I. The current situation in philosophy
Before beginning my discussion of phenomenology, I want to say a little bit about how I see the contemporary philosophical scene. There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy. As a preliminary formulation, we can say the question is: How do we account for our conceptions of ourselves as a certain sort of human being in a universe that we know consists entirely of physical particles in fi elds of force. More precisely: Given that any sort of Cartesianism or other form of metaphysical dualism is out of the question, how do we give an account of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, speech-act performing, ethical, free-will possessing, political and social animals in a world that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless brute physical particles. Most of the important questions of philosophy are vari-ations on this single question. So, the question of free will and determinism is: How can we have free action in a universe that is determined in accordance with causal laws? The problem of ethics is: How can there be an ethical right and wrong in a world of meaningless physical particles? The question of consciousness is: How can unconscious bits of matter in the skull cause consciousness, and how can irreducibly subjective states of consciousness exist in an en-tirely “physical” world? The question in the philosophy of language is: How can brute physi-cal sounds that come out of a speaker's mouth constitute the performance of meaningful speech acts? The question for society is: How can there be an objective reality of money, property, government and marriage when all of these phenomena only exist, in some sense, because we believe that they exist? How is it possible that human beings can, by their subjective thought processes, create an objective social reality? And so on with other philosophical questions that are variations on the central question. I am deliberately putting these points in a very crude fash-ion; and, as analytic philosophers, you will all recognize that before we go to work on them, they would need much more careful statement. How, then, can we and should we approach this question or this set of questions? Our question is, How does the human reality fi t into the basic reality? And what is the basic underlying reality? Well, that is a complicated story, but two central features of it can be stated quite simply. We know that the basic structure of the entire universe consists in entities that we fi nd it convenient (if not entirely accurate) to call “particles”, and these exist in fi elds of force and are typically organized into systems. We know furthermore that we and all living systems have evolved over a period of somewhere between three and fi ve billion years by processes of Darwinian natural selection. It is a deep mistake to think that these two propositions are just theories of science. “Science” is the name of a set of procedures by which we have identifi ed the truth, but once identifi ed, the truth is public property. It does not belong to some special do-main; indeed “science” does not name an ontological domain. These two propositions are now so widely accepted that it is hardly necessary for me to belabor them. I also want to add a third. In addition to the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology, we have to add the neurobiological basis of all human and animal mental life. All of our consciousness, in-tentionality, and all the rest of our mental life, is caused by neurobiological processes and real-ized in neurobiological systems. This is not as universally accepted as the fi rst two propositions; but it will be, and for the purposes of this discussion I am going to take it for granted. These three propositions taken together — atomic physics, evolutionary biology, and embodied brain neurobiology — I will call propositions that describe “the basic facts” or “the basic reality”. So now our philosophical question can be posed more precisely: What are the relations between the human reality and the basic reality? A preliminary diffi culty with phenomenology is that the phenomenologists that I know can-not hear the question I am asking. They think it expresses some kind of Cartesianism, that I am opposing the human realm to the physical realm, res cogitans to res extensa. Indeed, Hubert
The Phenomenological Illusion 319
Dreyfus had said over and over that I am a Cartesian. This misunderstanding is so breathtaking that I hardly know how to answer it. The human world is part of one world, not something dif-ferent. The question “How does the human reality relate to the more fundamental reality?” is no more Cartesian than the question “How does chemistry relate to the more fundamental atomic physics?” In a recent article Dreyfus writes: “We should adopt a richer ontology than the Car-tesian one of minds and nature assumed by Husserl and Searle.” He adds that we should fol-low Merleau-Ponty in postulating “a third kind of being” (Dreyfus 1999, 21). This is not just a misunderstanding of my views on Dreyfus's part, but reveals a very deep misconception. The assumption is that there are already two different kinds of being, mind and nature, and that we need to postulate “a third kind of being”. I do not have the space here to expose the full inade-quacy of this conception, and for purposes of this discussion I can only say that the very termi-nology of “minds and nature” and “a third kind of being” makes it impossible to address many of the fundamental questions of philosophy. There is no opposition between minds and nature, because mind is part of nature, and there are not three kinds of being, because there are not two kinds of being or even one kind of being, because the whole notion of “being” is confused. To state my view simply, if you can use “being” as a noun (or worse yet “Being”) you are in se-rious intellectual diffi culties. We know since Frege's analysis of existential statements that it could not name anything. Paradoxically, Wittgenstein helped to make possible a type of philosophy that I think he would have abominated. By taking skepticism seriously, and by attempting to show that it is based on a profound misunderstanding of language, Wittgenstein helped to remove skepticism from the center of the philosophical agenda and make it possible to do a type of systematic, theoretical, constructive philosophy of the sort that he thought was impossible. Skepticism has been removed from the center of the philosophical agenda for two main reasons. First, linguistic philosophy has convinced many people that skepticism of the traditional kind cannot be intelli-gibly stated (this is where Wittgenstein comes in); and second, more importantly, we know too much. The single most important intellectual fact about the present era is that knowledge grows. We now have a huge body of knowledge that is certain, objective and universal. You cannot, for example, send men to the moon and back and then seriously doubt whether the external world exists. The decline of epistemology as the central subject in philosophy has made possible a type of post skeptical, post epistemic, post foundationalist philosophy. This is the type of phi-losophy that I have always practiced. The theory of speech acts, the theory of intentionality, the theory of consciousness, and the theory of social reality (all of which are areas I have worked in) are precisely areas in which we seek general, theoretical accounts of a large philosophically puzzling domain. Notice, also, that there is no sharp boundary between philosophy and science in these domains. For example, the advent of cognitive science and the development of neurobi-ology have produced all sorts of cooperative endeavors between philosophers and scientists. In fact, cognitive science was invented in large part by philosophers and philosophically minded psychologists who got sick of behaviorism in psychology. That is the question or set of questions. What is the appropriate method for attacking these questions? The answer about methodology is always the same. Use any method you can lay your hands on, and stick with any method that works. The methods that I have found most use-ful in my work are what I call the methods of logical analysis, and I will contrast those with other methods in a few moments.
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