (see Levinas, 1999, pp. 97 ff., see esp. pp. 101–3). 17. Another facet of this gap is the tendency to absolutise and even mystify ethics in the way exemplified by for instance the early Wittgenstein (and, some would say, the later one too), Raimond Gaita (1991) and especially R.F.  Holland (1980). When language is alienated from I-you understanding it appears impossible to articulate the significance we have for each other. 18. It is hard to translate this passage so I just paraphrase it. Heidegger says that things are things in that they ‘thing’ (the last word being a verb-­ construction). By way of thinging, things constitute world. 19. Lacan’s view on the issue is, as usual, a mixture of insight and whimsicality, and of traditionalism and radicality. He does realise that love lies ‘at the center of ethical experience’ and that it is when the word you is spoken, ‘and nowhere else’ that the Thing is to be found. But his view of conscience and ethics in general is hopelessly inadequate: he thinks that the Thing and the ‘law’ mutually constitute each other, without seeing how both arise from a repression of conscience, see Lacan (1997, pp. 8, 56 and 83).

References Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1997). Dialectic of Enlightenment (J. Cumming, Trans.). London: Verso. Brandom, R. (2001). Making It Explicit (Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davidson, D. (2004). Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay Books. Gaita, R. (1991). Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception. London: Macmillan. Heidegger, M. (1971). On the Way to Language (P. Hertz, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1990). Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske. Holland, R.  F. (1980). Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Value. Oxford: Blackwell. Kant, I. (1979 [1787]). Critique of Pure Reason (J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Trans.). London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Lacan, J. (1997). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII) (J.-A.  Miller, Ed., D.  Porter, Trans.). New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company. Levinas, E. (1999). Alterity and Transcendence (M. B. Smith, Trans.). London: The Athlone Press. Malcolm, N. (1986). Nothing is Hidden. Oxford: Blackwell. McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (2000). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (2003). Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 3, 675–681. McDowell, J. (2009). The Engaged Intellect. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGilchrist, I. (2013). The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nagel, T. (2000). Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nykänen, H. (2014). Freud’s Dangerous Pupil (On Ethics in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy). European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1, 71–90. http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/freuds-dangerous-pupil/#_ftnref2 Nykänen, H. (2015). Repression and Moral Reasoning: An Outline of a New Approach in Ethical Understanding. Sats, 16, 49–66. Nykänen, H. (2019). Wittgenstein’s Radical Ethics. European Journal of Psychoanalysis 1/2019. https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/wittgensteinsradical-ethics/ Quine, W. V. O. (2000). Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine (A. Orenstein & P. Kotatko, Ed.). Dordrecht: Springer. Quine, W. V. O. (2013). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rorty, R. (2000). Response to John McDowell. In R. Brandom (Ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tschemplik, A. (2008). Knowledge and Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Theaetetus. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Wallgren, T. (2013). Radical Enlightenment Optimism: Socrates and Wittgenstein. In L.  Perissinotto & B.  R. Cámara (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Plato: Connections, Comparisons and Contrasts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Winch, P. (1972). Ethics and Action. London: Routledge. Winch, P. (1987). Trying to Make Sense. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Culture and Value (G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Ed., P. Winch, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. (2004). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology II (G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Ed., C. G. Luckhardt, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

13 ‘Private Language’ and the Second Person: Wittgenstein and Løgstrup ‘Versus’ Levinas? Rupert Read

1. ‘The great difficulty’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is not to represent the matter as if there were something one couldn’t do. As if there really were an object, from which I derive its description, but I were unable to shew it to anyone’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §374, emphasis added). I am interested in a ‘dialectic’ in Wittgenstein, a dialectic of freedom, a dialectic contained in embryo in this opening quotation.1 This dialectic has been little noted to date (an exception is the later work of Gordon Baker, a key inspiration for my work here and elsewhere).2 The present chapter explores that dialectic by first outlining how it features in Wittgenstein’s celebrated trans‘private-language’ considerations and then by connecting what I argue to be (literally) the moral of those considerations to the work of Løgstrup and (rather more critically) of Levinas. As my starting quote suggests in fantasising a private language, one fantasises an unfreedom in relation to (fantasised) ‘inner objects’; one rails against one’s ‘inability’ to publicly exhibit such objects, in a way that would ‘justify’ one’s claims about ‘them’. I suspect that one fantasises R. Read (*) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_13

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that, if only one were able to do this ‘impossible’ [non-]thing, then one would be home and dry: if one could only show others the ‘object’ that ‘is’ one’s pain, then it would be impossible any longer for them to withhold sympathy from one (and vice versa).3 One deflects a need for (mutual) sympathy and turns a feared and possible ‘metaphysical’ loneliness into a demand for a hyperbolical philosophical/epistemological justification. Such a fantasy of unfreedom involves a mood of (faux-)frustration. One feels frustrated by the nature of our bodies or of existence. Freedom from this frustration is a central goal of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in general and of the anti-‘private-language’ sections in particular. To defuse the grip that the fantasy has upon us, it is helpful to see, even if per impossible it could be realised, that still wouldn’t help. Thus the importance of remarks such as these, from 1949, remarks that, if he had lived, Wittgenstein would probably have integrated or composed into the material that was published as Philosophical Investigations: Even if I were…to hear everything that he is saying to himself, I would know as little what his words were referring to as if I read one sentence in the middle of a story. Even if I knew everything now going on within him, I still wouldn’t know, for example, to whom the names and images in his thoughts related. … // What goes on within also has meaning only in the stream of life. … // I can know that he is in pain, or that he is pretending, but I do not know it because I ‘look into him’. (1992, pp. 29–31)

There’s no alternative but relationality, commitment (to another, to the relationship). Everything we need is possible, retail not wholesale, if we are ready to seek to understand actual others. And it is hard to see how anything salient further could be gained by some madly fantasised ‘direct acquaintance’ with soul-objects.4 But the fantasy reflects a longing: for closeness, for connection. A longing that we can then say justly is good in its source, even if it then becomes distorted—and in that distortion, in the fantasy that I just adumbrated, impossible to satisfy. It can only be satisfied by the hard work of daring to know others (for such processes, to the chagrin of ‘social scientists’, and as psychotherapists learnt somewhat painfully, are always two-way affairs). To understand others, for

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example, those from unfamiliar cultures, we need first to clear away the prejudice of mutual incomprehendability. Wittgenstein reminds us that people (seek to) understand each other. They (we) don’t have to show each other their soul-things. We just vision—and act towards—each other as souls. Understanding at its best is unmediated.5 Doctrines such as ‘subjectivism’ hide from this and hide this from us. The concept of ‘alterity’, I will suggest, tends to do much the same. One is actually finding the proper place of pain when one refuses, with Wittgenstein, to give in to the deep attraction to think of pain as an ‘inner object’ (cf. once more 1958, §293, which satirically imagines the imagining of such ‘objects’, ‘beetles’). Wittgenstein considers the attraction, and wonders what it would be like to give in to it (see 1958, §§412, 420). But he does not cave in to it; no, on the contrary, his refusal to do so at least and at last starts to get one clearer on what pain is—and on how easy to deny its reality can be, for one unwilling to acknowledge the full reality of another being and of their suffering. The fragility of our community, of our relationality, is part of what it is for us to need to be ethical, for us to commit to acting in one way rather than another. If one could force another to yield to one’s soul by showing it to them, that would remove the preciousness of having to do the right thing6 rather than the wrong.7 And it would remove the wonderful necessary freedom in our being open (or otherwise) to the other. Freedom is essential to the ethical meaning of our responsiveness to one another’s suffering. The freedom to break our internal relations with one another is a necessary freedom. The existence of other people addresses us. This is a fundamentally second-person matter. Staying too much in the would-be-utterly spectatorial third person, or stuck within the first person, has been philosophy’s bane. Such ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, far from being opposites, are but two sides of the same coin. Stuff in the world, ‘stuff’ in the head/the ‘private’: these are, at root, the same.8 The alternative is the living world of the second person9: being involved with others. Being open to them and committed (to them). Including being what the ‘school’ of Wittgensteinians that I belong to calls ‘resolute’.

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One might risk putting it this way: that others’ pain and suffering itself addresses us is a relation between us. To place ‘it’ as an object hidden out of reach ruptures that relation, a relation which is ordinarily direct/unmediated, though never entirely unfragile.10 When pain is sequestered within a special first-person realm, efforts to objectify it will always fail. The first-­ person perspective and the third-person perspective are mutually complementary, but are never enough. Only a (broadly second-personal) relational perspective (or ethic) will adequately capture pain and its meaning for us. For one can see better now how the first-person ‘privilege’ and the third-person standpoint (the standpoint of scientific naturalism, as dissected in other chapters in this collection) feed off each other. The third-­ person perspective, so influential in our society now, is there for a reason. It is attractive because it is an ‘objective’ (and thus allegedly ‘scientific’, the highest accolade our society can bestow) way of trying to ‘correct’ for an excess subjectivism, a subjectivism that resulted from an excess of introspection (probably partly consequent upon being exposed to constant propaganda for individualism) and a failure to be with others. But so long as one is within the third-person perspective, it is by definition impossible for one to be with others. Scientific naturalism is necessarily in this sense spectatorial, inheriting exactly the way in which the Western philosophical tradition is dissected by Dewey.11 Taking the second-person perspective seriously opens up a route that could free us from all of that. And puts us rather in relation to one another, with each other, responsible for taking care of each other, free to do what mostly comes naturally—moving to comfort the other and so on—and (inevitably) free also not to. The vital ethical consequence is an ancient and (in its mode of presentation) partly-novel way of seeing how we are not—or at least, need not be—split off from one another. Philosophy’s dominant methodology, most strikingly in Cartesianism, has dangerously tended to imply otherwise. (Is this in part the result of the deformation professionelle of philosophy? Of philosophers as tending to be relatively asocial, private, even ‘autistic’ beings? I suspect so—though the general problematique is far wider. Philosophers’ individualism is an extreme case of a general cultural phenomenon in the West and especially in modernity.) In this perspective,

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a key goal of Wittgenstein’s considerations upon ‘private language’ is to contest that implication, and to enable a process of ethical re-­orientation towards each other. Epistemology and metaphysics give way—to ethics. One’s freedom not to acknowledge others’ pain is directly tied to the ethical demand12 to do so. As one might perspicuously put it: ought implies the possibility of not. (Though it should be noted that there’s an asymmetry between opening oneself to the other and rejecting them; the latter is possible only as a repressive response to the former, and this means that the rejected possibility leaves traces; e.g., a bad conscience and bad dreams, absurdities in one’s attempted justifications for it, the very need to find justifications, etc.)13 A second-person relational ethic is very different from a traditional third-personal (as in all the great ethical systems) ethic. Wittgenstein starts to situate us in our inter-being. No longer emphasising ‘the inner’, but emphasising our mutual internal-relatedness, as basic, as of the utmost importance and as vulnerable.

2. That, in very brief,14 is how I conceive of Wittgenstein’s considerations against the fantasy of a ‘private language’ as initiating an ethic. I will continue this chapter now by exploring the claims above a little more in connection with the care ethic, the thoroughly relational ethics, of Knud Løgstrup, for he is the thinker, I believe, whose thought runs most parallel to Wittgenstein’s, in this connection.15 But let me start by making a more obvious connection (and contrast), to a more well-known figure: Emmanuel Levinas. There is a semi-Levinasian aspect to the ethic that I locate in Wittgenstein’s anti-‘private-language’ considerations. It is most plainly visible in this Investigations-remark: ‘if someone has a pain in his hand … one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face’ (1958, §286). And we might expand on that wonderful remark by noticing their—Wittgenstein’s and Levinas’—shared commitment to something along the lines of what Levinas (1969, p. 304) calls our ‘primary sociality’, the primariness of our relation to one another. There are also

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however very important differences between Wittgenstein and Levinas. For starters, the very idea of something as opposed to something else being ‘First Philosophy’ is perhaps rather inimical to Wittgenstein’s thinking. Moreover, one crucial difference between him and Levinas that emerges from the passages in Wittgenstein that I have referred to above is this: for Wittgenstein, it need not be impossible to really or even fully understand another. Real meeting, real togetherness, real community is attainable and indeed its possibility is fundamental for Wittgenstein (in a way that it is not, if/as I understand him, for Levinas); it need not be ‘deferred’. Levinas’ vision of the infinite ‘alterity’ of ‘the Other’ repeats the very gesture of the alleged unknowability of others critiqued so deeply by Wittgenstein in Investigations §§243–428. Levinas thinks the other (as) an absolute other, with whom I cannot share a quality or even a number (cf. Christensen, 2015, p. 22 and fn 13); this is in direct tension with what I have suggested is present in the anti-‘private-language’ considerations: our being internally related to each other, even (and, in a way, especially) in what we are most tempted to think of as dividing us from each other; namely, our sensations, especially those which are extreme, aversive, terrible. What Levinas gives with his splendid emphasis on our being-for each other, and on our fundamental ‘solidarity’, he takes away with alterity, the ‘radical incomprehensibility’ of the other. A humorous way of understanding the point here would be as follows. Consider the chorus of the well-known song by ‘Simply Red’: ‘If you don’t know me by now, you will never never never know me’. This line is a question to a long-time lover: do you know me yet? If you still don’t, after all that we’ve been through and shared, then it ain’t ever gonna happen. But Levinas would have to shorten the line, to simply this: ‘You will never never never know me’. But that misses a vital possibility; that there is something that we call coming to know each other, no longer being alteritous, as God forever is (at least, on the Judaic conception). You don’t have to know everything about me, to know me; and a good thing too, given that knowing everything about me is probably an absurd goal (even for me!). (In fact, knowing about me is in the end besides the point; the point is to actually know me. Knowing another person in a second-personal sense always transcends knowing facts about them.) Nor does your knowing me, if you really do, take away my freedom. But it is

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revisionistic to dogmatically insist that you will never ever know me. A suitable Wittgensteinian emphasis on ‘ordinary language’ resists such would-be revisionism, whether inspired by Levinas or by Descartes.16 This point is of deep import, especially but not only when we are thinking of Investigations §§243–428. What Wittgenstein is about is: taking the other seriously, without a dogmatic commitment to alterity, without an assumption of an ‘infinity’ that places the other at an impossible remove from us. We are in relationship with the other (the Other) person, not, as Levinas would perhaps tacitly have it, with their otherness. Why do I say that that would be an accurate way of characterising what Levinas is tacitly committed to? Because, as Fredrik Westerlund puts it, for Levinas, human beings are ultimately an indirect means of approaching ‘the totally other’: that is, God. Thus the more other the human, the closer (they are, in your relationship with them) to God, the infinite.17 Rather than take up a dogmatic stance that says that actually getting into full contact with another person is impossible (as philosophy tends to do, whether in Descartes or in Derrida/Levinas), Wittgenstein prefers to leave the matter open. Being in caring contact with others is an endless task, an endless love. One shouldn’t make the mistake of saying that it can never happen (which is attractive, because it relieves one of the responsibility of trying), nor for that matter that it always happens without difficulty (which is a possible misreading that the present chapter might be vulnerable to). The craving for generality hereabouts is a crudification that is attractive precisely because it provides one with a reprieve from the messy, detailed, morally demanding work of understanding others and giving them their due.18 This kind of thing, Løgstrup’s work also enables one to see more clearly, and thus it directly complements Wittgenstein’s. For Løgstrup, the concrete reality of the other person, whenever they are in a position of vulnerability to one,19 or one needs to care for them in some way, or at least ceteris paribus to trust them, imposes an ethical demand upon one. This ‘ethical demand’ is imposing, difficult to live up to but not necessarily (as it often appears to be, in Levinas), in-principle-impossible (to live up to).20 Where Løgstrup, Levinas and Wittgenstein are at one is in refusing to equate freedom, as so much of Western philosophy does, with an escape from relationality-to-others. As Levinas remarks, ‘instead of offending

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my freedom, [the face of the other] calls it to responsibility and founds it’ (1969, p. 203, emphasis added). The way I would put this point, as it emerges in Wittgenstein’s later work, is this: ultimately, autonomy is relationality. Philosophical liberation in its true sense need not in any way be in tension with our (internal!) relations with others, or with at least the potential for such relations. On the contrary, the former is nothing without the latter. Free thought is coincident with a free embrace of others. When one succeeds in not being caught in heteronomy, in ideas or ways of seeing that have one rather than one having them, then one is freed to actually see and be with others. It might have seemed as if one has to choose between privileging the autonomous self in philosophy—between making philosophy quintessentially an exercise in self-liberation—or privileging the general enterprise of objective philosophising. But now we can see the falseness of this opposition. Does philosophy liberate self or others/all? We can now see how the question misses the point of the trans-‘private-language’ considerations. There are crucial differences between the first- and thirdperson perspectives, differences that philosophy has often overplayed (as Wittgenstein’s philosophy makes obvious) and at times underplayed, and these latter are brought out marvellously in these considerations (e.g. at 1958, §339, and also in Wittgenstein’s Blue Book [1969]). But a—or perhaps even the—fundamental human phenomenon, as we might put it, is the second-person relation, and in this, the gulf between subject and object that has plagued philosophy, and that appears indissolubly to sever first and third persons, is dissolved. As Hannes Nykänen puts it, ‘the fact that I understand that you are in pain is not based on a representation; it is about my understanding you’ (2014, second emphasis added).21 The yawning gulf between first and third persons, between subjective and objective, cannot be dissolved by a piece of over-arching philosophical theory. It has to be dissolved in actual cases. Which means: it has to be dissolved in our relations with other beings. These are the kinds of cases visible in the references I have offered in passing from Wittgenstein’s critique of the ‘private-language’ conception. And they are made visible also in Løgstrup’s work. They manifest (or at least recall, or at least stage) our profound (though vertiginously vulnerable) relationality, that Wittgenstein implicated in Investigations

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§§240–2, and then ethically explores in the famous anti-‘private-language’ considerations that follow. From very early in the Investigations, possibly as early as §1, and sequentially ever more strongly (and it is thus that one should read the progress from the opening of the book through to the anti-‘private-­ language’ considerations22), Wittgenstein paves the way for the fundamentality of such relationality. Now, is this a ‘thesis’? I think not, for this relationality is not a fact, not even a super-fact. It is, in the way I have sought to indicate above, something at once profound (fundamental) and vulnerable. It is, as we might put it, a project. It has continually to be made and remade. We might think of this in a slightly ‘Malebranchian’ way, transposed from the activity of God to the activity of everyday life, to our activity: we have to do this relationality (together), over and over, on every available occasion (call such an idea neo-occasionalism?). Relationality is the thread by which we all hang. And it is here—despite my philosophical debt to later Baker being greater, I hope, than my debt to anyone else—that I part most deeply from Baker23 (and from Waismann24). For they are surprisingly close to the basically ego-centred individualist ‘mainstream’ of the Western philosophical tradition, in this regard. For Wittgenstein and for Løgstrup, though not for most of the tradition, it is the relation between self and other that is primary. One can only ‘distil’ ‘subject’ and ‘object’ out from that relation. The freedom that later Baker and Waismann celebrate leads one too far away from relationality. It comes to grief in the anti-‘private-­ language’ considerations. Thus what I mean by the ‘liberatory philosophy’ that I see Wittgenstein as championing, though so clearly having the stamp of Baker’s thought upon it, moves beyond Baker to a new terrain where freedom and inter-being are inextricable, themselves ‘internally related’. Where it is obvious that freedom is not what Berlin called ‘negative freedom’. Where we will be able to see how philosophical autonomy—an overcoming of dogmatism, a true freedom of thought—coincides with the deepest possible inter-relation with others.25 ‘The ethical demand’ arises not as something external to the individual, not as something in any way heteronomous (although it may sometimes

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feel heteronomous: it may sometimes feel to us as if it is an unwelcome demand imposed upon us from outside: ‘Why me?: Why couldn’t someone else have been put in this place at this time, having to be a Samaritan?’ and so on, but when we breathe deeply or emerge from an ego-driven short-termism, this kind of thought is overcome, as shameful, making way perhaps even for a gratitude that we were ‘chosen’ by fate to be in this place at this time of need). We come to be subjects through the demand, that is, through the trusting relationship. And this, once more, is where we can interpret Løgstrup as going a step further than Levinas along the track towards a successfully realised second-personal ethic: ‘That a person is more or less in the power of another person is a fact we cannot alter; it is a fact of life. We do not deliberately choose to trust, and thereby deliver ourselves over to another. We constantly live in a state of being already delivered’ (1997, p. 54). And again; ‘it is not within our power to determine whether we wish to live in responsible relationships or not; we find ourselves in them simply because we exist’ (1997, p. 107). These thoughts of Løgstrup’s are profoundly in alignment with what I have sought to excavate in Wittgenstein. One can see this theme of Wittgenstein’s expanding further, from its ‘basis’ in the anti-private-language considerations: I would argue in fact that a central thrust of ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Part II (1992) and of On Certainty (1975) is the contesting of the philosophical canon’s placing of us as fundamentally in suspicion of one another. This suspicion may even be derived from our self-satisfaction with ourselves (the first-person) and a spectatorial relationship to others (‘third persons!’). Though all these phenomena are, as Hannes Nykänen (2002) and Joel Backström (2007) suggest, likely to be derived more basically from a reactivity against the (‘too’-)wonderful, ‘threatening’ possibility of love, of openness. Wittgenstein increasingly emphasises instead the second person, which is a relation—an ‘internal’ relation, ideally. Here is a striking example of Wittgenstein’s contestation of the bias of the philosophical tradition, and of his pointing up instead that there are some cases (actually, very many— though not all) where the prejudice that ‘no-one can really know anyone else’ is all-too-convenient, a way of avoiding love, avoiding mutuality:

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If I lie to him and he guesses it from my face and tells me so—do I still have the feeling that what is in me is in no way accessible to him and hidden? Don’t I feel rather that he sees right through me? // It is only in particular cases that the inner is hidden from me, and in those cases it is not hidden because it is the inner. (1992, p. 33)

In one reminder, one may be thus freed from capture by the prejudice of separateness. But one is likely to need reminding again and again and again: because the prejudice, as I’ve intimated, is literally a self-serving one. It helps to maintain one in ‘safety’, invulnerable to the profound vulnerability (to being called upon to act aright—and, if one does not, to criticism) that comes from recognising the call that the very existence of vulnerable others makes upon one. And I’ve suggested that the philosophical tradition, even to some extent including Levinas (whose very project was to set himself against this face of the philosophical tradition), is culpable here. It is a consequential, dangerous philosophical fantasy to suppose that we cannot be radically involved with each other unless we have ‘direct access’ to one another’s pains. In fact, the desire for such ‘direct access’, for the possibility of inspecting each other’s ‘beetles’, already shows that you are radically involved with the other. For the desire is a mark of our wanting confirmation for something we already suppose: that we are not, will not, must not be sundered radically from one another. The desire to be able to know another ‘directly’ misfires, but expresses, as through a glass darkly, that we already see each other, feel each other, want each other, face to face. (Why does this misfiring occur? Typically because we are afraid of the possibility of success; we pre-emptively stall the true meeting with the other because such a meeting will make us profoundly vulnerable—including, to our conscience.) Another way of expressing this of course would be (that we are free, helpfully) to say: we do directly encounter each other. We do see each other’s pain. It is only a philosophical prejudice that would insist upon inspection of a ‘beetle’—rather than us looking into another’s eyes (compare Wittgenstein, 1958, §286: ‘man sight ihm in die Augen’)—as involving a direct encounter. But this prejudice is not the product of a specific intellectual tradition alone; it is the product of a much deeper cultural

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malaise and hegemony. Philosophy in this sense is (as Cavell has seen most clearly, across his career) necessarily deep cultural criticism against philosophical and ideological prejudices that are occurrent far beyond the academy. We are radically (i.e. at the roots) involved with each other,26 contra any hypothesis to the effect that that involvement is somehow hypothetical.27 Philosophical normalcy tends to produce an attitude of inhumanity, or at minimum to provide a tacit apologia for it. Wittgenstein suggests as much here: What would it look like if everyone were always uncertain about everyone else’s feelings? Seemingly when they were expressing sympathy, etc. … for someone, they would always be a little doubtful, would always put on a doubtful expression or make a doubtful gesture.—But if we now leave off this constant gesture because it is constant, what behaviour then remains? Perhaps a behaviour that is cool, only superficially interested? But then we in turn don’t have to interpret their behaviour as an expression of doubting. (1992, p. 87)

What would it look like if we did as epistemology tends to tell us we ‘ought’ to do —because of the (scientistic) horror at false positives (whereas actually we should worry more about false negatives: about the dire results of our insisting upon evidence for humanity where such evidence may not be decisive, and where we may lose our contact with others or treat them inhumanely, in the meantime28). It would look much as our culture, sadly, quite often does: as though the most important thing were to be largely indifferent to others, and to look ‘cool’. (It is extremely telling that this term is among the greatest terms of approbation among the young, and thus among us all, because our culture venerates youth: how much happier the world might be, if instead we were all striving to be ‘warm’.) This should no longer be interpreted as an expression of doubting: it would rather be an attitude to life, to others. That is: it would no longer be an epistemological stance, but a moral-existential attitude. An attitude towards souls, of being somewhat less concerned with them than we ought to be. It means nothing to say that everyone is always uncertain about everyone else’s feelings. But it would mean

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something to be indifferent about others’ feelings. And this, the philosophical tradition runs the risk of encouraging. For the epistemological stance is, we can now see, a moral stance (or rather: typically a problematically amoral or immoral stance). Contra the epistemologically focused philosophical tradition, trust comes first. This Løgstrup expresses in his later work29 through the lovely notion of ‘sovereign expressions of life’, of which trust is, as I read him, the paradigm. Løgstrup gives here a lovely case of a Danish woman visited by a polite Nazi during World War II; the Nazi seeks to inquire as to the location of a man who is wanted. Even though the woman is completely clear in herself that the right thing to do is not to give this man away, nevertheless she has to struggle a little not to struggle in breaking trust with the Nazi. The attitude of trust is primary; it has a normative character enduring through everything. Wittgenstein, as I read him, suggests something similar: Are we perhaps over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence?—And on what experience is our assumption based? // (Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one.) // Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing. (1958, §§249–50)

Simulation, pretence, distrust are complex phenomena that can overlay and will not precede simpler ones. Roughly: a sovereign, unquestioned and unquestioning trust. On what experience is our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence based? On no experience at all; it is a fundamental attitude, emerging from attunement to and acceptance of the fundamental attitude that we might naturally term trust.30 It is a ‘one-sided’ trust31: trust that has no equal opposite, for it could make no sense for a distrust that is fundamentally opposed it to be fundamental. Thus this use of the word ‘trust’ is ‘transitional’, ladder-like. It serves as a reminder of something too basic to be meaningfully stated, though nevertheless fragile.

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The vulnerability of children, who have in a fundamental sense no alternative but to trust, even as they seek to discriminate those who they should not trust (i.e. even as they seek, rationally and needfully, to avoid being completely open), is in the end but a special, extreme, telling, most deeply moving case of the vulnerability of each and all of us in the hands of all our fellows. We are all (like) children, in the sense that we are all placed in the care of the myriad of others who are in our care. In Løgstrup’s resonant words, ‘we belong to one another’s world. Others are a part of the life we have received; they constitute its content. Any other life, a life in isolation, is humanly speaking unthinkable’ (1997, p. 117). In this mutual likeness, how could we be unknowable to each other (as Levinas risks supposing)? In our common predicament of pain, vulnerability to pain, dependence—and capacity to care.32

3. The kind of truly relational ethic sketched above is advocated, among Wittgensteinians, chiefly by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Hannes Nykänen and Joel Backström (and myself ). We all stress a second-person approach. I have already touched on Christensen’s approach, which I find very conducive. Nykänen and Backström too have been a significant influence upon me, and I believe their work in this area to be nothing less than the most significant since Buber’s and Løgstrup’s. But I have nevertheless some differences with them worth I think elaborating here, as we think together, in this volume and elsewhere, how one might develop a relational ethic further. A first difference is terminological. Nykänen and Backström call the problem inhibiting such an ethic ‘collectivity’.33 But why not ‘conformism’? Wouldn’t ‘conformism’ more accurately describe the problematical character of collectives that are problematical (for I do not wish to assume dogmatically that all collectives are problematical)? If the term ‘collectivity’ is to be used, then it would be well if it were recognised that the choice of (that) term is in an important sense arbitrary; the term ‘individuality’ could just as well be used to name the problem! For groups that oppress their members are no more a fundamental

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marker of what is wrong with our time, what it is in us that resists real relationship, than are individuals that insist endlessly upon their separateness. In fact, I would suggest that individualism is a more dominant ideology in our time than collectivism. (Though it is true that such individualism is mostly faux: the kind of freedom of thought prized by Wittgenstein is but rarely accomplished, and most actually existing individualism, as mercilessly mocked in a famous scene in ‘The life of Brian’, is actually just a veiled form of conformism.) My worry is that Backström and Nykänen risk tacitly buying into that hegemonic ideology. That they may even be more a product of their time, conformistically, than they appreciate. I think that our time’s prejudice in favour of individualism needs a corrective to help us take more seriously the aspect of our nature that is essentially collective. I am thinking in the first instance of how we are mammals, primates, born (unlike reptiles) into a love that is plural and not only dyadic, born into community. Most strikingly, in the profound mother-child bond of care. Now, does this make me a ‘naturalist’? Perhaps. But not, I think, a scientific naturalist. I am committed to no dogma of science being the only respectable method of inquiry or reflection—on the contrary34—nor to any recherché scientific knowledge being required for the point. The contrast between mammals and reptiles is one broadly informed by biological knowledge but actually of a very basic and very long-standing, and largely more or less non-scientific character, if by science we mean to index (as the scientific naturalist typically does) the institutions and forms of science proper, science in the sense of what scientific experts research. It is, in short, the kind of thing we all know, but that, as Wittgenstein reminds us, we need reminding of. And of course he himself had a name for this kind of basic or very general knowledge of nature: What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §415, emphasis added)35

In this (limited) sense, I’m with Wittgenstein in being a ‘naturalist’. But this sense of the word ‘naturalist’ means only that we are reminding

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ourselves of fundamental features of the anthropic and so on. It is not a scientific naturalism.36 The point I made above about terminology regarding ‘conformism’ or ‘collectivity’ (or ‘individualism’) might nevertheless of course turn out to be merely terminological. I suspect that the issue around naturalism that I’ve just touched on signals a deeper difference between myself and Nykänen and Backström, but I will let the reader judge that, based on what is in this volume. Let me turn instead to the most substantive way I’m aware of making a contrast between myself and the Nykänen-­ Backström approach. It is this. If we are all serious about believing, as we (and Christensen) claim to be, that it is the relation that is primary, not the relata, then the assumption that what are related must be individual persons will turn out to be just that: an assumption, a tacit dogma. My worry is that Nykänen and Backström at times fall into that dogma. They tend to assume that a relational ethic is an I-you [singular] matter always. But taking seriously that relationality is primary leaves it an open question what the relata are, so long as they are beings or being-like.37 In particular, I would submit that the relata can be made up of more than one person.38 That a relational ethic can sometimes involve I-You [plural] relations, or We-You relations. At either end of a relation can be persons or unified collectives. Examples of the latter might be some activist ‘affinity groups’,39 couples, families, tribes; the collective could sometimes include animals (most obviously, pack animals such as dogs40 or wolves). The impression sometimes given by Backström/Nykänen that ‘we’s cannot be a good thing is one that a determined anti-dogmatic attitude should overcome. It is a prejudice—a Modern Western prejudice (and here, Nykänen and Backström risk showing a cultural narrowness, comparable in abstract form to the cultural narrowness found in contemporary scientific naturalism)—to think that it is only ever individual persons who relate authentically to one another. The danger of making the meeting of eyes into a ‘paradigm case’ of relating, as Nykänen and Backström tend to do,41 is that it begs the question against meetings between larger units, first-person plurals (‘wes’) or second-person plurals (‘yous’). This tacit bias in favour of individualism becomes especially invidious when one considers the profound importance today of our relating to our

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descendants (unborn future generations) on pain of otherwise (as we are on course to do) destroying them pre-emptively. Such relating looks impossible, if one has to relate to individual persons: because future people are not yet formed as individuals. Their gaze can’t meet ours (see Read, 2014). The fundamental human unit can be ‘larger than self ’. Or, better still, more radically put: the self can be a larger unit than individual persons. At minimum, we should leave it open that one may be able to felicitously identify one’s self with something larger than one’s organism. We may even want to call that larger self, an achieved community, in-dividual. And such a we can then form a second-personal relation to other Is or wes, as I will shortly explicate. Such an achievement may be fragile; it will likely continually dissolve and re-form; in its dissolvements, one will see again the I-You relations that formed it. But it is dogmatism to insist that such a community can never exist. (Just as what the communitarians typically got wrong is assuming dogmatically that once it is formed it should always exist.) Think of understanding a feature film (the most influential art-form of our time) or seeking to do so. We sometimes attribute the authorship of a film solely to an individual author, an ‘auteur’ (usually the director). But a moment’s reflection tells us that this is a crude over-simplification (albeit a revealing one: it reveals our knee-jerk individualism, as well as our cult of celebrity). A film is a thoroughgoingly trans-individual enterprise, involving writers, actors, cameramen and so on. When we use the name of an auteur, we are typically referring in reality to an ensemble. If we seek to put film-making into an I-You frame, then quite clearly the ‘I’ in question is a ‘We’ (a well-made film will have involved realised internal relations between those making it, leading towards a unified work). Or, alternatively, if we view things from the perspective of the viewer, then the You that I am understanding when I understand a film is clearly plural in the sense of involving multiple persons. It is an achieved community that I am seeking to understand, when I understand a good film. An I-you relation, if achieved, forms a ‘we’ as Saint-Exupery famously recognised, when he said that ‘Love does not consist in gazing at each other. But in looking outward together in the same direction’, a remark that I think ill-fits the conception of Nykänen and Backström, who seem

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committed to having to take such looking outward together as a form of ‘collectivity’ and thus as necessarily problematic. Similarly, a we-you relation, if achieved, forms a new larger-still ‘we’. This is, roughly, a dialectical process. The synthesis becomes the basis of a potential further synthesis. And so onward. Because of this dialectic, when we take seriously the existence of ‘internal’ relations between beings, we open ourselves to the possibility that the fundamental ‘unit’ of existence is not the individual human person, but the unities formed/existent where there are internal relations between beings, that is, roughly, (small) communities. I want to be open to the possibility that it is larger-than-individual-­ person units that may have fundamental (including internal) relations to others. That seems to me the spirit of Wittgenstein: struggling always to overcome dogmatism. Consider again the example made famous by Saint-Exupery. Sometimes, what I have described above seems to me the way that one functions as part of a couple. That is, sometimes, we gaze into each other’s eyes, but other times we turn as one towards others. We feel as one towards some friend who is in need, for instance. Similarly: sometimes, in the anti-nuclear direct-action affinity group that I used to belong to (part of ‘Trident Ploughshares’, seeking to turn nuclear weapons into ploughshares), pairs of us or a trio or occasionally the whole group would turn as one towards another unit/entity. Sometimes challengingly, though (we tried to be) loving. That is the kind of phenomenon that I want to leave space for. It seems to me that Nykänen and Backström don’t leave any space for it, and that is why I suspect the presence in their work of a residual dogmatic individualism. Not in relation to their main claims (e.g. concerning conscience, and the mechanisms of what I call conformism) which I endorse and celebrate. But in relation to a way in which they seem, because of their antipathy to ‘collectivity’, to limit their main positive claims so that they are allowed to apply only to individual human persons. Which seems to me an unwarranted limitation, and furthermore one that illustrates a cultural-historical bias. (For I would claim that my ‘broader’ way of seeing things would make much more sense to most humans across the entirety of human history, including to most Christians, until relatively

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recently; seeing oneself fundamentally as part of a dyad is an extremely recent and geographically specific phenomenon. And not only because most human communities have had fundamental limitations or problems!) If we are really serious in making relationality the focal phenomenon, and thinking of beings as formed out of relationality, then we ought to be open to the kind of possibility I am seeking to clear space for. Nykänen is inclined to insist that ‘If a relation involves more than two persons it simply isn’t second personal’.42 I counter that what we call the first-person plural can be second personal in terms of philosophical grammar, if it is truly ‘unified’ as outlined above (noting, please, that I make explicit that such unification is rarely if ever permanent), and if it is appropriately related to others. Thus, the second person is not necessarily dyadic. This line of thinking hopes to be a case-study in what I call ‘liberatory philosophy’ in action (busting the prejudice that the second person is necessarily a relation between two people only), and it establishes the implications of conceiving of autonomy as relationality. It’s a prejudice to take it as obvious that autonomy has essentially to do with ‘individual’ persons’ autonomy. What matters are real relationships, and those are not always based in Is or singular Yous.

4. In conclusion then, I have sought to illustrate the ethical aspect—which I claim to be actually central—to Wittgenstein’s critique of our desire for a ‘private language’. Which is a desire to retreat from our utter relatedness to one another. I have connected that illustration to Løgstrup and (much more equivocally) to Levinas. And I have briefly sought to triangulate the relational ethic that this chapter hopes to have evinced with the related but more ‘individualistic’ such ethic present in Nykänen and Backström (and visible in their—excellent—contributions to this volume). My hope would be that the twenty-first century might see a deeper awareness of the problems inherent in (third-personal) scientific naturalism, and further research into and development instead of our (second-­personal) alternative. But in the darkness of these times, it would be wise not yet to over-invest in such a hope.43

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Notes 1. I explore that dialectic in detail in my book Liberatory philosophy (forthcoming). It is anticipated in Read (2012a). 2. See also the final chapter of Wallgren (2006), which investigates much the same dialectic under the heading of ‘emancipation’. 3. Compare here Løgstrup’s discussion of the desire to know the love of another in this extreme sense, of directly knowing it as an object: ‘Precisely because the other person whom I love is unable through his or her feeling to know my love, I must constantly testify to it. If he or she were able, even for a moment, to know my love as well as I know it myself, it would be unnecessary for me to express it. A strange stagnation would set in.’ (1997, p. 130, emphasis added). Wittgenstein might well hesitate to endorse Løgstrup’s seeming assumption that I know my love for another myself (this sounds a little too like a beetle in a box), but otherwise the basic point of the passage runs helpfully parallel to the point I am making, supra. For Løgstrup is trying to express the absolute importance of the expression of love, rather than its being a feeling alone, let alone an ‘object’. We might usefully go further still, and suggest that one’s love is not love at all except if it gets in some form or another expressed (even if only in something like the spirit of one’s thoughts and hopes), and thereby made vulnerable. 4. There may be some exceptions to what I am saying here. Consider for instance someone with locked-in syndrome. But here it is important that I had to mention a serious pathology in order to locate an exception. 5. This connects with John Caputo’s perspective in his (ill-named) Against Ethics (1993). Caputo’s suggestion that we respond to suffering without mediation is exactly consonant with what I take from the anti-private-­ language considerations, see also Backström (this volume). 6. The point here is of course similar to that motivating ethical defence of free will. It also resembles Gandhi’s important idea that the secret desire of those seeking a moral or political philosophy is, impossibly and ­self-­defeatingly, to save human beings the trouble of having to seek to be good. 7. It would also, (not) incidentally, open one to a new possibility of being abused. Ursula le Guin explores that possibility quite beautifully in her The Word for World is Forest (1977), in depicting a (more or less enslaved) species who can be forced to not hurt others through being exposed to a

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particular set of bodily gestures/ritual. She explores what happens, for good and ill, when that forcing gives way to freedom. 8. The desperate irony of Descartes’ splitting us into two substances is that he renders us not only overly split, but he fails even to distinguish adequately mind from body. Talking of the mental as a substance renders it insufficiently different from body. On this delicate point, see Wittgenstein (1958, §339). 9. I will make clear below that I do not have an individualistic conception of the second person in mind. The second-person relation can involve a ‘we’, and/or a ‘you-plural’. 10. Note that talk of fragility here needs to be carefully parsed. One should be aware that the kind of fragility I am referencing here is not a neutrally descriptive characteristic but an expression of a moral struggle. It’s like saying ‘Love is too hard.’ (Thanks to Hannes Nykänen for this reminder). 11. See especially his The Quest for Certainty (1929), see also Spurlock’s (n.d.) helpful discussion. 12. Here I am tacitly invoking Løgstrup, whose work is in my view quite deeply consonant with Wittgenstein’s. See, for example, Løgstrup (1997, p. 112), for his emphasis on the radically agentic character of freedom in the face of an ethical question. There is no contradiction between the force of the ethical (or Christian) ‘must’ and the freedom to uphold or deny it, on the contrary. See below for development of this theme. 13. I owe this thought to Joel Backström. 14. I offer much more detail in Chapter 8 of Read (2012b), and in Read (2010a). 15. One of my key guides here is Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen’s wonderfully clear paper, ‘Relational views of ethical obligation in Wittgenstein, Levinas and Løgstrup’ (2015). If there is a difference between us, it lies mostly in the fact that, while she takes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the ‘Lecture on ethics’ and Culture and Value as her main sources, my main source is the Investigations §§243–428. Where I strongly agree with Christensen is in finding Wittgenstein’s kinship to Løgstrup to lie above all in their t­horoughly relational ethic. And in finding their approach to be, in the end, superior to Levinas’: on which, see below. 16. Notice my use of the word ‘inspired by’ here. It is not certain that even Descartes is vulnerable to this criticism, if one reads him as Baker and Morris do in their Descartes’ Dualism (1995). It is far less certain that Levinas is; Levinas seeks to explore precisely the point about knowing a

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person not being knowing facts about them that I emphasise in this paragraph of my text. But remaining agnostic about whether the criticism I am making here would apply to Levinas himself, my experience is that it applies to virtually all his interpreters. 17. See Westerlund (forthcoming). Cf. also Christensen (2015, pp. 16, 22). 18. As for instance noted in Wittgenstein (1992, pp. 82, 89): passages which stress how knowing someone’s state of mind or of feeling or of being may depend upon knowing them personally. This connects with my emphasis below on the importance of the second person, an importance profoundly neglected in philosophy. More generally: in his Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology II, Wittgenstein enters into the subtleties of our openness, our concealment, our mutuality, our care, our oppression… He is detailing here how we are normally connected second personally, as part of a field, and all the intricacies that risk being smothered by that ‘normally’. 19. Løgstrup holds that the other is always in some way vulnerable to us. He says that the presence of the other person always gives rise to an ethical demand, because we always need to take care of the other, because the other is always—in some small way or other—exposed to us (we always have a little bit of the life of the other in our hand). This may be going too far; it seems an attempt to ‘transcendentalise’ the situation or theorise it. On Wittgenstein’s behalf, we don’t need to commit to going quite that far here. Perhaps there are situations where one person has no vulnerability to another; I wouldn’t like to rule that possibility out in advance. An example might be where someone has inured themselves against the depredations of another, through long experience. The important thing about such an example is that it shows that it would be a mistake to assume that rendering oneself invulnerable to others was always a mistake, a regrettable separation. 20. Though at moments Løgstrup does sound alarmingly close to Levinas: as when at times he seems to describe the ethical demand as intrinsically unfulfillable. An advantage of Wittgenstein’s approach, that I emphasise below, is his greater emphasis (than either of these) upon the variability of whether one can actually succeed in empathising with or understanding another. 21. Not incidentally, the wording here recalls the way (that we resolute readers stress) that Wittgenstein addresses the reader and invites a second-­ person relation to himself, at the end of the Tractatus (1922).

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22. One might even say: this progress is less than it seems, because, albeit often without realising it, from the start we had actually to assume or live in what is made explicit in Investigations §§243ff. 23. See Chapter 2 of my Liberatory Philosophy (forthcoming). 24. In the way in which he insists on grammar being ‘autonomous’ and ‘arbitrary’, Waismann risks a kind of subjectivistic (or at best inter-­ subjectivistic, rather than truly social) Anti-Realism. His approach is too individualistic; it is as if human agreement is a matter of trying to bring into alignment ships that might always pass in the night. This fails to comprehend the deep lessons of Investigations §§240–2 and of the anti‘private-language’ considerations. This is tellingly revealed by the way in which Waismann (e.g. at 1997, p. 141) runs together the word ‘agreement’ with the words ‘convention’ and ‘arrangement’; he never shows attunement to the way in which Wittgenstein, in §§240–2 and the entire sequence of considerations that follows those remarks, is interested in foregrounding rather something like ‘attunement’—an ‘agreement’ that is not by convention. Waismann’s picture has our agreement being too close to agreement in opinions or conventions; similarly, in Chapter XII of his The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (1997), ‘Problems of communication’, there is almost nothing of our commonality, our feeling for each other—the kinds of matters I have sought to make focal, in the present chapter. 25. I lack space here to expand this crucial point. Such expansion can be found in 2.1 of Read (2012a) and in Read (2010a, 2010b). 26. And with nature: see Greaves and Read (2015), which sketches a relational (rather than ‘intrinsic’ or ‘instrumental’) environmental ethic. 27. I am thinking of hypothetical ‘social contracts’ and so on. As argued at p. 100ff. of Read (2010b), liberal contractarianism and contractualism, like standard epistemology, involves a ‘private language’ delusion, a fundamental, dangerous individualistic dogma. 28. Cf. Investigations §420 for a case-in-point: I discuss this passage in detail in ‘Swastikas and cyborgs: The significance of PI 420’, in Read (2012b). 29. See primarily his (2007). Cf. Again Wittgenstein’s Investigations, Part II, and this, from his later writings: ‘I want to say that there is an original genuine expression of pain; that the expression of pain therefore is not equally connected to the pain and to the pretence’ (1992, p. 55). Pain ‘comes first’, pretence only later.

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30. The political ramifications of this can perhaps be seen in this marvellous remark of Merleau-Ponty’s, from The Phenomenology of Perception, another great philosophical ‘war book’ (written 1945): ‘Solipsism as a philosophical doctrine is not the result of a system of private property; nevertheless into economic institutions as into conceptions of the world is projected the same existential prejudice in favour of isolation and mistrust’ (2002, fn.18, pp.  198–9, emphasis added). Far from hell being other people, hell is their total felt absence. The world is other people (and nature). 31. Here I am thinking of the work of Eckhart Tolle, who stresses that real love has no opposite and that trust is a natural state for humans (2002, p.  92). Think also of Wittgenstein’s remarks about trust in the Investigations and On Certainty. 32. For a consonant analysis of the latter, see MacIntyre (1999). 33. See, for example, Backström and Nykänen (2016). 34. See again, for example, Read (2012a). 35. One should read this remark also in the context of the longer discussion of the same theme in Investigations, ‘Part II’: ‘If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar?—Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest does not fall back upon these possible causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history—since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes. I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realising something that we realise—then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him’ (1958, p. 230). The apparent contradiction between the two remarks is irreal: Wittgenstein doesn’t of course say, in §415, that he is doing natural history, but that he is making remarks on the natural history of human beings. Philosophical remarks. Cf. also the ‘below the line’ remarks at §142: ‘What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept, are often

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extremely general facts of nature: such facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality’ (1958, p. 56). Part of my suggestion is that that we are mammals, that we are born defenceless and nurtured in community, that we spontaneously exhibit care for each other are such general facts of nature—concerning human beings (and some other animals, including our mammalian kin). 36. It is called by Jerrold Katz a ‘deflationary naturalism’. See his (1990), which is based on a contrast between Wittgenstein as ‘deflationary naturalist’ and Quine, Chomsky and others as ‘scientific naturalists’. Deflationary naturalism rules out only what Wittgenstein, in the Lectures and Conversations (1966), calls ‘superstition’, that is, a crude pseudo-­ scientific supernaturalism. That is, it doesn’t actually rule out anything at all, but only delusions. Thus ‘deflationary naturalism’ can really only be a term used ‘in the negative’, to say what one isn’t, where what one isn’t is something it makes no sense to say. So there’s no real ‘ism’ here, no position. And that’s as it should be. 37. Thus, there may even possibly be internal (quasi-second-person) relations between beings and objects, if those objects are conceived in a being-­like manner: as in animism. See, for instance, the powerful conception offered here: http://www.christiananimism.com. 38. Indeed, we might go further: the philosophical task being about how to live, and living being always together across long periods of time (periods longer than individual human lives), the task is necessarily one of caring for community. (Thanks to Thomas Wallgren for making this clearer to me). 39. It is in the context of one of these, a direct-action nuclear disarmament group, that I first self-consciously experienced what I believe to be a ‘we’ that then related itself to ‘yous’, a ‘we’ that at times had a splendidly unitary nature and was not merely an aggregate of individuals, nor oppressive. I elaborate on this experience below. 40. Here, I should like to remark that it is dangerous to assume that there are necessarily power relations between humans and non-human animals such that a genuine ‘we’ involving both is impossible. Once again, that assumption, though a fair guess in the direly anti-animal world we currently inhabit, is a dogma that should not be projected onto all times and places. 41. See, for example, Backström (2007, p. 79), among many other passages. Of course, I have stressed, in invoking Investigations §286, that such

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connection through the meeting of eyes is absolutely vital for human beings, for love. But to turn it into a shibboleth or exclusive paradigm, and to use it to exclude the possibility of more plural meetings of humans as potentially involving internal relations, is I think to over-extend the passage and its moral. 42. Personal communication, 31 October 2017. 43. Huge thanks to Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Hannes Nykänen, Joel Backström, Niklas Toivakainen and Thomas Wallgren for marvellous comments on earlier versions of this material. Thanks also to an audience at Åbo Akademi for feedback. And thanks to Atus MariqueoRussell for editorial assistance.

References Backström, J. (2007). The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Backström, J., & Nykänen, H. (2016). Collectivity, Evil and the Dynamics of Moral Value. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 22(4), 466–476. Special Issue: Philosophy Thematic Issue. Baker, G., & Morris, K. (1995). Descartes’ Dualism. London: Routledge. Caputo, J. D. (1993). Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Christensen, A.-M. (2015). Relational Views of Ethical Obligation in Wittgenstein, Levinas and Løgstrup. Ethical Perspectives, 22(1), 15–38. Dewey, J. (1929). The Quest for Certainty. London: Unwin LTD. Greaves, T., & Read, R. (2015). Where Values Resides: Making Ecological Value Possible. Environmental Ethics, 37(3), 321–340. Katz, J. (1990). The Metaphysics of Meaning. Beverly, MA: Bradford Book. le Guin, U. (1977). The Word for World is Forest. London: Victor Gollancz. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Løgstrup, K. E. (1997). The Ethical Demand (T. Jensen, Trans.). Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Macintyre, A. (1999). Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago, IL: Open Court.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). The Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge. Nykänen, H. (2002). The ‘I’, the ‘You’ and the Soul: An Ethics of Conscience. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Nykänen, H. (2014). Freud’s Dangerous Pupil. European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1(2), 71–90. Read, R. (2010a). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a War Book. New Literary History, 41(3), 593–612. Read, R. (2010b). Wittgenstein vs. Rawls. In V.  Munz, K.  Puhl, & J.  Wang (Eds.), Language and World. Part One, Essays on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. Read, R. (2012a). Wittgenstein Among the Sciences (S.  Summers, Ed.). Farnham: Ashgate. Read, R. (2012b). A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Read, R. (2014). The Philosophical and Democratic Case for a Citizens’ Super-­ Jury to Represent and Defend Future People. The Oxford Philosopher. Retrieved from https://theoxfordphilosopher.com/2014/10/28/citizenssuperjuryforthefuture/ Read, R. (forthcoming). Liberatory Philosophy. Spurlock, R. S. (n.d.). Commentary on John Dewey. The Quest for Certainty. Retrieved from https://www.giffordlectures.org/lectures/quest-certainty Tolle, E. (2002). Practicing the Power of Now. Mumbai: Yogi. Waismann, F. (1997). The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallgren, T. (2006). Transformative Philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield: Lexington. Westerlund, F. (forthcoming). Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena. Bloomsbury. Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (G.  E. M.  Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures and Conversations of Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Wittgenstein, L. (1975). On Certainty (G.  E. M.  Anscombe & G.  H. von Wright, Ed., D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. II (G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Ed., C. G. Luckhardt & M. Aue, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Author Index1

A

Annas, Julia, 183 Anscombe, G. E. M., 76n30, 77n41 Apel, Karl-Otto, 71n3, 75n28 Aristotle, 88, 116, 124n1, 180, 309 Augustine, Saint, 64, 278, 281, 304n13 B

Backström, Joel, 78n46, 79n60, 157n22, 248, 259n5, 262n15, 262n16, 302n5, 305n16, 305n20, 372, 376–381, 388n43 Baker, Gordon, 77n41, 77–78n43, 363, 371, 383n16

Barrett, Louise, 106, 114, 115 Bataille, Georges, 94 Baz, Avner, 106, 108–111 Benardete, José, 142, 154n12 Bennett, Maxwell, 54–56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 69, 72n9, 77n39, 77n40, 209–212, 274 Blanchot, Maurice, 91 Bouwsma, O. K., 59–61, 65, 68, 78n45 Brandom, Robert, 71n3, 73n17, 351 Brenner, W., 144, 155n15 Bruin de, Leon, 71n5 Buber, Martin, 11, 206, 302n5, 376 Butler, Judith, 193

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 J. Backström et al. (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6

391

392 

Author Index

C

Cadena, Marisol de la, 68 Caillé, Alan, 91 Cassirer, Ernst, 95 Cavell, Stanley, 24n2, 78n43, 134, 142, 155n12, 218, 224n7, 374 Cerbone, David, 21, 22, 79n60, 176n12 Chalmers, David, 2 Chemero, Anthony, 103–105, 115, 117–119, 122, 123 Chiesa, Lorenzo, 283, 284, 298 Churchland, P. M., 16, 25n3, 48, 72n12, 208, 310 Churchland, P. S., 208, 310 Clark, Andy, 104, 123 Coetzee, J. M., 197 Conant, James, 77n41, 78n43, 211, 216, 217 Cook, John, 220, 260n7 Costall, Alan, 114, 118, 119, 122, 124, 260n6 Crary, Alice, 77n41, 200n7 Crick, Francis, 44 Cusa, Nicholas of, 21, 92–98

154n7, 154n9, 155–156n16, 156n22, 231, 235, 236, 267–271, 302n3, 310, 325n1, 339, 340, 345 Derrida, Jacques, 57, 77n42, 91, 369 Descartes, René, 2, 70, 87, 88, 94, 95, 98, 112, 116, 231, 232, 236, 271, 272, 310, 332, 369, 383n8, 383n16 Dewey, John, 366 Diamond, Cora, 77n41, 78n48, 78n50, 199n2, 199n6, 222 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 91 Dilman, Ilham, 24n2, 207, 217 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 96, 97 Drury, M. O’C., 72n14 E

Ebersole, Frank, 106, 110, 111, 260n8 Eccles, John C., 71n5, 72n10 Evans, Gareth, 187 F

D

Dain, Edmund, 21, 22, 152n3, 157n22, 176n12 Darwin, Charles, 1 Davidson, Donald, 66, 71n5, 74n19, 346, 348, 354, 357, 359n9, 359n14 Dennett, Daniel, 2, 21, 22, 31, 32, 46, 48, 54–56, 58–61, 63, 64, 68, 69, 77n39, 134–139, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152n1,

Frazer, J. G., 62 Fredrickson, Barbara, 207–210, 213, 217, 219, 224n6 Frege, Gottlob, 74n19, 76n30, 77n41, 106, 109 Freud, S., 184, 310 G

Gadamer, H-G, 37, 49, 50, 75n28 Gaita, Raimond, 53, 77n37, 213, 218, 221, 225n8, 360n17

  Author Index 

Galileo, 1 Gallagher, Shaun, 71n5, 260n6 Garfinkel, Harold, 111 Geach, Peter, 143, 154n11 Gibran, Kahlil, 203–207, 213, 219–221, 224n3 Gibson, James, 21, 103, 114, 115, 117–122 Gøtzsche, Peter C., 79n55 Griffiths, Paul E., 223n2, 224n2 H

Habermas, Jürgen, 44, 52–54, 66, 71n3, 75n28, 76n34, 76n35, 79n57 Hacker, Peter, 21, 31, 32, 46, 54–56, 58–61, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71n3, 77n39, 77n40, 77n43, 209–212, 274, 279, 344, 350 Heal, Jean, 236 Heft, Harry, 103, 104, 114, 118, 119 Hegel, Georg, F., 11, 96, 98, 325n2 Heidegger, Martin, 71n1, 106, 115, 117, 152–153n5, 311, 336, 338, 357, 359n9, 360n18 Hertzberg, Lars, 106, 176n12, 224n5, 261n13 Holland, R. F., 360n17 Honneth, A., 71n3, 312, 325n2 Hull, C. L., 236 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 183, 199n5 Hutchinson, Phil, 21 Hutto, Daniel, 10, 103–105, 114, 115, 123, 260n6

393

I

Irigaray, Luce, 206 J

Jaspers, Karl, 21, 85–98 Johnson, Mark, 112, 114 Jonze, Spike, 7 K

Kant, Immanuel, 25n4, 40, 74n20, 77n41, 96, 330, 331, 338, 349, 358n4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 11, 206, 214, 216, 219, 220, 225n8, 310 Kim, Jaegwon, 2, 21, 31, 32, 34–48, 51, 52, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 72n8, 72n12, 72n13, 74n21 Korsgaard, Christine, 180, 181 Kuhn, Thomas S., 33, 106 L

Lacan, Jacques, 71n3, 91, 269, 281–287, 289, 292–295, 297, 298, 301, 304n15, 360n19 Lakoff, George, 112, 114 Legendre, Pierre, 91 Leoni, Federico, 21, 85, 258n1 Leslie, Alan M., 236 Levinas, Emmanuel, 11, 23, 153n5, 360n16, 363–381, 383n15, 383–384n16, 384n20 Løgstrup, K. E., 23, 206, 363–381, 382n3, 383n12, 383n15, 384n19, 384n20 Lovibond, Sabina, 183

394 

Author Index

M

P

MacIver, A. M., 236 Malcolm, Norman, 78n49, 144, 146, 147, 344 Marion, Jean-Luc, 206 McDowell, John, 21, 31, 32, 44, 46–52, 54, 56, 60, 61, 68, 69, 71n3, 72n10, 72n13, 73n16, 74n18–20, 75n22, 75n24, 75n28, 75–76n29, 77n40, 181, 182, 302n2, 342, 344, 346–351, 353, 354, 357, 359n14 McGilchrist, Iain, 342 McGinn, Colin, 270, 272, 302n3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 71n3, 112–115, 117, 156n20, 261n13, 386n30 Midgley, Mary, 237 Moore, G. E., 76n30 Moran, Daniel, 24n3 Moran, Richard, 187, 195, 200n10 Morris, Katherine, 77n43, 383n16 Murdoch, Iris, 199n2, 206, 219, 220, 225n8

Paolo, Ezequiel Di, 103, 106, 115 Parmenides, 40, 70, 79n59 Peirce, C. S., 62 Phillips, D. Z., 216, 217, 220, 224n7 Plato, 69, 70, 116, 180, 259n4, 301 Plotinus, 95 Popper, Karl, 38 Prinz, Jesse, 104, 123, 223n2 Putnam, Hilary, 111, 116

N

Nagel, Thomas, 270, 272, 302n3, 339, 340 Newen, Albert, 10, 24n3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 90, 303n8, 310 Norem, Julia, 224n4 Nykänen, Hannes, 23, 78n46, 79n60, 157n22, 212, 258n1, 259n5, 260n11, 262n15, 262n16, 262n18, 302n5, 305n16, 305n20, 370, 372, 376–381, 383n10, 388n43 Nyman, Heikki, 58

Q

Quine, Willard v. O., 66, 130, 351, 352, 355, 357, 387n36 R

Read, Rupert, 23, 75n29, 77n41, 79n60, 379, 382n1, 383n14, 385n25–28 Rich, Adrienne, 256 Rorty, Richard, 54, 73n17, 77n38, 350, 352–354 Rosch, Eleanor, 114, 115 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67 Rowlands, Mark, 103, 106, 111, 112, 114 Ryle, Gilbert, 41, 237 S

Sacks, Harvey, 111 Saint-Exupery, Antoine, 379, 380 Särkelä, Arvi-Antti, 71n3 Sartre, J.-P., 106, 259n4 Schlick, M., 71n4 Schopenhauer, A., 59, 60

  Author Index 

Searle, John, 21, 31, 32, 38, 48, 54–56, 58–61, 64, 68, 69, 270, 271, 273, 302n3 Sellars, W., 46, 73n18, 74n19, 123, 124 Sextus Empiricus, 58 Sheldrake, Rupert, 44 Socrates, 11, 40, 58, 69, 70, 223n1, 301, 310, 330, 339 Søndergaard Christensen, Anne-­ Marie, 22, 157n22 Stern, Daniel N., 259n2 Stone, Martin, 77n42 T

Taylor, Charles, 24n2, 302n4, 312, 325n2 Theunissen, Michael, 67, 78n50, 79n59 Thompson, Evan, 24n3, 71n5, 114, 115, 199n5, 261n13 Toivakainen, Niklas, 23, 78n46, 79n60, 157n22, 260n9, 388n43 Tolle, Eckhart, 386n31

395

Travis, Charles, 106, 108–111 Turkle, Sherry, 24n1 Tye, Michael, 48 V

Varela, Francisco J., 71n5, 114, 115 W

Waismann, Friedrich, 371, 385n24 Wallgren, Thomas, 21, 77n38, 79n58, 157n22, 302n2, 302n4, 305n20, 357, 382n2, 387n38, 388n43 Weil, Simone, 206 Wheeler, Michael, 114, 115 Wiedmann, Thomas, 79n54 Winch, Peter, 176n10, 220, 359n12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11, 32, 41, 106, 129–151, 179–199, 209, 233, 269, 330, 363–381 Wright, G. H. von, 44, 52, 72n11, 76n31