Dreyfus and Heidegger

Posted on January 23, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 5 Comments

Interesting post over at Minds and Brains. It makes a claim about Dreyfus that is intriguing. (Dreyfus of course has a well received commentary on Being and Time as well as a highly influential class at Berkeley on the same that many subscribe to via iTunes U)

…it is this feature of Heideggerian thought which led me to become dissatisfied with Hubert Dreyfus’ insistence that Dasein’s nonrepresentational and “non-mental” absorbed coping is the total story insofar as Dasein is average. On the contrary, as the rift-structure indicates, and as John McDowell attempts to demonstrate in Mind and World and in his recent exchange with Dreyfus in Inquiry, human experience is thoroughly “conceptualized” in terms of linguistic “object carving.”

Now maybe I’m admitting to some poor listening and reading skills, but I don’t recall Dreyfus making quite that strong a claim. If he does I certainly agree with Gary it is wrong. I have a bunch of papers by Dreyfus I’ve not gotten around to reading. I should check them out. I’ve just not really read Dreyfus on that topic. (Or perhaps missed the extreme position Gary points out)

The way I always took Dreyfus is to say that concepts aren’t basic. (Which maybe is what Gary is really saying) That is to me what Heidegger is after is how we are able to put concepts into correspondence. So in contrast to those cognitive scientist who take representation as basic and concepts a building block in the brain I take Dreyfus to saying that’s doomed to failure simply because there is (a) more going on and (b) concepts aren’t basic.

But I don’t think Heidegger’s discussion of language works against this.

I ought think through this more though. I’m quite sure I recall reading something on this not long ago. But it’s after midnight and I’m doing an all nighter on data entry. So I really shouldn’t be posting at all. (I’m sure come morning I’ll slap my forehead and say, “I can’t believe I said that!”)

Related posts:

  1. Dreyfus on Deworlding
  2. Dreyfus on Heidegger and Husserl
  3. Dreyfus Classes
  4. Dreyfus Heidegger Lectures: 2007
  5. Dreyfus on the Latter Heidegger.
  6. The Da of Dasein

Comments

5 Responses to “Dreyfus and Heidegger”
1 Kevin Winters on January 23rd, 2010 1:54 am

I agree with your reading of Dreyfus/Heidegger: we aren’t only transparent copers, or else we wouldn’t ‘have’ de-worlded objects or be able to adequately address breakdowns, which we clearly do. Dreyfus, in a few cases, even praises Samuel Todes’ Body and World for providing an account of how transparent coping makes conceptual cognition possible, something that he claims neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty adequately addressed. Gary seems to be taking an overly simplified view of Dreyfus.

I don’t think I am oversimplifying Dreyfus. If you read the Dreyfus/McDowell exchange, Mcdowell is accused by Dreyfus as endorsing a “Myth of the Mental” when he insists that basic embodied perception is “infused” with conceptualization “through and through”. Dreyfus has this layercake model wherein the bottom level is purely nonconceptual and “absorbed”, with conceptualized thinking occurring only during times of equipmental breakdown. My reading of the rift-design tries to show that this dichotomy between “transparent coping” and “equipmental breakdown” is misleading insofar as it prevents us from seeing the extent to which language and culture have infused our entire perceptual experience, making it “explicit” and “carved” i.e. conceptual. Dreyfus doesn’t seem to have much to say about this kind of interpretational perception, and accuses McDowell of trying to bring the “Myth of the Mental” back into Heideggerian thought. On the contrary, by illustrating how we are linguistic creatures through-and-through, McDowell argues that our perception is “conceptualized”, albeit with concepts thought in terms of the “as-structure” and not in terms a rational egoism or conscious mind-space. Thus, I think McDowell has a better reading of Heidegger than Dreyfus; a great article in this respect is Christensen’s “Getting Heidegger Off the West Coast” (with Dreyfus representing West Coast phenomenology).

However, there is a sense in which Dreyfus is right to emphasizes a layercake model, because I do hold to an account of some transparent coping being “primordial” (such as perception and basic habitual action) with other coping methods being recently evolved less ubiquitous in everyday life(such as introspection and reflective cognition). However, I think it is bad phenomenology to stipulate that we are only reflective and introspective when equipment breaks down. If Dreyfus is right in interpreting Heidegger that way, then I believe Heidegger is wrong. On the contrary, I think introspection occurs throughout the course of everyday life as a part of our everyday intentional comportment.

Gary, I need to read that paper to perhaps see the explicit claims. My initial thoughts is that of course our perception is profuse with an “an-structure.” We think in terms of language, although never as far as the old Sapir-Worf hypothesis suggested. To me the conceptual model is the idea that there is some “language of the mind” that is primal and that all thinking can be reduced to. Hopefully you’d agree that is nonsense. But to me what you outline in the above paragraph is precisely the place of Das Man.

My problem is that I just don’t see Dreyfus opposing this, even if he doesn’t focus on it.

I think one has to recognize that our introspection can be authentic or inauthentic. Perhaps that is where some crosstalk is happening? Dreyfus might be using those terms to apply only to authentic introspection.

I have that two volume collection of papers in honor of Dreyfus and I vaguely recall some discussion with McDowell’s position. But I seem to recall the point of contention being a little narrower.

I’ll see if I can do a bit of research on this tonight — assuming I have time.

To add, I’ve never found Dreyfus particularly compelling on “everydayness.” So that might be an issue too. But then the times I’ve listened to his lectures on the subject he clearly doesn’t seem too comfortable on the subject either. That may be me reading in too much since I have a hard time figuring out exactly what Heidegger means in Being and Time there as well. I get it at a lose level, but when I try and tighten it up it seems more confusing.

So that might be a problem too. That is to Dreyfus when we are in our everdayness we just encounter things as they present themselves without thinking about them carefully. It may well be that for Dreyfus as we start to think about things more carefully we then just aren’t being average. I note you use the term average – so is the real issue whether the conceptual scheme is occuring in our averageness?

If the issue is this “everyday coping” then I probably can see Dreyfus’ point. It might appear like we are using concepts but we aren’t really encountering them as concepts. Rather we are using language the way you use a broom when sweeping but not thinking about it. It is a kind of invisible coping. We don’t even see how the “as” structure is coming to us. It’s when we start to think (and then move out of that averageness coping) that we can encounter concepts more carefully. But these depend upon the break down of practice in order to give us present-at-hand entities which we can attempt to manipulate technologically. This then gets at the issue of why Heidegger sees the essence of science as technology: precisely because of that manipulation of concepts.

So I think concepts and conceptual based language is there. I am just skeptical that it happens during our everydayness. However, once again, it’s in that averageness that I find myself somewhat uncomfortable with both Dreyfus and even Heidegger. I’m not sure that it ultimately works except in a lose sense.

I found the passages. There is a paper in Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus Volume 2 by Joseph Rouse called “Coping and Its Contrasts.” A lot of the paper is just Rouse explicating Dreyfus’ position. However Rouse wants to breakdown the distinction Dreyfus has between language use and transparent coping.

Now I’m actually pretty sympathetic to Rouse because I personally think a lot of language use is transparent coping. That is we typically in our average everydayness use language as one piece of equipment for a world. And different worlds have different languages in that sense. So my use of “I’m hungry” to get food isn’t that different from using a hammer. And just as the hammer becomes invisible to me as I hammer (until it breaks down) I think language often functions that way.

That said, clearly Heidegger and Dreyfus see a distinction between that sort of language use and explicit articulation. Dreyfus has a longish response to Rouse which is well worth reading. It’s there he makes a confession that touches upon the point you raise Gary.

I should never have said that for Dasein the animal way of coping is more basic than the social way, and I should certainly not have “assimilate[d] the contrast between bodily coping and social normativity to the more basic contrast between practical coping and the explicit articulation of propositional content.” …rudimentary social normas are already in force at the level of transparent coping. I know think that asking which is more basic, Merleau-Pontyian gestal-governed coping or Heideggerian socialization into the style (and language) of the culture is the wrong question to ask. [...]

If there is some disturbance and ongoing transparent coping is interrupted, we normally stay involved but pay attention to what is going on in the situation. This is the level of explicitation. Here it makes sense to speak of beliefs, desires, goals, and in general of propositional content. [...] Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both acknowledge the importance of what they call representational thinking but both would say that all thinkers who begin their analysis on this propositional level begin one level too late.” (ibid, 315-6)

Now this isn’t quite what you were discussing. But clearly it is related. I think though that it is clear Dreyfus makes a distinction between these two ways of coping. While the regular “articulated” language use depends upon equipment breakdown, it is just to get it’s “start.” As articulated it becomes social and is a different way of coping. It becomes theory of a sort. So I think Dreyfus here explicitly rejects the characterization you give of him.

The line of attack on Rouse that Dreyfus offers is quite interesting to those of us interested in Derrida. Language is special precisely because it can be removed from one context and grafted into other contexts. (Moved between worlds) This is quite different from the normal discussion of worlds and tools. There is something special about language.

Leave a Reply