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ABSTRACT
What I call the active mind approach revolves around the claim that what is “on” a person’s mind is in an important sense brought on and held on to through the agent’s self-conscious rational activity. In the first part, I state the gist of this perspective in a deliberately strong way in order to create a touchstone for critical discussion. In the second part, I engage with two categories of our mental lives that seem to speak against construing the mind as active. First, I discuss affectivity, in particular emotion, and show that emotional episodes are active engagements. Second, I discuss habitual action, and in particular those manifestations of habit which are initially opaque to the agent. In my responses to both objections, the notion of a practical self-understanding will play a central role. The result will be a qualified defence and expansion of the active mind position.
Acknowledgments
I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous, insightful and spirited comments and suggestions. I also thank Laura Candiotto for her thoughtful scepticism expressed in response to an earlier version. Moreover, thanks is due to Kathy Ran for her terrific language editing. Work on this paper was partly facilitated through a grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Notes
1 It is interesting to consider the phenomenological tradition in this regard, as its allegiance is split between differing versions of the active mind thesis. A strong current in phenomenology tends to oppose the Kantian strand in modern philosophy, which champions stronger and normatively inflected versions of the thesis, while another faction – spearheaded by Heidegger, with strong echoes in Sartre and a more balanced uptake in Merleau-Ponty and also Ricoeur – develops credible and phenomenologically “safer” versions of it. As this text is not about the history of ideas, I remain largely silent about specific authors and their allegiances to versions of my core claim. Let me note, however, that my employment of the term “mind” is more directly aligned with the tradition of reflection as found in post-Wittgensteinian Oxford philosophy (Ryle, Anscombe) and its current adherents such as Richard Moran, Matthew Boyle, also more broadly John McDowell and other so-called post-analytical philosophers. One key feature of this notion of “mind” is that its proponents do not consider it an open question whether animals or pre-linguistic infants do have “minds” in the sense at issue, but rather assume self-reflective capacities that are tied to language as a key prerequisite of the kind of mindedness under discussion.
2 Boyle, “Active Belief.”
3 Gallagher, “Socially Extended Mind.”
4 Given this moderate ambition, the term “expansion” in this paper’s title is not meant in a technical sense, for instance suggesting something along the lines of an “extended mind” theory. Rather, “expanding” is meant to bring out the centrality and the reach of agency for key dimensions of individual mindedness, enlarging the position’s scope to cover not just epistemic comportment but also emotional episodes, habitual action, and potentially other manifestations of sapience.
5 A clarification about the notion of “rational” employed in this text is in order. When I speak of “rational agency” or “the rational agent”, I mean no more than the basic conditions of reason-responsiveness and consistency that ensure an intelligible outlook on the world persisting over time so as to give the term “agent” a foothold. The rationality required for this is not only compatible with vastly different thick conceptions of lifeworld rationality, accounting for broad ranges of cultural, historical, and milieu-specific differences, but it also allows leeway for considerable instances of irrationality and individual or group-specific idiosyncrasies. Thus, it would be wrong to blame the present account for promoting a form of reductive rationalism in the mold of rational choice theory or instrumental rationality, as some readers of earlier drafts had feared.
6 Throughout this exposition I will take many hints from Richard Moran, whose encompassing formulation of the position in Authority and Estrangement lays the foundation for what I will do in the following.
7 This aligns the present account with an important current of post-phenomenological thought that is labeled “enactivism”. However, there is a marked difference in emphasis, as enactivists in their attempts to develop the de-facto agentive character of the mind usually stress the continuity of animal and human mindedness and therefore give short shrift to higher-level reflective capacities. An important exception to this trend, and thus much closer to what is developed here, is the work of Alva Noë, see e.g. Noë, Action in Perception.
8 Boyle, “Active Belief”; Boyle, “Making Up Your Mind.”
9 See McDowell, Mind and World.
10 Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 92–93.
11 See Anscombe, Intention; Thompson, “Anscombe’s Intention and Practical Knowledge.”
12 Note that this does not amount to doxastic voluntarism: I cannot believe at will because I am committed, qua my capacity for belief, to only believe what I deem true. See Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 51–55.
13 See Anscombe, Intention.
14 See Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 83–93.
15 See also Hampshire, Freedom of the Individual, 97.
16 See Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 150.
17 See Hieronymi, “Responsibility for Believing.”
18 Obviously, much more could be said here. A deeper diagnosis of what goes wrong in accounts that adhere to the standard picture of belief as inert, standing attitudes is provided by Boyle, “Active Belief”, who helpfully clarifies the kind of activity at issue in believing and contrasts it with the standard picture of the putatively punctual “act” of judging.
19 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 595.
20 Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 140.
21 Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 140.
22 See Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 142.
23 This need not apply to all interpersonal encounters, but only to those that allow a specific social distance which is reflectively acknowledged. Besides these, there are forms of more intimate interpersonal engagement which do not, or at least not initially, allow such distance to take hold (see, e.g., De Jaegher and Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making”).
24 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 41.
25 Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 142.
26 This problem recalls the McDowell-Dreyfus debate on whether experience is conceptual all the way down and whether this would require the actual involvement of concept tokens in conscious experience, as Dreyfus seemed to think; see the contributions in Schear, Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World.
27 Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 145–46.
28 See Ingerslev, “On the Role of Habit.”
29 I cannot go into the intricate debate about the proper sense in which emotions can indeed be understood as “passive”. Jean Moritz Müller has recently illuminated this issue by bringing out that emotions must be understood as forms of reason-responsiveness which renders them “spontaneous” (in a roughly Kantian sense), instead of “receptive”, as many other views championing emotional passivity seem to imply. Despite significant differences in the details, Müller’s clarification supports the gist of my approach as it understands emotions to be activities that contrast sharply to perceptions as paramount exercises of receptivity (see Müller, “The Spontaneity of Emotion”).
30 See Goldie, The Mess Inside, Ch.4. Besides drawing on the work of Peter Goldie, who has championed the view of emotions as enduring episodes or processes that connect various elements into a complex whole (see Goldie, The Emotions and Goldie, The Mess Inside), I take up hints from various authors who have proposed agency-based approaches to emotion. For instance, Griffith and Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild” present a powerful naturalistic account in line with considerations from ethology, evolutionary biology and social psychology. Slaby and Wüschner, “Emotion and Agency” outline a perspective more in line with the phenomenological tradition by drawing on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
31 Sartre, Sketch, 61.
32 Goldie, “Emotion, Reason, and Virtue.”
33 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 135.
34 This is part of why cognitive theories of emotion are so problematic from a phenomenological vantage point: while such views are correct to emphasize that emotions have formal objects, they misconstrue the peculiar way in which emotions disclose a part of reality and thus fail to capture the unique characteristic of affective intentionality.
35 Sartre, Sketch, 41.
36 A noteworthy and to date still highly relevant analysis of this specifically emotive rationality is Helm, Emotional Reason.
37 See Solomon, The Passions.
38 Moran, Authority and Estrangement, 148.
39 Whether this robustly normative inflection prevents the account from expressing “homely” truths about human subjects, as one reviewer suggested it does, is debatable. That we are open to normative demands and often heed these calls is not in doubt, yet obviously our emotive attitudes hover right at the (inevitably disputed) border between the voluntary and involuntary. In view of this, one might contend that there are indeed few homely truths to be found in this region.
40 See Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals”. This is certainly a position that entwines a normative outlook with a phenomenology of situated embodied existence.
41 See Ingerslev, “On the Role of Habit,” 492.
42 Note how this intelligent intertwinement of receptivity and spontaneity, experience and action, or passivity and activity within an expansively construed embodied self-understanding is something that links the views of Taylor and McDowell quite closely with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. See Slaby and Wüschner, “Emotion and Agency” for more specific hints in this direction.
43 Ingerslev, “On the Role of Habit,” 490.
44 Ingerslev, “On the Role of Habit,” 483.
45 Ingerslev, “On the Role of Habit,” 489–90.
46 Like Moran, Ingerslev brings up the theme of psychotherapy in relation with her proposal on the elucidation of an agent’s self-understanding. Both invoke work by Jonathan Lear, who himself has engaged in instructive ways with Moran’s account on these issues. See Lear, “Avowal and Unfreedom” and Moran, “Replies.”
47 Ingerslev, “On the Role of Habit,” 493. To be fair, Ingerslev does acknowledge the possibility of transformation, but she does so only briefly at the end of her paper (see 495).
48 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844,” 139, as quoted approvingly in McDowell, Mind and World, 118.