Danielle Macbeth
To constitute is to bring into being. This formulation, while strictly defensible, is deliberately provocative. For it seems to force a choice between two hopeless ways of understanding the idea that ordinary objective phenomena are constituted, one incredible, the other self-defeating. That provocation sets a stage on which the merits of a more careful formulation—constituting is letting be—can come into view.
—John Haugeland, “Truth and Rule-Following” (HT, 325)
In “Mind Embodied and Embedded,” Haugeland develops and defends a conception of our mindedness that in its explicit opposition to the Cartesian divide of mind and body (or matter or world) is reminiscent of the ancient Aristotelian conception. He holds, in particular, that
the meaningful is not in our mind or brain, but is essentially worldly. The meaningful is not a model—that is, it’s not representational—but is instead objects embedded in their context of references. And we do not store the meaningful inside of ourselves, but rather live and are at home in it. (HT, 231)
Such a view is defended also by, for instance, McDowell (1994) and Thompson (2008), and both emphasize the Aristotelian resonances of the conception. It appears, then, that we are faced with a choice between the ancient Aristotelian conception of our mindedness and the modern Cartesian conception (or more usual today, some suitably naturalized version of that latter conception). And as critics are happy to point out, if we are faced with such a choice, then it must be the modern conception that we choose. My aim is to show that this inference rests on a mistake: the conception of our mindedness that Haugeland defends is not the premodern conception but instead one that is essentially and recognizably “postmodern” in incorporating insights of both the premodern Aristotelian conception and that of early modernity.1
It may seem that there is no room to move here, that the philosopher is no more in a position to criticize the Cartesian conception than she is positioned to argue that the sun circles the earth. This concern is evident in, for example, Huw Price’s review of McDowell’s Mind and World:
Physiology … teaches us that Kant was right: what we get from our sensory apparatus depends on quite contingent features of our physical construction, as well as on the nature of the external world. Arguably, the same is true of our entire conceptual apparatus, but certainly it is true of experience. This product of the sideways-on scientific perspective is not a kind of comatose version of transcendentalism, but a plausible first-order theory about the way in which our brains are linked to the environment. Nor is it a kind of philosophical opening bid, which we can abandon on the grounds that it causes problems elsewhere in philosophy.
To all intents and purposes it is a fact of modern life, within the constraints of which philosophy must operate. (Price 1997, 174)
According to Price, it is not philosophy but empirical science that tells us that the meaningful is not essentially worldly, that the meaningful does indeed reside in our minds or brains, that it is representational. And Haugeland is sensitive to this concern: it is from the perspective of science, specifically,
“from principles of intelligibility drawn from systems theory” (HT, 5), that Haugeland argues that his way of slicing up the mind–body–world pie holds out greater promise of insight than the Cartesian alternative. It is not clear, however, how exactly this is to work, how we are to recover meaning in the world without falling back into premodern superstition. What has changed to render the idea of worldly meaning so much as intelligible in the context of modernity?2
In the ancient Aristotelian conception, the meaningfulness of the world is a given. The things we find in it, plants and animals, the sun, moon, and stars, mountains and rivers, all have their natures and characteristic powers and behaviors, and also sensory properties. And we, conveniently enough, have the sense organs requisite for sensing those properties, the capacity to take in, for instance, the redness of ripe McIntosh apples, the warmth of the sun, and the drumming of the rain. And because things have natures that are expressed in their characteristic behaviors, we can learn by observing those behaviors what it is to be, say, an animal of a certain sort, or fire, or a heavenly body. Two features of this worldview are especially salient for our purposes here: the
understanding of a living being as an instance of a form of life with characteristic powers and behaviors, and the understanding of inanimate nature on the model of animate nature.
The paradigm of being for Aristotle is a living organism, a cat, say, engaged in the perceptual and motor activities that are characteristic of cats. These activities are expressive of its nature and are intelligible as the activities they are only in light of the form of life as a whole. What the animal does makes sense only on the basis of an antecedent understanding of what it is, an instance of some particular life-form. An animal is in this regard strikingly different from a mere mechanism or other inanimate system, which can be understood wholly in terms of what it does. Of course, Aristotle had no notion of a mechanism in our sense. But because we have this notion, and furthermore have a tendency to think of living organisms in reductive, mechanistic terms, in terms of what they do (for example, reproduce themselves), it will help briefly to consider Thompson’s motivation for distinguishing (formally) between what living things do and the characteristic behaviors of nonliving things, in particular his discussion of the respects in which both respond to stimuli.
The warming of an asphalt roadbed and the train of photosynthetic events in a green leaf are both of them, in some sense, the effect of sunlight. And the thawing of icy ponds and the opening of maple buds are each occasioned by rising spring temperatures. It is natural, though, to think that the two vegetative phenomena belong together as instances of a special type of causal relation, or a causal relation with special conditions, distinct from any exhibited in asphalt or water. … On the other hand, though, the effect of the hydrogen bomb on a rose, and on a roadbed, will be pretty much the same—at least if they are both at ground zero. I mean not only that the effects will be similar, but also that the type of causality will be the same. It is in a more restricted range of cases that we seem to see a difference, if the affected individual is an organism.
(Thompson 2008, 40)
Intuitively, the difference Thompson points to in this passage should be clear.3 Our understanding of the process sunlight warming an asphalt roadbed, on the one hand, and our understanding of the process sunlight triggering a train of photosynthetic events in a green leaf, on the other, are very different. In the first case, we have a merely causal connection, one that is fully explicable by appeal to certain molecular structures (in asphalt) and the effects of sunlight on
such structures. Thompson’s interest lies in the fact that if we try to conceive the second process as another instance of such a causal connection, something essential goes missing, something that can be highlighted by the question, what happens next?
In the case of a photosynthesizing leaf, there is a natural answer to the question of what happens next, namely, whatever then goes on in the course of a properly functioning, that is to say, living, thriving, plant leaf. There is no comparable answer in the case in which the connection is merely causal.
In a description of photosynthesis, for example, we read of one chemical process—one process-in-the-sense-of-chemistry, one “reaction”—
followed by another, and then another. Having read along a bit with mounting enthusiasm, we can ask: “And what happens next?” If we are stuck with chemical and physical categories, the only answer will be:
“Well, it depends on whether an H-bomb goes off, or the temperature plummets toward absolute zero, or it all falls into a vat of sulphuric acid
…” That a certain enzyme will appear and split the latest chemical product into two is just one among many possibilities. Physics and chemistry, adequately developed, can tell you what happens in any of these circumstances—in any circumstance—but it seems that they cannot attach any sense to a question “What happens next?” sans phrase. … It is not just that “the rose and maple are subjects of processes of their own”:
they are also subjects of a special type or category of process
—“biological” processes, if you like, or “life-processes.” (Thompson 2008, 41–42)
Such processes, Thompson argues, are distinguished not by their content but by their form: they exhibit a different sort of unity from that of merely physical, that is, nonbiological, processes.
In the case of a living organism, in this Aristotelian conception, the question
“what happens next?” (sans phrase) makes sense because living organisms are instances of characteristic forms of life. What happens next is what happens in the life not of this or that individual but of that species of organism: “When springtime comes, and the snow begins to melt, the female bobcat gives birth to two to four cubs” (Thompson 2008, 63). The bobcat is a species or life-form, something about which just such a judgment can be made. Furthermore, such an answer to the question “what happens next?” can be correct even if the answer is in fact false of most instances of the kind: it is perfectly correct to say that the mayfly breeds shortly before dying although most die long before breeding.
A judgment such as that the mayfly breeds shortly before dying “may be true though individuals falling under both the subject and predicate concepts are as rare as one likes, statistically speaking” (Thompson 2008, 68). To understand something as alive is in this way to see it as an instance of a biological kind and so as having a distinctive form of life, one that takes the form of a story, a narrative with a characteristic beginning (what happens first), middle (what happens next), and end (what happens last), whether or not all or even most instances of the kind in fact realize such a life.
What an animal does is expressive of its nature, its form of life; it is an actualization of something that is in the animal’s power to do.4 And this notion of a power, like that of a life-form, is something we heirs of modernity tend to ignore, or forget, or simply know nothing about at all. As Rödl explicates it, a power contrasts not only with the dispositions of mere physical objects such as stones and pieces of iron but also, and more tellingly, both with a habit and with what, corresponding to a power, an infinite being might be said to have.
First, a power is unlike a habit in having what Rödl (2007, 141) calls a
“normative measure”: an act of a power, unlike an act of habit, brings that act under a standard. An animal (of the hunting sort) does not, for instance, have merely the habit of hunting for food, though it may habitually do so in one location rather than another. Instead it has the power of hunting, a capacity to pursue prey in characteristic ways, and on any given occasion is successful or not. The end for the sake of which the animal hunts is to be fed; and this end, what it is for, provides the measure. Being a good hunter is having the power to bring about the relevant end. But in some cases the animal, even one that is a highly skilled hunter, will fail, perhaps because the prey runs too quickly to be caught. And this is true of powers generally; they can be exercised—as the powers they are and to the ends for which they are powers—only in favorable circumstances. This second aspect of powers, their fallibility, the fact that they can be thwarted when the circumstances are not propitious, is furthermore, as Rödl (2007, 153) emphasizes, not a limitation of the power but instead a
“logical or metaphysical fact.” Powers are by their natures as powers inherently fallible; the successful exercise of a power requires propitious circumstances. An infinite or eternal being does not have powers for precisely this reason. Such a being engages in activity (we can suppose) but without thereby exercising a power. The act of such a being is “pure act; the contrast of power and act does not apply to it” (Rödl 2007, 153; see also Beere 2009, 296). Only living, finite beings, beings that are instances of life-forms, have
powers.
The things that are to be found in inanimate nature, rocks and stones, rivers, fires, and winds, for example, likewise have their natures and (fallible) powers in Aristotle’s account, in particular the power of self-movement. It is in the nature of, for example, fire to “go up,” to seek the highest point, and in the nature of earth to “go down,” to seek the lowest point, and in both cases unpropitious circumstances can result in the failure of the stuff to achieve its end. In this view, then, living things such as cats and cacti are natural in precisely the same sense that water, stones, and stars are natural. All are equally and similarly a part of the natural world, as, of course, are we rational animals.
With the rise of modern science, this conception of the workings of inanimate nature came to seem utterly naive, a childishly anthropomorphizing conception of nature that self-indulgently projects distinctively human meaningfulness onto what is now understood to be properly objective, mathematically describable fact. A stone is not trying to get anywhere when it sinks to the bottom of a pond; it has no nature in the Aristotelian sense, and no power to act. Its behavior is instead to be explained by appeal to empirically discovered forces such as gravity, together with exceptionless (Newtonian) laws of motion. And as Haugeland emphasizes, this (derivational-nomological) form of explanation constituted “a radical advance in ways of understanding … a totally new way of talking about what happens, and a new way of rendering it intelligible; mathematical relationships and operations defined on universal measurable magnitudes became the illuminating considerations, rather than the goals and strivings of earth, air, fire, and water”
(HT, 38).5 Goals and strivings, and more generally the sort of meaningfulness that is found in lives shaped by such things, have no place in nature as it is now to be conceived. Not reasons but only causes are to be found in nature.
From the perspective achieved in early modernity, the ancient Aristotelian conception was grounded in a confusion of what belongs properly to the mind and what is characteristic of mere bodies, physical stuffs. But not only was a new distinction drawn; there was also a reversal in what is understood in terms of what. Whereas the ancients had understood inanimate nature on the model of animate nature, for the early moderns, animate nature, now focused in particular on rationality, our mindedness, came to be modeled on the newfound understanding of nature in terms of exceptionless physical laws. To be, in the modern view, is to be governed by (exceptionless) law, laws of physics on the