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The Journal of Value Inquiry

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28-01-2016

Absorbed Coping and Practical Wisdom

Author: Kristina Gehrman

Published in: The Journal of Value Inquiry | Issue 3/2016

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Hubert Dreyfus has recently taken the position that practical wisdom is not primarily an excellence of the intellect, or even of the mind. According to Dreyfus, contra the Aristotelian tradition from which the notion derives, true practical wisdom supersedes rationality, rather than perfecting it. Practical wisdom on his view is an absorbed or engaged way of ‘coping’ with the world; something that humans are capable of doing “without thinking at all.” It is therefore best understood on the perceptual model of response to affordances.¹ …

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Hubert Dreyfus, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005): p. 56. See also Dreyfus, “Response to McDowell,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (2007): pp. 371–77; Dreyfus, “Return of the Myth of the Mental,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (2007): pp. 352–65; and Dreyfus and Sean D. Kelly, “Heterophenomenology: Heavy-handed sleight-of-hand,” Phenomenology and Cognitive Science 6 (2007): pp. 45–55.

See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also McDowell, “Response to Dreyfus,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (2007): pp. 366–70; and McDowell, “What Myth?” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (2007): pp. 338–51.

Dreyfus, op. cit., and Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Dreyfus 2005, p. 52.

Ibid., p. 50.

Ibid., p. 51.

Ibid., pp. 54–5.

Sean Dorrance Kelly, “Closing the Gap: Phenomenology and Logical Analysis,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy 13 (2005): pp. 4–24. Compare Charles Taylor: “As I navigate my way along the path up the hill, my mind totally absorbed in anticipating the difficult conversation I’m going to have at my destination, I treat the different features of the terrain as obstacles, supports, openings, invitations, to tread more warily, or run freely, and so on. Even when I’m not thinking of them these things have those relevancies for me.” From “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen, (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 34.

Kelly, p. 16.

Dreyfus 2005, p. 56.

Ibid.

Dreyfus 2007b, p. 353.

Dreyfus 2005, p. 54. Sentence italicized in original.

Ibid., p. 55.

See especially McDowell, “Reply to Dreyfus,” op. cit. For further discussion of the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell construed as about the nature and contents of experience, see Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, Joseph K. Schear (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2013). For a different account of embodied perception according to which action and agency are central to perception, see Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

There are many interesting ideas here that it is beyond the scope of this paper to address, including an implicit challenge to the individualistic theories of selfhood that ground standard philosophical theories of agency and action. For a pertinent and interesting discussion see Arne Naess, “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,” in The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess. Alan Drengson and Bill Deval (eds.) (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2008), pp. 81–98.

Dreyfus 2005, pp. 56–7. Quoting Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 238.

Kelly, p. 11.

Dreyfus 2005, p. 3, my emphasis.

Kelly, p. 17.

Ibid., p. 18.

Ibid.

Warren Quinn, “Putting Rationality in its Place,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 181–208. Quinn says, “Given the perception that a radio in [his] vicinity is off,” this man tries, “all other things being equal, to get it turned on.” 189–90.

Kelly, p. 14.

Dreyfus 2005, pp. 57–8.

See Dreyfus’ “A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition,” with Stuart Dreyfus, Operations Research Center Report (1980).

Dreyfus 2005, p. 55. Again here, for an alternative account of perception as a mindful, but still embodied human activity that depends on human practical capacities, see Noë, op. cit.

Annas, p. 1.

Ibid., p. 13.

Ibid., p. 29.

Ibid., p. 13.

Ibid., pp. 28–9.

Ibid., pp. 13–14.

Ibid., p. 29.

Ibid., p. 27.

Dreyfus 2005.

Aristotle, p. 183, 1142a22–30, my emphasis. Note that the phrase Dreyfus quotes is translated slightly differently here: “wisdom has as its object what comes last, and this is not an object of systematic knowledge, but of perception.”

Ibid., p. 178, 1139b15–17.

Ibid., p. 179, 1140a2.

With Stuart Dreyfus, Dreyfus (1980) proposed a model of human skill acquisition that makes room for innovation as a kind of expertise that transcends expertise, so to speak. See note 34, above.

Jane Austen, Emma. (Boston: Tichnor and Fields, 1887), p. 319. Accessed online at https://books.google.com.

See Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980.

For an account of second nature as central to the ‘conceptualist’ view of virtue in terms of which Dreyfus frames his initial argument, see McDowell, Mind and World.

See Rosalind Hursthouse, “The Central Doctrine of the Mean,” in Blackwell’s Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Richard Kraut (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 96–115, for an account of individual virtue in terms of hitting the mark, where the ‘mean’ – the mark the practically wise person hits – is conceived as the center of a circle, which one may fail to miss in all directions and in any number of different ways.

Gavin Lawrence, “The Rationality of Morality,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 122.

Ibid., p. 124.

For a vivid description of this sort of deliberation see David Wiggins’ “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1976): pp. 29–51.

Title: Absorbed Coping and Practical Wisdom
Author: Kristina Gehrman
Publication date: 28-01-2016
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: The Journal of Value Inquiry / Issue 3/2016
Print ISSN: 0022-5363
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0492
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9540-2

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