The irrational in the rational, or: John McDowell’s dialectic of enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Post-Kantian philosophers typically hold there to be a coincidence between reason and freedom. In this paper, I question their ability to secure this coincidence. I do so in particular by examining the work of John McDowell: probably the leading light of contemporary analytic post-Kantian philosophy, and certainly someone for whom the coincidence is important. Working through McDowell, I argue that in order to be considered ‘rationally free’ in relation to the external world, the world itself needs to, at at least some level, elude rational understanding. In the conclusion, I claim that this invites greater engagement – particularly by post-Kantian philosophers working in the analytic tradition – with the work of Theodor Adorno.

KEYWORDS:

• McDowell
• reason
• freedom
• Adorno
• post-Kantian philosophy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Credit here to David Batho, who once described reading McDowell as ‘like being told off by someone else's parents.’

2 An analogous example to this is given in Sellars (1997, 37ff).

3 See Rorty (1979); Davidson (1984).

4 To be clear: McDowell doesn’t actually say so explicitly, but I think we can identify this motivation in his work.

5 McDowell's conceptualism has attracted a wide range of responses in the literature. For further reading see Crane (1992).

6 McDowell is one of the founders of the recent tradition of ‘liberal’ or ‘soft’ naturalism. For further reading see De Caro and MacArthur (2004).

7 Perhaps the most pertinent quote on this score has already been given in the introduction above – it will return in section 3 below.

8 This paper was the first in a fairly lengthy exchange that McDowell and Pippin engaged in throughout the mid-00s. McDowell's first response is his (2002a). The other papers in the exchange rather forget about nature and become focused on technical issues in Kant.

9 I think he takes this phrase from Sellars.

10 ‘My purposes do not require such ambitions,’ as he remarks in his ‘Response to Bernstein’, 2003.

11 I appreciate that there is much more that really ought to be said about Adorno's ‘non-identical’ and his critique of identity-thinking here. Some readers may have the proper background in Adorno already; for those who are feeling like they're still in the dark, a good starting-point would be O'Connor (2004), especially chapter 2. There is also more to be said about the relationship between Adorno's non-identical and the non-conceptual, especially as invoked by Travis. This would be fertile ground for a future paper.

12 This paper grew out of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, which was submitted at the University of Essex way back in 2015. The process of turning this chapter into a publishable article turned it into a sort of synopsis of the argument of my thesis overall. Thanks from way back to Fabian Freyenhagen, David McNeill, David Batho, and Joe Saunders. More recent thanks to Matthew McKeever, as well as a series of anonymous reviewers, for helping me give what was a very unwieldy draft into something like a coherent philosophical shape. I would probably have never tried to get this published to begin with if it wasn't for a chance comment in a meeting with Stephen Houlgate.