Freedom and Second Nature in The Formation of Reason

Abstract

This article elaborates and defends a thesis prominent in my recent book, The Formation of Reason; namely, that a human being gets to be free in the distinctive way that human beings are free through the acquisition of second nature. My treatment of this thesis in The Formation of Reason is much influenced by the philosophy of John McDowell. McDowell himself, however, is notoriously reluctant to offer a theory of second nature. In this article, I explain his reasons for taking this stance and show how, for all that, his work contains much that illuminates the idea of second nature and its relation to freedom. I make this argument by focusing on a number of McDowell's papers on Aristotle and Wittgenstein that I do not discuss in detail in my book. Finally, I consider the objection that although McDowell recognizes second nature as a property of individuals, he mistakenly rejects the idea of second nature in external form. I argue that his works do in fact contain resources to countenance second nature externalized, so long as we keep that idea insulated from the constructivist theories of normativity that McDowell rightly rejects. Understanding our thesis aright is, I maintain, a necessary condition of a compelling conception of the social dimensions of mind and of the end of education.

Notes

¹John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher who was born in Boksburg in 1942. He was educated at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and at New College, Oxford. In 1966, he became a fellow of University College, Oxford, where he taught for 20 years. In 1986, McDowell left Oxford for the University of Pittsburgh, where he now holds a university professorship. McDowell's writings include significant papers on the philosophy of thought and language, epistemology, metaethics, and history of philosophy. His 1991 John Locke Lectures were published in 1994 as Mind and World, a book that has received a great deal of critical attention. Four volumes of collected papers have subsequently appeared (1998c, 1998d, 2009b, 2009e). In 2010, McDowell was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award. I have been interested in McDowell's work since I was an undergraduate, and had the pleasure of working under his supervision for 2 years as a graduate student. I make reference to his work in many of my writings, though The Formation of Reason represents by far my most sustained treatment of his ideas.

²Frederick Neuhouser (2000) offers this translation rather than the more usual “being-with-oneself-in-another” (pp. 305-6n34).

³I am sure my efforts are not entirely successful. For one thing, under the influence of Richard Moran's (2001) impressive work, I tend to overemphasize “making up one's mind,” thereby appearing to stress deliberation at the expense of responsiveness to reasons in its more spontaneous forms.

⁴McDowell makes much use of the idea of the “space of reasons,” which he draws from Sellars (1963). The notion is the focus of chapter 5 of FR. The identification of freedom with responsiveness to reasons raises many other thorny issues (some of which I discuss in chapter 4 of FR). For example, McDowell (2008/2009h) writes that the degree to which freedom is realized in action “depends on the extent to which the supposed reasons in the light of which someone acts are genuinely reasons” (p. 169). But this is ambiguous between the modest claim that an agent is free in so far as she moved by reasons as opposed to, say, external forces, and the bold claim that someone is free to the degree to which she thinks and acts in light of what, objectively speaking, she has reason to think and do. I try to resolve the ambiguity at FR, pages 90–91. McDowell comes at the issues by drawing on ideas from the German tradition, but that is not the only route: see, for example, Pettit and Smith (1996).

⁵Here one might protest that if human beings have a nature, surely they have at most one. To speak of two natures is to invite the potentially misleading question of whether second nature replaces or supplements our “first” nature. Wouldn't it therefore be better to say that we are creatures whose nature it is to acquire rational powers in the course of our development, rather than creatures who acquire a new nature? I have some sympathy with this objection.

⁶Though he does not distinguish the two uses and tends to slide between them (as I have done so far in this article, as attentive readers will have spotted).

⁷ McDowell (2009i) expounds this argument, but a more detailed account can be found in his earlier writings on Wittgenstein, collected in McDowell (1998d; see, especially, 1993/1998b, pp. 264–266).

⁸ Sebastian Rödl (2007) defines a power as “the cause of the existence of its acts in such a way as to be, at the same time, the cause of their conforming to a normative measure, which is thus internal to these acts” (p. 141).

⁹In FR I tend to resist talk of “habituation” and “training” on the grounds that those notions too readily imply the passive reception of routine “unthinking” behaviours (hence my preference for “learning by initiation”). I now feel my discussion (there and in Bakhurst, 2007, pp. 135–136) was influenced by too narrow view of habit. McDowell's various papers on Aristotle help to correct this and suggest richer possibilities for the notion of habituation. I have also benefitted from reflecting on Julia Annas's (2011) recent book.

¹⁰For Aristotle, “the noble” (to kalon) designates, not one virtue among others, but a quality of actions recommended by virtue. As McDowell (1996/2009a) puts it, “the concept of the noble organizes the evaluative outlook of a possessor of excellence” (p. 46).

¹¹The reference is to Otto Neurath's famous metaphor that likens the body of knowledge to a boat at sea: any part of the boat can be modified or repaired but only by relying on the soundness of some other parts of the boat. When it comes to knowledge there is no dry dock.

¹²It is important to stress that such a view of moral judgement can accommodate critical reflection leading to moral innovation. Of course, people can abdicate their responsibility to decide what to think by deferring to convention or custom, just as there are many ways of making bad judgements. And these failings can result from our upbringing. It is an achievement of modernity that our taking responsibility for what we think is recognized as constituting the freedom of self-determination, the exercise of which is partly constitutive of human flourishing. So McDowell's neo-Aristotelian picture of phronesis as second nature embodies an ideal of critical moral personhood. It is not simply a description of what happens in our upbringing.

¹³McDowell's papers on Wittgenstein are collected in McDowell (1998d, 2009b). I discuss Wittgenstein on rule following and private languages in Bakhurst (1995) and consider the relevance of such arguments to Vygotskian themes in Bakhurst (1986; reprinted in Bakhurst, 1991, chap. 3).

¹⁴Although, as I observe in FR, McDowell's view of the mental puts him at odds with most contemporary cognitive science, there are interesting parallels (and differences) with, for example, Alva Noë's (2004, 2009) work.

¹⁵As McDowell (1984/1998h) puts it, “Shared command of a language equips us to know one another's meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else's meaning in his words … . A linguistic community is conceived [by Wittgenstein] as bound together … by a capacity for a meeting of minds” (p. 253). I try to express similar thoughts, for example, at FR, page 39.

¹⁶ McDowell (2007/2009f) writes, “If Hegel did think thought can be beholden to its subject matter only in the context of complete mutuality of recognition, the right response would surely be: ‘So much the worse for Hegel’ (p. 200)… . That objects are authoritative over thought—certainly over its expression—is a feature of a social practice that has evolved into being as it is. The authority is genuine, because we freely acknowledge it. But the idea of bestowing it on objects does not apply to anything we do, or anything our predecessors did” (p. 203).

¹⁷However, he is not always at ease with them. For example, in acknowledging the “historicality of human spontaneity,” McDowell (2002) commends Bubner for stressing that “the forms of life within which we come to be human beings at all … are both products of drawn-out historical evolution and dependent for their continuation on continuing whole-hearted participation by mature individuals” (p. 97). There are two awkwardnesses about this passage. First, we do not become human beings; human beings become persons. Second, the idea that our form of life depends on our whole-hearted participation is odd, as if our form of life might be endangered by lack of commitment or conviction.

¹⁸As John Haugeland (1995/1998) nicely puts it, “Intelligence resides in a meaningful world: not just in books and records, but roads and ploughs, offices, laboratories and communities” (p. 236).