In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now.
The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen
Hilan Bensusan
1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around the the attractions of social immunity from the point of view of the workers, can flag a red light with respect to the Given. If Lyotard`s diagnosis is right, there is a class struggle packed into the disputes around the deliverances of the senses. The coupling of (empirical) thinking and the surrounding environment can be compared with the association between hands and tools, bodies and machines, for the resulting product – what is manufactured or what is thought – depends on the way the assemblage is put together. In the case of manufacture, the assemblage is geared towards the merchandise whereas in the case of thinking it is oriented towards thoughts that are equally in conformity with the entrails of capital. If concepts are not in themselves the battlefield between a proletarian way of looking at the world and the received capitalist – or protocapitalist – perspective, it could seem that arguing against the Given is precisely a defense of the bourgeois order that makes the proletarian underground of concepts invisible.
The suspicion against concepts has driven thinking towards the Given. In the already classical seesaw image that John McDowell put forward in the opening pages of Mind and World, the oscillation is between the attractions of an empiricism that would shortcut concepts and place us directly in (partial) contact with the world and the attempts to depart from a picture where the senses can provide no real reasons but only exculpations for us to think that things are one way or another. To move away from the oscillation is not straightforward. If concepts are to be seen as an illusory placement of thought, we could feel further driven towards the Given. If there is a class struggle in the friction between senses and their coupling by concepts, we are thrown into a conception of perception where workers are tied to what is concrete and the fear is that without concepts thought could be hardly contentful. It could seem like a renewed dilemma: either the view of the capital or the Given. If there is no other way out, capital through concepts would make the underground working underneath it invisible.
Once we decide to be faithful to the effort to avoid the gist of the myth of the Given, there are two related ways to go around the problem that are not foreign to my recent work. The first is to associate concepts as a register for thinking and to insist that the revolutionary force of the work of thinking lies in attaining some oblivion with respect to registration – and even with respect to distribution. This line is tributary of the way Deleuze and Guattari thought about productive forces as capable to forge new social relations in an environment where capital does no more than control this development. The struggle within the senses appear thus as non-ending unless concepts are somehow placed out of the scene. The second way is to argue that there are ways to articulate or modulate the senses – register their production – that involve no conceptual capacity because what concepts provide is one among many types of matrices of importance, matrices that determine which differences make a difference. One can then argue that while concepts are associated to capital, there are other matrices of importance that can be part of perception and that would ensure that there is no appeal, in perception, to (mythical) non-acquired deliverances of the senses. This second way is derivative of the efforts of Alfred Whitehead to denounce what he called ‘the myth of the isolated fact’ according to which it is only within considerations of importance than any isolated claim can be contentful at all.
The two alternatives contribute to strengthen Lyotard’s suspicion by providing a broader framework in which (empirical) thinking takes place outside the realm of concepts while not assuming that senses unaided by anything acquired can provide empirical content. They also help understanding that rejecting the Given is not tantamount to exorcising an underground to the conceptual that could be relevant for thinking. There is more to what can be said to lie under concepts than items that would amount to instances of the Given.
The suspicion concerning the conceptual can also be elaborated in a different vein, in terms akin to the gesture promoted by McDowell in his partial departure from the minimal empiricism that he recommended as a strategy to stop the oscillation he diagnoses in Mind and World. In later texts, specially in “Avoiding the myth of the given”, he suggests an underground of the conceptual that he reckons fares better than his previous position as far as avoiding the myth of the Given while being open to (empirical) constraints of the world to thinking. This alternative position he then spouses paves the way for a different way of understanding what takes place underneath concepts and, as a consequence, underneath (propositional) content.
2. There is an Aristotelian reading of Hegel that enables absolute idealism to be a result of iterated sublation where the first nature gives way to the second etc. This sequence of moments of overcoming involves the exercise of the activities of the spirit which are, themselves, what ensure both departure from the immediate – from the Given – and a contribution of the objective, absolute spirit to what is thought. The absolute spirit has a certain perspective which is not the only possible one – because each stage in the sequence is also provided with a perspective – but rather the appropriate one; the spirit is guided towards a particular history of thinking that is entangled with its self-transformation which responds to its own path towards an increase in self-knowledge. In other words, the appeal to the spirit as appropriate operations is the source of what is ultimately known – appropriate knowledge is not the result of a Given but rather of the suitable (non-ending) departure from it.
It is this response-dependence of adequate knowledge that McDowell brings to the forefront in his reading of Wilfrid Sellars in Mind and World. It is not that the exorcism of any contribution – say, any conceptual exercise – is the path to perceptual knowledge because perceptual knowledge, like moral knowledge for Aristotle, is not immediate knowledge, is not relying on the Given. One has to achieve a position in the logical space of reasons through acquiring conceptual capacities that would enable suitable reasons to be attained. Empirical knowledge requires conceptual capacities and thus requires acquisition. McDowell is able to resolutely embrace this response-dependence take on perception because he is guided by the Aristotelian idea that ethics is thoroughly acquired though an education that enables one to see what are the really salient ingredients of reality. The analogy between perceptual and moral knowledge guides the conception of an empiricism that would not shy away from conceptual exercises but rather posit them as constitutive of what the senses themselves can deliver. The senses are plastic in the sense that they provide no content if they are not aided by a guidance concerning what matters – what is of importance, what is salient – in a given circumstance. The work they do accompanies the exercise of conceptual capacities that they trigger, they do not stand alone in seeing anything (alone they are blind) or in stating anything (alone they are mute). That they see and state something is a consequence of acquiring something that enable them to entertain content.
Sellars talks about a reliable reporter of an empirical state of affairs as primarily someone who is endowed with the capacity to tell those who speak a language – and make use of a conceptual structure – whether they would consider that something is thus and so. This is extended further to encompass a realism about theoretical statements – including, for that matter, those claimed by Jones concerning ‘seeming’ and similar terms that Sellars envisage as theoretical constructs. Once endowed with the right theory, the inquirer as the reporter, can attain an adequate view of how things are. Response-dependence is a resolute defense of the positive contribution of what is acquired in the attaining of knowledge. It becomes more plausible if we add a measure of externalist spice: one doesn’t need to know whether knowledge is attained through this response – one doesn’t need to know whether the response is adequate. Only cases where the mobilized response is faulty requires an explanation that could help itself to resources that are themselves response-dependent. Just as Aristotle thought of moral education as an indispensable ingredient for a fair judgment, acquired capacities are not obstacles but enablers of a suitable appreciation of what is around. To be sure, even though McDowell himself hardly expands on this, moral and perceptual knowledge are not distinct spheres requiring non-overlapping capacities to be exercised – the acquisition of conceptual capacities involve the capacity to perceive injustice or courage in the very moments where concepts are being employed.
Varieties of response-dependence have often been evoked as a possible way out of arguments that deflate perceptual certainty by appealing to different sensibilia or different couplings of sensory apparatuses and supporting cognitive faculties (with underlying assumptions). The first modes of Aenesidemus, for example, can be countered by claiming that one type of perception – of humans, or of some humans, or of some humans under the appropriate state – is somehow privileged. Further, once perspectives of any kind – perceptual, spatio-temporal, personal or otherwise indexical – is brought to the fore, either they are taken to be irrelevant to the constitution of reality or they pose a threat to the idea that there is an accessible reality independent of them. In case there isn’t any, one can deal with the plurality of perspectives – something I have argued for elsewhere – or embrace response-dependence by resolving in favor of the response afforded by a perspective purported to be appropriate. Response-dependence is a salient toolbox to deal with the failure of neutral, immediate access to how things are: if we need perspectives, better to stick with one – which in a sense requires a minimal revision in the way the reality to be accessed is conceived.
McDowell’s appeal to response-dependence in Mind and World is one of the places where it is difficult to distinguish, in the consequences, minimal empiricism and the no-room-for-empiricism view that McDowell wants to exorcise without falling into the Given, the view he attributes to Donald Davidson. Indeed, Davidson advocates that there is no epistemic role for experience as the work of justifying beliefs can only be performed by other beliefs. Davidson argues that there could be no alternative conceptual schemes because they would be ultimately unintelligible and unrecognizable to each other – no scheme can consider the other both as an alternative and as a conceptual scheme. This is because another conceptual scheme can only be intelligible from the point of view that envisages it so it cannot be another – unless it is not a conceptual scheme. McDowell often claims that this argument comes too late as the link between experience and what is believed is already severed. The result of the argument, however, is that we are locked in a conceptual scheme and so is reality no matter how we decide to conceive it. When McDowell argues that in experience conceptual capacities are operative even though in a passive mode, he is endorsing the idea that the concepts being used in this operation are the suitable ones – that perceptual experience through minimal empiricism can be adequate. This endorsement can only be based on the idea that the economy of beliefs ensure that the conceptual scheme is deeply tied with the sensory economy. To be sure, the rejection of the third dogma – that conceptual schemes can be separated from empirical content – is itself a form of response-dependence: it is only through a conceptual scheme that a response, that can be the adequate one, can be formulated. In other words, it is unclear how McDowell can disentangle himself to Davidson’s inclination towards a form of response-dependence in order to maintain further that experience entrenched in conceptual capacities can (tentatively) inform about how things are. The response-dependence of experience is hostage to the concepts that make it possible. The attempt to escape from the Given in a way that appeals to response-dependence while not suggesting an image of a confinement where reality is locked out and experience is deemed irrelevant fails if there is nothing but the privileged conceptual scheme one can appeal to when experience is invoked as a passive response to how things are.
3. Response-dependence is not alien to Marxism. The idea that the working class is both a consequence of the regime of capital that both struggles against it and brings about its aftermath is held together with the notion that it is universal. Because knowledge is intrinsically political, the response that the working class provides and its choices bear a universal meaning – it is a class to end all classes in the sense that it is a perspective to end all perspectives. Clearly, it is also a perspective and a class different from all the others. It is capable to perceive the political injustices and to foresee what takes place beyond capital. The appropriate course of action is also something that can only be seen from the perspective of the class that has the capacity to respond appropriately to the challenges of capitalism. If we are to express this in Aristotelian language, we would say that the proletariat entertain a capacity for several virtues which lies in what they learn in the experience within the engines of capital. They can see through the downfall of capital – the oppressed sees beyond what is seen by those who are in a different position. It is from the working class perspective that capitalism is appropriately analyzed and the mystifications sponsored by capital are exposed.
If, as Lyotard maintains, one of these mystifications is the idea that thinking happens within the logical space of concepts, the relevant perspective that the working class should entertain is that of a thinking that view this space from without. That is to say that the point of view to be attained is not only alien to bourgeois economics and bourgeois politics but also alien to bourgeois way of thinking; to see the work involved in thinking in terms of something that underpins concepts is not only what the universal class can see but also what constitute its response that is the best placed one. If this is so, we have moved full circle from response-dependence as a way to account for an accessible reality without appeal to the non-conceptual to response-dependence as a mean to make the non-conceptual more relevant. That is, if we follow Lyotard’s claim, an appropriate response-dependence account of thinking should see through concepts and focus on the (non-conceptual) underground where the work claimed by concepts take place. We are now sailing in dangerous waters: if concepts are put aside, we can slide in the direction of the Given. The two alternatives mentioned above – the Deleuze-Guattarian one and the Whiteheadian one – could help avoiding a direct collision. It seems, nonetheless, that it is incumbent upon us to look closer into the attractions of the Given in this context in order to look into the underground of the conceptual and determine how immediacy lingers there.
4. McDowell’s revision of minimal empiricism in “Avoiding the myth of the given” and other texts can be helpful here. As an effect of an intense and insightful change that involved a growing acquaintance not only with Kant and some of the internal difficulties with the very idea of receptivity but also with Hegel, partly influenced by the parallel reading that had been carried out by his interlocutors such as Robert Brandom, McDowell reformulated some key elements of his previous position. This major change, provoked by several criticism including chiefly that of Charles Travis, moved him out of a position that proved to be barely distinguishable from that of Donald Davidson according to which experience is like a special guest with peculiar propensities for passivity in the house of beliefs. McDowell was from the outset eager to be faithful to experiencing, to the capacity of experience, in perception, to convey something about the world that would not be attained otherwise. Now he admits that the content of perceptual experience has to be structurally different from that of an ordinary belief, he claims that a) “I used to assume that to conceive experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional content, the sort of content judgments have” and b) “I used to assume that the content of an experience would need to include everything the experience enables its subject to know non-inferentially” (3). He is willing to reject both of these assumptions and maintain that experience is made of Anschauungen that are neither propositional nor involving everything that the subject is capable to ascribe to that experience. An Anschauung – he prefers to avoid the translation ‘intuition’ – involves conceptual capacities but displays not all the concepts that could be operative in a judgment. It is also not propositional and therefore is foreign to the logical space of beliefs even if it can have an impact on it – an impact from outside, which would prevent one to be spinning frictionless in the void of one’s own beliefs. The content of experience is not fully translated into a proposition because it comes with a marker, something associated to an indexical position that McDowell hints at when he translates Anschauung as ‘having in view’ (6). When an episode of experience takes place, the subpropositional components form an unity without anyone putting their pieces together – the unity of an Anschauung is given. Yet, albeit not propositional, the Anschauungen are conceptual and thus this givenness of it is not provided by operations of the sense uninformed by concepts. This is why we have an underground of concepts that impact on the economy of beliefs without being part of it. While experiencing is not taking things to be one way or another – they have no belief-like content – they provide representations that are only intelligible with the help of concepts. The content of experiencing is not itself discursive, for one thing because it is, as ‘having in view’ situated, attached to where it takes place, attached to where it is had.
McDowell posits an underground to concepts that are conceptual but belong in a distinctive realm that we could call the logical space of Anschauungen if we take into consideration that the items of this space come with an address connected to a specific situation where something comes to be viewed. This underground, conceptual but not discursive, is one that depends on what is around in the sense of what is available for experiencing. Here, although it could look as if we’re facing something like the Hegelian sequence of concepts that are overcome by other concepts, a different gesture appears: the concepts that appear in experience are distinctively underground. That they are located where experience is indicates that their generality is limited although the concepts through which they impact beliefs are thoroughly general. Experiences are singular, situated thoughts and not simply (passive) instances of the stuff beliefs are made of. They are building blocks of beliefs – for McDowell not the only ones – and they are in direct contact with them through concepts. They do the work of empirical thinking even though they are (de)limited from within by the conceptual that they shared with the propositions that constitute beliefs. Still, it is the realm of the propositional – the logical space of beliefs – that authorize and prohibits experiencings by making some Anschauungen conceptually impossible. They do that because concepts are shared between beliefs and experiences but while the former are mostly general and disconnected from specific surroundings that are in view, the latter is not.
We can start to make sense of Lyotard’s diagnoses by saying that are not concepts themselves that do the work of (empirical) thinking, but rather it is experiences that carry it out. The concept, to be sure, pretends to work, but merely determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited – as Lyotard would claim. Further, it is experiencing, and not propositional judgment, that sets thinking moving – and arguably this is not confined to what is usually taken to be empirical knowledge as situated thinking that has something in view can appear not only when cardinals are around (the example McDowell inherits from Travis) but also when fascism looms back in many parts of the world around. It is experience that not only challenge beliefs but also consolidate them and both this processes are account in terms of beliefs that are composed of concepts in their proper propositional environment only as deception. Concepts alone would not do the job, thinking is thoroughly situated and cannot be deprived of the productive force that comes from something that is not general, that cannot be applied, as a proposition, across the board. To understand Lyotard’s diagnosis in terms of the relevance of experience for thought is also to highlight that experience is a form of production – situated and irreucible to the propositional beliefs that it entails. Experiencing is producing something – while capital is concerned with products of thinking that display the form of beliefs that are general and disconnected from where experience took place, from where something was had in view. McDowell holds that experience is a hybrid item – on the one hand it escapes the full propositional logic of concepts, on the other it is conceptual although not discursive, meaning that it is not in the realm of the Given. It is what brings the economy of concepts to the specific situations where a sensibilia is activated without leaving behind the situated activation of the senses. The indexicality of Anschauungen is what ensures it to be anathema to beliefs as propositional items. (To be sure, proposition here means, as in McDowell, something like a Fregean thought, that is, an expression that acquires its meaning in a ‘de dicto’ manner, through descriptions; there are other ways to understand propositions but Kaplan’s account, which would contrast sharply with Frege’s by insisting on the ‘de re’ component is not sufficiently indexical to make room for experiencings in our sense.) The work of thinking is thus situated and requires the mobilization of the senses and to see it as a mere conceptual product packaged as a belief is a mystification.
We have threaded from Lyotard diagnosis concerning concepts to the (conceptual) notion of experience espoused by the late McDowell. Response-dependence paved part of this course. As we have not fallen in the myth of the Given precisely because, if McDowell is right, Anschauungen are conceptual although different in content from beliefs, we have avoided the idea that privileged view of the working class lying in the underground of concepts would resolve into unaided contribution from the senses. But if experiences are conceptual, what they can afford to think is arguably under the predicament of response-dependence – if the concepts within them are adequate they provide appropriate responses. For McDowell, this response-dependence is structurally different from Davidson’s as experiences have a different content and thus provide a different kind of response. We can think further that experience can reach thinking beyond those oriented that have truth-value is an ultimate parameter. If we go this way, thinking, through experiencing, will appear more like a production to be distinguished from the accomplished products that are easily packaged as merchandise. Thinking would them appear in line with production, coupled with the its forces and capable to challenge social relations that are chrystalized in the logical space of concepts.
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