Hubert L. Dreyfus (1929–2017)

Every now and then I read a book which makes me wish I were a lot smarter and well-read than I really am. Now, as a librarian, you would probably expect me to have read quite a bit, and I have, but books like this one make me realize how much more there is (even though I already have forty-nine books checked out of my current library). In this work, two philosophers come together to examine what they deem “western classics” and examine their connection with the way our world is today. show more For those who lean towards the melancholic, “who wants to lure back the shining things, to uncover the wonder we were once capable of experiencing and to reveal a world that sometimes calls forth such a mood; anyone who is done with indecision and waiting, with expressionlessness and lostness and sadness and angst, and who is ready for whatever it is that comes next; anyone with hope instead of despair, or anyone with despair that they would like to leave behind, can find something worthwhile in the pages ahead” (xi). And although this is a bold and ambitious claim, I would argue that they succeed.

The first chapters address “contemporary nihilism” in a very unique manner, comparing and contrasting David Foster Wallace and his work “Infinite Jest” with Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love.” The authors contend that both authors are addressing the “tension between commitment and choice” (27) and that “although each is motivated by a deep sense of confusion and lostness, a sense that the darkness of being adrift is a central feature of the age, nevertheless each feels strongly that the writer’s responsibility is to show the way forward, to offer a vision of the hopeful possibilities available in the modern world” (28). The following chapters jump backwards in history to Homer and other Greek literature, then to Augustine, Dante, Kant, and so on. In each chapter, the authors look at the society and culture which surrounds each writer or work, including the religious and philosophical assumptions that the general population lived with, and how that should affect the modern reading.

This is probably one of the better books I have read recently, even with a quick skimming through. Although the idea of using classic literature to explore philosophy has been done before, this one is particularly poignant as it considers the secular nature of our contemporary society, and makes readers consider what may be lost in a culture that is so disconnected from the sacred. show less

I really wanted to like this book. And I liked it more at the end than I did in the middle, but all told it was disappointing and frustrating. It is a parade of anecdotes from the Western canon, each used to illustrate how we have descended from the heights of human flourishing in Homer's Greece to the depths of dull, flat nihilism in this modern age. On the whole I found it patronizing and superficial. It is written in a first-person plural that goes back and forth between a "we" show more representing the two co-authors and a "we" that (though it is never stated) seems to refer to college-educated white people living in North America. I dislike this book in the first place because I reject its central premise: that "we" are living empty, unprecedentedly meaningless lives. I dislike it in the second place because it has a self-satisfied tone: it seems to say "All of Western art has failed you (except Moby-Dick), aren't you glad we came along to set you straight?" The unstated premise of the book, that personal philosophies are able to be willfully adopted, and that they can be valued without regard to their internal logic or relationship to experienced reality, also rubs me wrong. The stickiest parts of this book's arguments are the parts the authors flit over the most delicately. I think of philosophy as being about tackling hard questions, but this book leans more towards easy answers.The book begins and ends with a discussion of David Foster Wallace as a representative of the destructive nihilism of our age. The authors suggest, preposterously, that Wallace's suicide was a result of the failure of his personal philosophy. Such a perspective on the nature of mental illness is offensive and irresponsible. By the end I began to get the sense that, after all, the authors and I agreed on the ways people can and should find meaning in their lives. And it was that glimmer, that sense of failed promise, that sealed my dislike of the book. show less

I very much enjoyed this book even though I disagreed with most of it! I really liked the writing. I constantly found things I wanted to argue about, and it made me think a lot about why I disputed many of their points.

Dreyfus and Taylor present a unique solution to the problems of knowledge and realism, “retrieving” both from a skepticism that seems inherent and inescapable in traditional western philosophy.

There are two big arguments in the book. The first is an epistemological argument and attacks what the authors call “mediational” theories of knowledge — ones in which our access to reality is in one way or another “mediated” rather than direct. The second is a metaphysical argument that show more takes a non-mediated, direct account of access to and knowledge of the world farther, to a “realist” claim about the status of our knowledge with respect to a world independent of our involvement in it or our making sense of it.

The anti-mediational argument is relatively familiar. Dreyfus and Taylor characterize “mediational” accounts of knowledge as adhering to four characteristics: (1) that our knowledge of reality outside us is obtained “only through” some features (ideas, representations, percepts) within us, (2) that our knowledge of external reality can be decomposed into some sort of discrete elements (e.g., ideas, beliefs, sentences), (3) that justifying those elements of knowledge cannot rely on anything outside of them — e.g., that beliefs only follow from other beliefs — that there is no transcendent Archimedean point from which to justify the system of beliefs or representations per se, and (4) a “dualist sorting” or, for short, the distinction between mind and reality (where “mind” needn’t be individual, but could refer to the theoretical knowledge or socially generated ideas of a community). The most familiar “mediational” accounts are representationalist, although Dreyfus and Taylor mean to generalize the view they oppose as “mediationalism” to encompass a broader scope of views.

They then draw on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to construct an alternative account in which our relationship to the world is pointedly unmediated. It is through our bodily orientation that we come to experience the world — our touching, gripping, and reaching, our orientation in up, down, near, far, our involvement in practical tasks . . . These are the ways in which we first or “primordially” come to terms with the world, not through observation at a distance and construction of representations or theories.

Their opponent here is a “picture,” in Wittgenstein’s sense of a picture that holds us captive. Once we escape this picture of the knower as observer and theorizer, the picture that has long dominated western philosophy, the involved, embedded knower can emerge.

So long as knowledge of the world is “mediated”, i.e., so long as we only know of the world through some intermediate (ideas, representations, etc.), the question of skepticism can arise. Do those intermediates provide us with reliable access? How could we know, since we have no independent way of checking their reliability in toto? This is the strength of Cartesian skepticism.

Eliminate the intermediary, and you disarm the skeptic. We know the world because we are already in it. There just is no separation, no mediation, to feed the skeptic’s doubt.

The response to skepticism then is not so much a solution as a dissolving, again in a Wittgensteinian sense. The skeptic cannot get his argument off the ground, because that separation, the question of how the “internal” (the idea, belief, representation, etc.) relates to the “external” (the world in itself) never arises in the first place.

Given that dissolution, the traditional philosopher may still ask, what of our theories, beliefs, ideas, representations? What is the status of the world they give us access to? Is it the world of traditional realists, or idealists, or something in-between? Kantian epistemology, for example, upheld knowledge but not realism, at least in the traditional metaphysical sense.

This is where the second argument of the book kicks in. Dreyfus and Taylor stake a “realist” claim. Roughly, their argument is that, beginning with our direct access to the world, our scientific undertaking, i.e., our investigation into what accounts for the behavior of the world we directly interact with, is a valid investigation into the world as it is in itself. In our direct interactions, we meet resistance from the world. The world has an independence against our will and understanding — objects in it are too hard, too soft, too distant, etc. And we seek an account of that resistance or independence. This is science, or at least protoscience.

The real crux of the argument comes in Chapter Seven, where Dreyfus and Taylor distinguish “deflationary realism” from “robust realism”. Deflationary realism is where we seem to end up when we admit that the world we live in is co-produced by us, providing sense and intelligibility, and “the world itself”. That “world itself” is never, according to this deflationary realism, available to us in its pristine, unalloyed state, only via our ways of making it intelligible. And in fact Dreyfus and Taylor seemed to be headed toward such a “deflationary realism” in their account of the world as we know it as a product of our interaction with it — a “co-production”.

If Dreyfus and Taylor stopped at deflationary realism, they would have still made a valuable contribution, in insisting that the ways in which we make the world intelligible are primarily bodily — via interaction-laden, orienting projects, movements and positions such as up, down, near, far, heavy to the hand, etc. This is in opposition to the, to my mind, Kantian notion of intelligibility that is intellectual and observer-driven.

But Dreyfus and Taylor want to claim “robust realism” — which in their terms reclaims a sense of truth as correspondence to an independently existing reality — the very terms of traditional realist epistemology that have been under attack.

They claim that in fact it is this “independence” of reality that scientific theories are capturing, in accounting for the resistance that we meet — the very fact that, while how we perceive and act may be up to us, but what we perceive and what we act with or against is not. Science gives us exactly an account of those very qualities of hardness, nearness, distance, etc. — the independence of reality that we meet in our direct access to it.

It’s important to see that these two big arguments — the epistemological and the metaphysical — are linked. Otherwise, a Cartesian response to “robust realism” would simply call classical doubts into play — dream or deceiver arguments. But those arguments themselves presume a lack of direct access. Skeptical arguments depend upon a problematic relationship between beliefs, theories, ideas, representations, etc. on one side (the “internal” for Drefyus and Taylor) and reality itself on the other (the “external”). But, if Dreyfus and Taylor have been successful in their first big argument, that problematic relationship never is able to get off the ground.

I have to admit reticence to accept their conclusions. As Dreyfus and Taylor conceive science, it is the result of a Heideggerian “deworlding” — an abstraction from the context of everyday life in which direct access is grounded. I haven’t yet seen the argument that this abstraction isn’t also a distortion of that direct access — a withdrawing into abstraction and an explicit construction of “theory”. Explicit beliefs, statements, even representations are the lifeblood of science — in the abstraction and withdrawal that generate them, is there room again for the skeptic’s distinction between world and account to grow? More to think about. show less