Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision 3031270258, 9783031270253

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Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision Dionysis Christias

Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision “What will philosophy look like in the future? Dionysis Christias makes a case here that Wilfrid Sellars offers us the best path to moving philosophy into the future. Sellars realized that the problematic of contemporary philosophy is generated, not by a metaphysical clash between two orders of being, say, mind and body (or world), or the concrete and the abstract, but by the conceptual clash between a thoroughly naturalistic descriptive framework spawned by the sciences and the norm-laden (and therefore prescriptively oriented) framework in which we conceptualize and intend our activities. The key to resolving this clash is rejecting the Myth of the Given. We can then properly understand the relations between these frameworks, that is, we can take science seriously while acknowledging that personhood is a normative and communal phenomenon. This will enable us to form “a non-alienated experience of ourselves-in-the-world.” Christias puts Sellars into fascinating dialogue with continental philosophy and its emphasis on the life-world (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Meillasoux and Deleuze), but does not infer that it is incompatible with a scientific world-view. Philosophy in the future will be a widerranging conversation than was available in its immediate past, and Sellars was ahead his time. Christias makes a strong case that his time has come.” —Willem de Vries is Professor of Philosophy in the University of New Hampshire “Wilfrid Sellars is an anomalous figure in 20th century philosophy: a Kantian who proclaimed both the irreducibility of the normative and the ontological primacy of science; an analyst of meaning who insisted that language does not mirror the world; a scientific realist who espoused a metaphysics of pure processes. Sellars fits into neither the analytic nor Continental traditions. In this brilliant book, Dionysis Christias shows how Sellars’ singular oeuvre harbors a hidden thread that unravels the dichotomies around which the analytic and Continental traditions constituted themselves. Christias’ starting point is the insight that Sellars’ metalinguistic expressivism and his process naturalism are not incompatible but interdependent. On this basis, Christias proposes a daring rapprochement between Sellars’ expressivism and phenomenological critique of representation. While Sellars exposes phenomenology’s reliance on the myth of the categorial Given, his non-representational model of lifeworld and science points towards a post-phenomenological stereoscopy of manifest and scientific images which is at once practically and cate-

gorially transformative. But Christias goes beyond reconstruction to augment Sellars’ philosophy. He shows how to provide conditions of individuation for pure processes; how to distinguish between the emancipatory and oppressive aspects of science; and how to reconcile instrumental rationality with intrinsic purposefulness. Perhaps most importantly, Christias shows how Sellars provides us with the resources for reconciling collective emancipation with natural necessity. This is not only a groundbreaking contribution to Sellars scholarship but a profoundly audacious work of philosophy in its own right.” —Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy in the American University of Beirut

Dionysis Christias

Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision

Dionysis Christias Research Center for Greek Philosophy Academy of Athens Athens, Greece

ISBN 978-3-031-27025-3    ISBN 978-3-031-27026-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Prelude: Sellars’ Project and Its Essential Tension 15 Part I Sellars and Phenomenology: Normativity, Lifeworld and Science  25 3 Husserl’s Lifeworld and the Scientific Image 27 4 Lifeworld  Phenomenology After Husserl: Merleau-Ponty, Enactivism, Heidegger and Science 63 5 Toward  a Non-representational Conception of Science and the Lifeworld 91 Part II Sellars’ Relevance for Continental Philosophy 111 6 Toward  the Thing-in-Itself: Sellars’ and Meillassoux’s Divergent Conception of Kantian Transcendentalism113

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7 Deleuze and Sellars on Ontology and Normativity145 Part III Unifying the Manifest and the Scientific Images 175 8 Sellars’  Synoptic Vision: Unifying the Images at the Level of the Lifeworld177 Part IV Persons, Free Will and Processes 219 9 Persons  as Normative Functions in a Nominalistic Process World221 10 Free Will in a Scientifically Disenchanted World243 Part V Philosophy, Disenchantment and Self-Critique 255 11 The  Dialectic Between Manifest and Scientific Image in the Wake of Weberian Disenchantment257 Part VI Scientific Naturalism and Non-­instrumental Values 271 12 Science  and the Objectification of Values: A Sellarsian Response to the Continental Critique of Science273 Index317

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1

Aboutness relations and picturing relations as different forms of mind-­world ‘correlations’ The Specious Present (adapted from Sellars, 1981, p. 63)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Wilfrid Sellars is one of the most important twentieth-century analytic philosophers. This, among other things, can be shown by the fact that, primarily due to his own influence, many analytic philosophers gradually came to endorse the view that a host of many important but seemingly loosely connected philosophical problems—for example, about the relations of mind and body, the place of persons, intentionality, meaning, intention, action, moral or aesthetic facts within the natural world—are essentially different forms of expression of a more fundamental philosophical problematic: the problem of the place of normative facts—that is, of facts which are not just descriptions of what is the case but essentially involve in their identity and individuation facts about what ought to be the case—within a naturalistically described world, bereft of any norms. The view that philosophical questions at their deepest level take this form was largely Sellars’ own original idea. Indeed, he believed that a similar view about the nature of philosophical problems can already be found— in nascent and not fully self-conscious form—in Kant. This general metaphilosophical viewpoint was adopted and creatively elaborated by post-Sellarsian philosophers such as Rorty, McDowell and Brandom, notwithstanding their objections to Sellars’ ‘scientism’ and his overall vision of integrating the manifest and scientific image of ourselves-in-the-world. Indeed, as Rorty argued, Sellars’ influence was such as to usher analytic philosophy from its empiricist to its Kantian stage, while post-Sellarsians,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_1

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such as Brandom, have been said to further move analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage.1 It is important to remember that the above philosophical problematic about the place of normative facts within a naturalistically described world, which Sellars and his followers take to be at the heart of a host of other more specific philosophical problems, had not always been formulated in these terms. The first signs of its recognition and thematization as an important philosophical problem can be traced back to modernity as a result of the gradual depersonalization of the natural world due to the huge success of the natural sciences from the sixteenth century onward in explaining and predicting observable natural phenomena. This process of depersonalization, which had wider social consequences (e.g. the demystification of God-given state power, the transition toward a secular form of state power based on the ‘general will’ of the people), has been famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (Weber, 1919). This ‘disenchantment’ is here understood as the gradual overcoming of magical or, in general, anthropomorphic ways of understanding the world and our place in it, through the gradual elimination of capacities and abilities of persons (intentions, purposes, life-plans) in explaining the emergence and course of natural phenomena. Consider, for example, how pre-modern humanity understood reality and its place in it. External objects were thought to be internally related to human needs and purposes, in that they were understood as having an intrinsic value within a teleologically structured ‘closed’ and hierarchical world where everything had its proper place according to its ‘value’ (Koyré, 1957). In the context of this pre-modern worldview, natural happenings were conceived teleologically, as striving to conform to their internal life-plan or purpose. By contrast, after the huge success of the natural sciences from the seventeenth century onward in predicting and explaining the course of natural phenomena, the world is understood as populated with value-free material unobservable objects or bodies governed by mathematically described natural laws and related through mechanistic causation, thereby eliminating the need for invoking teleological, value-laden normative categories or perceptible features for explaining their behavior. An important consequence of this cultural process of disenchantment in the field of philosophy was the eventual 1  This post-Sellarsian analytic tradition was and still is a minority view within analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophy mostly comes in the form of analytic metaphysics and is heavily influenced by Quine, Kripke and Lewis, rather than Sellars.

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challenge and overcoming of the pre-modern conception of normativity as something imposed upon us from a transcendent source which fixes how we ought to think and act independently of our recognition of this normative force in the context of our social practices. The norms to which we are committed are prescribed neither by God nor by Nature. We are only answerable to one another for the commitments and the actions we undertake. However, the process of disenchantment also created new forms of alienation not only in practice (where people could no longer give meaning and purpose to their life by invoking a transcendent authority) but also in theory, where an almost unbridgeable gap was opened between persons and the radically depersonalized natural world. Since the essential properties of persons (rationality, purpose, will, perceptual qualities) could no longer be attributed—not even by analogy—to external natural objects, they were salvaged by being confined to a supposedly ontologically and epistemologically autonomous sphere, the human ‘mind’. Yet, in this way, and to the extent to which even our own body was thought as part of the disenchanted natural world, a gap was opened within human beings themselves between their minds and their bodies. In this sense, it started to become clear that the price that human beings had to pay for disenchanting the external world was their confinement within a ‘subjective’ sphere within which they could have complete cognitive and practical autonomy and transparency, but which completely alienated them from their own bodily existence and contact with the external world. The Cartesian ‘modern’ subject conceived itself as a thinking and non-extended substance which has direct and transparent access to its perceptual states and is characterized by complete freedom of the will within the private sphere of the ‘mind’, yet without being capable of understanding how it can be so much as possible for it to transcend this private sphere of the mind and reach out to the external world.2 Perception and action cannot directly connect us to external reality since they are both conceived as essentially mental states. In this way, the ‘thinking subject’ of modern philosophy is alienated from its bodily and worldly existence in a radical sense: its perceptual capacities and its free will, being confined to the private sphere of the mind, do not

2  Descartes himself invoked God’s power to solve this problem, but this arguably amounts to explaining the obscurum per obscurius.

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suffice to connect its thought contents to action and to a world existing independently of the subject.3 However, it must be stressed that while this distinctively modern skeptical gap between mind and the external world and the ensuing problem of the relation between mind and the external world is intimately related to that of the place of normative facts in a non-normative world, the two problems are not identical. Sellars’ genius, in this case, consists in his application of Kantian critical transcendental tools to contemporary philosophical problems in a way that brought to light a deeper conception of their content from modernity onward. According to the ‘pre-critical’ views of rationalists and empiricists alike, modern ‘disenchanted’ philosophy takes for granted that there is a fundamental categorial distinction between the ‘physical’ and the ‘mental’ which is ontological in nature and subsequently attempts to understand how the human mind, with its capacity for rational thinking and freedom, can be ontologically connected with external, mind-independent, reality. Yet, according to Sellars, Kant’s transcendental and critical turn already marks the beginning of a radical change in our conception of the content of fundamental philosophical questions in the face of Weberian disenchantment. The traditional ontological distinction between the physical and the mental is replaced with the deontological distinction between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom: the realm of nature consists of ‘things’ which are non-normatively related, while the realm of freedom includes normatively individuated things (Brandom, 2009). In this way, pre-critical ontological questions about the relation between the physical and mental realms become questions about the source and nature of normativity, namely, the bindingness and objective validity of our concepts of the ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’. This change of the very questions that must be properly asked in order to have any chance of finding a philosophically correct account of ourselves-­ in-­the-world in the face of Weberian disenchantment was so radical that even Kant cannot be said to have been fully aware of it. In fact, it is clear that many remnants of the old, ‘ontological’ way of thinking still survive in Kant’s novel transcendental-critical metaphilosophical framework and make their presence felt by creating a host of unresolved ‘tensions’ in the latter (the most important being, arguably, the controversial notion of the 3  In this way, ironically, that which distinguishes humanity from the rest of (animate and inanimate) nature, namely, mind, no longer results in a higher integration of its being into the totality of being, but on the contrary marks the unbridgeable gulf between itself and the rest of existence (Jonas, 2001, 214).

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‘thing in itself’). Indeed, this tendency of understanding the formulation of fundamental philosophical problems about the place of mind in nature in directly metaphysical terms, completely bypassing the phenomenon of normativity (in our perception, thinking and acting), is present and prevalent in contemporary analytic philosophy, as can be seen in recent discussions about modality and grounding in analytic metaphysics, about the relations between mind and body in philosophy of mind or about meaning, truth and reference in philosophy of language. Within this, mostly hostile, philosophical landscape, Sellars—himself a highly systematic philosopher and deeply knowledgeable in the history of philosophy—saw that the fundamental theoretical challenge posed in philosophy by the Weberian disenchantment of the world was not so much the connection of two separated ontological realms (‘mind’ and ‘world’) but the way in which normatively individuated phenomena—which are now what makes us distinctive as ‘rational animals’—are connected with and are about a natural world which is described in exclusively non-normative terms. Human beings are not distinguished from animals or nature due to their having ontologically emergent ‘minds’ over and above physical bodies, but because their mental states are understood normatively, as loci of normative authority and responsibility. This construal of ‘human nature’ in terms of sensitivity and commitment to norms attempts to account for the distinctiveness of humanity within nature, albeit in a non-metaphysical way that does not present humanity as a ‘kingdom within a kingdom’ (as a separate ontological realm within nature) and is thus fully consistent with the lessons of Weberian disenchantment. This way of understanding the theoretical predicaments of contemporary philosophical thinking in the light of continuing Weberian disenchantment forms a central metaphilosophical backbone of this work. Another related and equally important predicament of contemporary philosophy as a result of the disenchantment of nature and ourselves in late modernity, again originally proposed by Sellars, is the indispensability yet at the same time lack of coherence between two equally fundamental ways of understanding ourselves-in-the-world, namely, the categorial framework of the manifest image and that of the scientific image. The gap between those two equally central ways of understanding ourselves-in-the-­ world becomes obvious if we consider that in the context of the manifest image, human perception, thought and action are understood as essentially norm-governed and conceptually structured capacities of persons, whereas, in the context of the scientific image, these phenomena can be exhaustively explained, at least in principle, in terms of pre-personal,

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non-­normative and non-conceptual mechanisms or processes. Again, here the deeper issue comes down to accounting for the place of persons, construed as loci of normative authority and responsibility, within a scientifically, naturalistically described world, bereft of values and norms. Philosophy stands or falls by its success in accounting for this possibility in the domains of theoretical and practical reason alike. Sellars notoriously takes both the framework of persons and science seriously and thinks that this implies the need not just for reconciling the manifest and scientific images but for fusing them into one stereoscopic vision of reality and our place in it. Taking as our point of departure the above project and metaphilosophical framework, one of the main aims of this book is to address head-on the issue of the form which a non-­alienated experience of ourselves-in-the-world would take in the Sellarsian cryptic stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image. Since our aim here is to focus on the concrete experience that this fusion would produce at the level of the everyday lifeworld, this project can perhaps be seen as a non-traditional, non-descriptive, revisionary phenomenology which, pace phenomenology, takes science and scientific realism seriously. I will attempt to show that, in many respects, this novel lifeworld experience would turn us into a new kind of person-in-the-world (Chaps. 4, 8 and 12). The transformation would be no less—in fact, far more—radical than that of the development of our manifest-image conception of persons-in-the-­ world in modernity out of our original-image conception of ourselves-in-­ the-world, where everything was some kind of person. Post-modern persons would be ‘open’ to the world through sensibility and action in a different way than we currently are. The very contents and kinds of affordances and solicitations that constitute our perceptual-practical awareness of the natural and social world would be transformed by the direct incorporation into them of scientific knowledge about the world’s causal contribution in their phenomenological structure. Α corresponding transformation would take place also in the very categories through which we conceive and perceive ourselves-in-the-environment. For example, the social and environmental world would not anymore be open to us in a reified sense, as external alien forces, but would be directly perceived as a product of our own instituting activity (social world) and our own evolutionarily developed sensory-motor-affective activity (the organism-­ environment system). In this sense, our environmental niche itself (including the perceptual features of what we now categorize as ‘external objects’) would be understood and experienced as a functional component of our sensorimotor system, rather than something external to it, to

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which we may be ‘intentionally directed’. Moreover, such transformations would also have momentous practical implications, as they could open the way for an unprecedented enhancement of our freedom and autonomy, but also lead to new forms of alienation and ‘enslavement’ (Chap. 12). Our Sellars-inspired wager here is that in this next ‘post-modern stage of categorial evolution, when the scientific image will have fully demystified persons, depriving them of any metaphysical essence, persons, presicely through this demystifying process, will have self-consciously come to ‘own’ their ‘essence’ by realizing that the latter is normative and communal (a matter of collective self-determination based on symmetrically recognitive normative attitudes) and not ontological and individualistic (a matter of a ‘unique human nature’ transparently given to individuals).4 There are no natural or social forces that dictate what we ought to do and to which we must ‘submit’ in order to successfully navigate and flourish in our environment. The liberating—yet potentially frightening and paralyzing—dimension of disenchanting reason is the gradual realization that our successful survival and flourishing in the world ultimately depends on our collective commitment to make the natural and social world a place (a coevolved symbiotic environment) worth living and striving for. With this general aim in mind, let me now focus on the more specific objectives of this book. (1) A major aim of this book is to highlight the importance of Sellars’ attack on the myth of the Given to phenomenology in particular and to continental philosophy in general by arguing that such diverse philosophical views as Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld, Merleau-Ponty’s and Heidegger’s post-Husserlian rendering of the latter, as well as contemporary speculative realist brands of continental philosophy (Meillassoux’s anti-correlationist mathematical rationalism) all fall prey to its most basic version, namely, the ‘categorial Given’. Τhe resort to the categorial Given (in the form of an ‘eidetic intuition’ of the essential features of the lifeworld and of science) turns out to be the unacknowledged cost of antinaturalism in the Continental tradition and of its systematic distortions of the categorial structure of the lifeworld and of science (Chap. 3). And while Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger depart from Husserl’s transcendental methodology and uncover deeper phenomenological structures not explored by Husserl, such as the non-apperceptive bodily correlation 4  This acknowledgment makes meaningful the regulative ideal of a ‘post-modern’ community of persons in which each member identifies with all the others, at once expressing and sacrificing their own particular attitudes by taking co-responsibility for the practical attitudes of everyone (Brandom, 2019, 757).

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between mind and world (Merleau-Ponty) and our non-intentional existential openness to the world based on a non-thematic and non-­theoretical ‘pre-understanding’ of its basic features (Heidegger), both end up, in different and more subtle ways than Husserl, privileging the intuitive structures of the lifeworld over the non-intuitive world of science, a move that is ultimately unjustifiable (Chap. 4). An alternative, non-representational model of both lifeworld and science, which asserts their inextricable entanglement, will be provided as a way toward a post-phenomenological philosophy free of the myth of the Given in all its forms. In this context, it will be proposed that the Sellarsian scientific image must be understood as radically non-representational and as operating at all levels with the evolutionary selectional mode of explanation (Chap. 5). (2) I will attempt to show the fertility of Sellars’ philosophy and its relevance for continental philosophy by putting his views on ontology and normativity in conversation with one of the most important figures of contemporary continental philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, who was perhaps the most systematic and rigorous defender of an unabashedly metaphysical picture of the world as a ceaseless processual becoming. I will argue that some features of Deleuze’s ‘monistic pluralist’ process metaphysics—especially his notions of virtuality and intensity—could put some flesh in the bare bones of Sellarsian process nominalism. Conversely, the Sellarsian resolutely non-representationalist notion of normativity can be used to amend a blind spot of Deleuze’s thought, as it shows that normativity is an indispensable form of thinking and a necessary condition of our individual and collective freedom in a way that does not fall foul of what Deleuze calls ‘the image of representational thought’ (which, according to Deleuze, reduces the creative, differential and processual dimension of being to a static conception of the world and ourselves based on the substance-­property categorial framework of traditional thought). This will be the topic of Chap. 7. (3) Ι will provide a novel interpretation and articulate in some detail Sellars’ central but cryptic and elusive notion of the stereoscopic fusion between the manifest and the scientific image at the level of concrete lifeworld experience. It will be argued that the stereoscopic fusion of the images can be understood in terms of the concrete realization of our practical ability for absorbed skillful coping within an ever-expanding range of (linguistic and non-linguistic) environments (Chap. 8). It is also suggested that in this envisaged situation of the fusion of the images in the concrete context of the lifeworld, the latter will radically change not only in its specific content but also in its very categorial form.

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(4) I shall attempt to show how Sellars sees the manifest and the scientific image as crucial metaphilosophical concepts capable of throwing ample light on the historical evolution and contemporary scene in both analytic and continental philosophy in the face of the continuing Weberian disenchantment. Based on this analysis, I propose that the scientific image, in its role as a critical metaphilosophical tool, and suitably enriched by sociological supra-personal explanations (à la Marx, Weber), can be used for criticizing Sellars’ own conception of science (Chap. 11). (5) I shall provide the beginnings of an account about how—the hinted at but somewhat underdeveloped by Sellars—process-oriented (as opposed to a substance-property) ontology can function as a metaphysical model that overcomes and critically delimits Aristotelian and Kantian substance ‘manifest-image’ ontologies (Chaps. 6 and 9). Process metaphysics in this sense can be seen as a non-representationalist ontology from the point of view of which, at one stroke, we can understand ‘how things really are’ without succumbing to the metaphysical and epistemological impasses of a representational ‘substance-property’ ontology. In this connection, I also attempt to fill another important gap in Sellars’ process ontology by sketching a response to the objection that we cannot make full sense of how processual entities can have determinate identity and individuation conditions. Moreover, I consider the manner in which persons, conceived as loci of normative authority and responsibility, can be integrated in such a radically nominalistic world (Chap. 9). It is argued that persons can be so integrated in the sense that although a nominalistic process world does not admit persons in its ontology, persons do exist in such a world in the sense that, like money, they exist only to the extent to which certain organisms, through the ‘activation’ of recognitive we-attitudes of authority, responsibility and trust, bootstrap themselves into (normative) existence, the latter being thus always precarious and dependent on the sustenance and constant reproduction of those we-attitudes.5 In the context of this wider

 Of course, there is a crucial difference between the mode of normative existence of money and that of persons: money is ultimately a means for fulfilling the ends of persons, while persons are not further means for the satisfaction of something other than persons, but have ‘intrinsic value’. But the point of this resolutely normative rendering of the existence of persons in terms of the sustenance and reproduction of recognitive we-attitudes is precisely to show that even the intrinsic value of persons (their self-recognition as free and equal individuals) is not a metaphysical fact of the ‘nature’ of persons, but something that it must be treated as such in order to exist at all. And in this sense, persons as normatively instituted entities actually do resemble money and other institutions. 5

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investigation, I shall examine how free will can be incorporated—and indeed vindicated—within a scientifically disenchanted world (Chap. 10). (6) I shall develop a neo-Sellarsian framework, close to the spirit—if not the letter—of Sellars’ philosophy, for distinguishing between an emancipatory and a non-emancipatory dimension of science. This shows how Sellars can contribute to discussions, most often conducted by continental philosophers, about the moral and political dimension of science, or more specifically, about the precise sense in which science can be said (or cannot be said) to objectify important non-instrumental epistemic and moral values, central to our human flourishing. Here, among other things, I shall provide a framework that challenges deeply ingrained assumptions in the fields of ethics to the effect that the process of disenchanting physical and human nature through techno-scientific means, practices and procedures necessarily drains persons of their freedom and autonomy, by ‘objectifying’ them, thereby making them prone to viewing others—and, ultimately, even themselves—on the model of ‘human resources’, fit to be mastered and controlled, rather than persons which ought to be treated as ends in themselves. In this context, it will be argued that the best way to make sense of an eventual integration of a radical scientific naturalism with the non-instrumental character of the moral point of view is by envisaging a post-human community of reciprocally recognized persons that directly relate the world to their purposes by construing their intentions and actions in scientific terms. I will also briefly discuss the political implications of this vision of (post)-humanity-in-the-world6 (Chap. 12). Two central ideas and unifying threads connecting nearly all the Sellarsian themes discussed in this book are the following: (1) In opposition to a widespread tendency of contemporary philosophers to view Sellars’ own critique of the myth of the Given as incompatible with a radical scientific naturalism (and more congenial to a ‘liberal’,  For example, one important such implication is that while ‘disenchanting reason’, and the ‘promethean freedom’ it promises, does not by itself imply unconditional respect for persons, it transforms nature, individuals and society in such a way that the stakes of not respecting persons become explicit and existentially transparent to everyone. Correlatively, as this disenchanting process unfolds in time—with its increasing techno-scientific sophistication making the end of domination and the achieving of unconditional respect a live option for everyone ‘here and now’—the demand for equality in possession and distribution of socially significant goods would gradually lose its ideal and semi-abstract status and would be motivationally salient and concrete for everyone (which is not of course to say that the demand in question is guaranteed to be realized). 6

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non-scientific naturalism), I take seriously Sellars’ claim that the ‘normative turn’ (e.g. about meaning, thought, action, perception) must simultaneously be a radical naturalist—and even nominalist—turn, because to not do so requires accepting the Given in its most basic form, ‘the categorial Given’ (i.e. the view that the categorial structure of the world imposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on a melted wax). And this, in turn, entails accepting (an epistemically privileged access to) abstract entities that are recalcitrant to naturalistic treatment. (2) There is an important sense in which we must overcome ordinary anthropocentric manifest-image categories for conceiving ourselves-in-­ the-world. Yet, this overcoming cannot be achieved by recourse to some kind of mythically Given element in perception, intuition or thought, but through those very categories themselves reinterpreted as having epistemological, expressive, metalinguistic import, which, in conjunction with the explanatory resources of the scientific image, can enable us to understand the world and ourselves non-anthropocentrically without in the least compromising personhood. Thus, at the most general level, it is argued that through a scientifically informed metaphysics, constrained by the normative theoretical and practical collective ideals of the space of reasons, we can diachronically remove the subjective (sensible, phenomenological, conceptual) means that condition what we synchronically take to be an objective access to the world and ourselves and critically revise them so as to achieve a better understanding of—and practical comportment to—our environment.7 It is, of course, also true that we cannot understand the ‘really real’ unless we first understand the structure of the lifeworld into which we have our everyday being. But to understand the structure of the lifeworld is not to conceive it as categorially transparent in such a way as to determine or limit our access to the real in an absolute, non-revisable manner. It is to reinterpret its basic categories and semantic-epistemic functions in non-descriptive, normative terms and to understand that this normative rendering of the mind-world relation embodies regulative ideals that put pressure on the categorial autonomy of the structures of the lifeworld, in a way that ultimately leads to an (a-categorial and 7  Brassier makes a similar point when he says that “there are two dimensions of spatiotemporal structure: the one which we represent, and the one in which our representing unfolds. The goal of cognitive enquiry consists in incorporating ever more facts about the structure of representing into every represented fact. This would be the naturalization of the involuted spiral of absolute knowing” (Brassier, 2016).

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nominalistic) picture of the world and ourselves as patterns of absolute processes. In this process, paradoxically, we come to realize that a resolute non-­anthropocentric conception of the world and ourselves not only does not entail nihilistic conclusions, but, guided by the collective theoretical and practical regulative ideals of the space of reasons, is in fact necessary for the satisfaction of our most basic needs and interests in the long run. This book is an attempt to show that this is one of the deepest lessons of Sellars’ philosophical vision and a reason that Sellars’ legacy is of lasting importance and continuing relevance for twenty-first-century philosophy. The ‘big picture’ that emerges out of all this shows Sellars’ highly creative and deeply innovative conception of ourselves-in-the-world, which unfortunately is at best underappreciated and at worst completely non-­ existent as a philosophical position in the literature: Sellars, in effect, formulates the (essentially non-representational) semantics and ontology of a consistent modern materialism, in the form of a nominalistic process naturalism, and shows how space-of-reasons semantic-categorial-intentional-­ modal-moral vocabulary at bottom function as collectively instituted tools for making explicit, reproducing in a dynamic temporally extended way, and critically revising our conceptual responses to the world. This is ultimately a vision of a nominalistic process world within which some complex physical systems coordinate themselves by collectively producing (externalizing themselves as) linguistic ‘marks and noises’, gradually attempting to ‘seize the means of semantic production’ (make explicit, regulate, control, reproduce and critically change this patterned structure, purging it of its metaphysical-ideological dimension) in their striving to obtain ever-increasing levels of collective ‘resonance’ (skillful coping) in the natural and social environment so as to freely exercise their sensory and intellectual powers as joyful ends in themselves. At bottom, this book aspires not so much to be faithful to the letter of Sellars’ philosophy, by just providing interpretative suggestions and solutions to issues surrounding Sellars’ scholarship (although it does attempt to do this at times and in a suitably broad sense), but to follow the spirit of Sellarsian Weltanschauung, by offering Sellars-inspired critical philosophical tools for handling contemporary problems both in analytic and continental philosophy, in a broad range of philosophical issues. The critique of Husserl’s, Merleau-Ponty’s and Heidegger’s scientific instrumentalism (Chaps. 3 and 4), the non-representationalist version of scientific realism based on evolutionary theory (Chap. 5), the justification and development of a corresponding non-representationalist process ontology

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(Chaps. 6, 7 and 9), the connection of normativity to novelty and positive freedom (Chap. 7), the specific characterization of the Sellarsian stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and scientific images (Chap. 8), the proposed reconciliation of free will and science (Chap. 10), the distinction between emancipatory and non-emancipatory science (Chaps. 11 and 12) and the ethico-political implications of the Sellarsian commitments to naturalism and normativism (Chap. 12) are nowhere to be found in Sellars’ texts, and some of these themes might even lie beyond his explicit philosophical interest. Moreover, the distinction between emancipatory and non-­ emancipatory science and the development of a non-representationalist process ontology, though proposed in the spirit of friendly amendment, are based on direct criticism of Sellars’ positions (and omissions) in these matters. Hence, perhaps this book should have been called ‘Normativity, Lifeworld and Science in a Post-Sellarsian Synoptic Vision’. The original title, however, reflects the fact that while my thoughts and suggestions at times may go beyond what Sellars took himself to have been saying, they were directly inspired by the spirit and general orientation of his philosophy. Be that as it may, I hope that this book will be a timely and relevant contribution not only to Sellars’ studies but also to the critical assessment and wider application of the ideas concerning scientific naturalism and rational normativity that Sellars investigated in innovative and currently much-discussed ways. Some chapters of this volume (Chaps. 6, 8, 11 and 12) include material from previously published articles which were written for different occasions and in the context of a different overall argument. In preparing this volume I have transformed and updated the originals, introducing new sections, themes, positions and arguments, with the view to strengthening the overall argument of the book. I also return many times in certain themes and passages from Sellars, but I would like to think that the price paid by such repetition brings with it a certain gain. The repeated passages or arguments throughout the book have been so far relatively neglected in the literature or else developed in a very different way from the one proposed here. Thus, repetition can serve, in the different thematic contexts in which it is found, as a form of emphasis and reframing. There are many topics relevant to Sellarsian philosophy that are not discussed in detail in the book, such as Sellars’ views on meaning, justification, truth or practical reasoning. One reason for this is that there are excellent monographs, papers and edited volumes in which many aspects of these Sellarsian themes are thoroughly discussed (Lance & O’Leary-­Hawthorne,

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1997; deVries, 2005; O’Shea, 2007; Shapiro, 2013, 2020; Koons, 2019). Moreover, I would like to think that the aspects of Sellars’ philosophy that are here taken to be of central importance (manifest-­scientific image, myth of the categorial Given, nominalistic naturalism, process ontology, normativity of persons) do indirectly provide for some of the other aspect of his philosophy, not discussed here (e.g. his non-relational theory of meaning or his anti-foundationalism in epistemology).

References Brandom, R. (2009). Reason, Expression and the Philosophical Enterprise. In R. Brandom (Ed.), Reason in Philosophy (pp. 111–129). Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press. Brassier, R. (2016). Transcendental Logic and True Representings. Glass Bead. http://www.glass-bead.org/article/transcendental-logic-and-true-representi ngs/?lang=enview deVries, W. (2005). Wilfrid Sellars. Acumen Publishing. Jonas, H. (2001). The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. Northwestern University Press. Koons, J. R. (2019). The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars. Routledge. Koyré, A. (1957). From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Johns Hopkins Press. Lance, M., & O’Leary-Hawthorne, J. (1997). The Grammar of Meaning: Normativity and Semantic Discourse. Cambridge University Press. O’Shea, J. (2007). Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn. Polity Press. Shapiro, L. (2013). Intentional Relations and the Sideways-on View: On McDowell’s Critique of Sellars. European Journal of Philosophy, 21(2), 300–319. Shapiro, L. (2020). Sellars, Truth Pluralism, and Truth Relativism. In S. Brandt & A.  Breunig (Eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy (pp. 174–206). Routledge. Weber, M. (1919). Politics as a Vocation. http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Politics-as-a-Vocation.pdf

CHAPTER 2

Prelude: Sellars’ Project and Its Essential Tension

1   The Rejection of the Myth of the Given As is well known, Sellars is mostly famous for his rejection of the ‘myth of the Given’ in all its forms, epistemic, semantic and categorial. The concept of the Given is supposed to give content to our conviction that our only guarantee of a non-circular, solid (infinite regress stopper) and objective (non-arbitrary) access and knowledge about reality is the existence of a point of immediate contact between subject and object that enables the former to have immediate (non-inferential) knowledge of the latter. This immediate epistemic connection between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge makes the cognitive contact between them absolutely immediate, transparent, ‘diaphanous’, independent of any other knowledge and is precisely what constitutes Given knowledge, which, by serving as a foundation on which other bits of knowledge could be justified, guarantees the very possibility of knowledge. (If we substitute ‘meaning’ for ‘knowledge’ and ‘semantic’ for ‘epistemic’ in the last sentence above, we arrive at a notion of ‘Given meanings’, i.e. of the semantic Given.) More precisely, a certain (usually mental) state functions as a epistemic Given if (1) it is epistemically independent, that is, has an epistemic content independently of any (formal or material) inferential relations to which it may stand in with other such contents and (2) it is epistemically efficacious, that is, capable of ‘transmitting’ its epistemic status to other states or contents, thereby accounting for the possibility of objective knowledge (deVries & © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_2

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Triplett 2000: xxv-xxvi). (Again, if we substitute ‘semantic’ for ‘epistemic’—and ‘purport’ for ‘knowledge’—in the above definition, we arrive at a definition of the semantic Given.) It is important here to note that Sellars, by characterizing the Given as a myth, does not object to the notion of immediate, non-inferential knowledge (i.e. knowledge that is not inferred by other knowledge). What he objects to is the idea that the immediate, non-inferential knowledge in question is presuppositionless, that is, that it is ‘there’ (in the world or in the mind) independently of its position (functional role) within a historically evolved categorial framework transmitted through language from generation to generation. In his later work (1981), Sellars suggests that the most general form of the myth of the Given is that of the categorial Given, namely, the view that “if a person is directly aware of an item which [in fact] has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C” (Sellars 1981: I §44). The categorial Given is intimately related to the epistemic or semantic Given: it is what explains why and how certain mental states can be semantically or epistemically independent and efficacious, that is, it provides the ‘ontological’ foundation for the semantically or epistemically ‘Givenist’ functions of those states. The Given can play its foundational role (i.e. has epistemic and/or semantic independence and efficacy) just because the categorial structure of reality is imposed on—or ‘discloses’ itself to—the subject who ‘receives’ it as it really is in perception, thought, volition, intention and so on. One falls prey to this version of the myth if one takes it that there is a direct classificatory awareness of categories such as ‘sorts’, ‘resemblances’, ‘facts’, ‘universals’ or even ‘particulars’, independently of our acquisition of a logical and categorial framework—that is, of a whole language (Sellars 1997: §29-31). The categorial structure of the world or of the mind cannot be somehow directly ‘read off’ or intuited on the basis of the basic descriptive and explanatory concepts of the categorial framework we actually employ in our everyday language.1 Those concepts, which constitute what Sellars terms the ‘manifest image’ of 1  A note here is in order for clarifying the use I will make throughout this book of the terms ‘diaphanous’ and ‘transparent’ as a characterization of the immediacy of contact between mind and world. An experiential or in general mental state is ‘diaphanous’ or ‘transparent’ if by just undergoing such an experience, its mode of being is thereby given in propria persona (as it really is), or, in other words, if by just having an experience one is thereby aware of its categorial status. I (and, for that matter, Sellars) do not deny that an experiential or mental state can be directly present to ‘consciousness’, in an unmediated manner. The sense of ‘diaphanous’ or ‘transparent’ access to these states that is in dispute is the further view that

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humanity-in-the-world, although capable of yielding ‘direct knowledge’ of the world and our place in it in the context of categorial system of which they are part, are nonetheless not unchangeable essences which put us in direct conceptual contact with the essential categorial structure of the world or the mind. As Sellars puts it: “To reject the myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world - if it has a categorial structure - imposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on a melted wax” (emphasis original) (Sellars 1981: I: §45). The bottom line of the critique of the semantic, epistemic and categorial Given is that for something to function in semantically or epistemically significant ways is for it to be a ‘node’ (play a functional role) within what Sellars calls the ‘logical space of reasons’ or the ‘language game’ of ‘giving and asking for reasons’. The ‘space of reasons’ is a socially articulated logical space in which persons have their being. To be a denizen of the space of reasons is to be sensitive to certain collective pattern-governed behavioral habits regarding ‘language-entry’ transitions (perception), intra-linguistic transitions (inference) and ‘language-exit’ transitions (action), in a way that places them in a network of reciprocally recognized rights and duties (‘cans’ and ‘oughts’) pertaining to meaning, knowledge and action (Sellars 1954). And the important point regarding the categorial status of claims placed within the space of reasons is that the rationality of the latter—and thus, derivatively, of the categorial status in question—does not depend on it having any synchronic foundations, but in its diachronic self-correcting character, namely, the fact that, within it, any claim can be put into jeopardy, though not all at once.

2   The Relation Between Mind and World Is Not Representational Now, an important consequence of the rejection of the myth of the Given on Sellars’ part (although highly contested by many of his admirers including McDowell and Brandom) is that all our central semantic concepts of meaning, reference and truth that at first glance seem to directly connect language or thought to the external world are not in the business of representing the world but are actually metalinguistic expressive devices that monitor our epistemic and semantic inferences within the space of reasons this kind of direct, unmediated awareness amounts to a direct awareness of the categorial status of that experiential, mental state, external world fact and so on.

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(as opposed to denoting a relation between conceptually shaped space of reasons contents and non-conceptually worldly events). According to this non-relational view, semantic terms and descriptions provide functional classifications of linguistic tokens. Sellars’ analysis of meaning statements such as ‘Rot’, in German, means red, or ‘Brother’, means male sibling, treats them as statements that convey the information that the word mentioned on the left-hand side has a relevantly similar usage to the phrase on the right-hand side. These meaning statements do not explicitly say that the two expressions they each contain have the same usage. Rather, each sentence presupposes that the person it is directed at already understands the background language and uses the expression on the right-hand side as an illustrating sortal to form an indexical predicate (forming a predicate by giving an example bearing the relevant property), which is then applied to the tokens picked out by the expression on the left-hand side of the sentence (deVries 2005, 2021). For Sellars, this resolute non-relational, non-representational function of meaning, truth and reference, which is internally connected to the critique of the Given, has the important consequence that worldly objects and processes, to the extent to which they are non-conceptually and non-­ normatively articulated, cannot be conceived as directly justifying our beliefs about them, as their only direct relation to our belief is in causally evoking or non-epistemically shaping them and not in justifying them. The very intentionality, conceptual directedness of language and thought (their capacity to point to something outside themselves, the world) can be understood in terms of inferential relations between token linguistic expressions, as opposed to representational or intentional relations between linguistic or mental expressions and extra-linguistic, non-­ conceptually structured reality. Non-conceptual reality poses only causal, evolutionary or, in general, non-epistemic constraints upon our beliefs, thought and actions, not epistemic or logical ones. Here Sellars (and his followers, Rorty and Brandom) rejects a widely held view about the way in which the content of our empirical beliefs and thoughts is fixed. According to this, orthodox view of content determination, the content of an empirical belief is given by its truth conditions. One understands the content of the empirical proposition ‘the streets are wet’ if one knows what it is for the streets to be wet, that is, under what conditions the streets are actually wet. In this particular case, the knowledge in question stems from perceptual experience as it seems to be precisely through our sensory modalities that we understand the kinds of

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things referred to by our empirical beliefs and the conditions under which they are actualized in the world. From this point of view, meaning is understood in terms of propositional contents which function as such by being internal representative signs of objective states of affairs in the external world, independently of their inferential connections to other contents within the space of reasons. Further, in the context of this representational orthodoxy in contemporary analytic philosophy of language, truth is understood in terms of ‘representational accuracy’ while its inferential transition to other contents is effected by formal rules of inference. This means that our communal normative practices of giving and asking for reasons do not play any essential explanatory role in accounting for meaning, reference and truth, but whatever role they are to play must be strictly derived from the truth-conditional relations of linguistic contents as the latter are expressed in formal logic. Yet, from this point of view, it is difficult to explain the epistemic and semantic powers of the ‘material’ non-­ logical content of empirical thought, except by appeal either to a self-justifying Given element in experience or to relations of correspondence between the empirical content in question and its truth conditions which are epistemically and semantically invisible (‘external’) to the subject (we can call this ‘the thermometer view of content’2). And both these solutions seem unsatisfactory (Rorty 1979; Brandom 1994). It must be mentioned here that Sellars’ objections to representational or ‘relational’ theories of meaning, truth and reference are not immediately effective against more sophisticated relational theories of meaning and truth, such as McDowell’s (1987, 1998, 2000), which construe both parts of the word-world relation as belonging within the space of reasons. Yet, Sellars would surely not accept even this more refined version of representational theories of meaning and truth, although they avoid the classic objections against more mainstream such theories in contemporary philosophy of language. Very roughly, this is because relational theories of McDowell’s stripe which place the truth or meaning relation within the space of reasons (thereby conceiving the very externality and independence of the world in conceptual, normative, space of reasons 2  The ‘thermometer model’ compares non-inferential knowledge with a good thermometer. The temperature readings of a good thermometer reliably indicate the actual temperature. In a similar manner non-inferential knowledge is a matter of a belief reliably covarying with the environment irrespectively of whether the subject understands its content or has reasons for taking it as true. This ‘externalist’ view first came under attack in Sellars’ EPM (1956), as part of a general attack on the whole framework of Givenness.

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terms) presuppose that language is always already categorially fit to represent the structure of the world and cannot independently explain the construction of those very categories themselves through language. Sellars thinks that there must be some such explanation of the very categorial space connecting language and world, without appeal to space of reasons concepts, such as those of linguistic or mental ‘content’, or else we succumb to a version of the categorial Given (according to which there is a ‘pre-established harmony’ between our categories and the world). As we shall see later (Chaps. 6 and 9), Sellars’ notorious concept of an a-­categorial, non-­normative mode of correspondence between mind, language and world, namely, picturing, will be used for this purpose.

3  Science and Normativity: An Internal Tension in Sellars’ Philosophy? Another major pillar of Sellars’ philosophical system, besides the attack on the myth of the Given, is the ontological primacy he accords to the scientific image, in a radical sense which eventually ontologically commits us to a completely disenchanted, non-normatively described world, bereft of logical or conceptual structure, in which there is no (ontological) place for natural purposes, intentions, ethical or aesthetic facts. Yet, this radical naturalism seems to be in tension with Sellars’ rejection of the Given: an important consequence of the rejection of the Given is that the meaning, justification and truth of our empirical beliefs are always determined from within the (conceptually, normatively structured) space of reasons, while scientific naturalism of the Sellarsian stripe commits us ontologically to a picture of a radically disenchanted, non-conceptually structured world, bereft of any norms and situated firmly outside the space of reasons. Indeed, as is well known, this seeming tension between the above equally fundamental Sellarsian philosophical commitments have led many philosophers influenced by Sellars to a division between ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ Sellarsians. Left-wing Sellarsians, such as Rorty (1979), McDowell (1994) and Brandom (1994), emphasize the Kantian and Hegelian aspects of the Sellarsian view about the necessity of placing meaning, justification, knowledge and truth firmly within the space of reasons and consider Sellars’ naturalistic tendencies as an expression of an unfortunate and indefensible scientism. By contrast, right-wing Sellarsians, such as Churchland (1981, 1988), Dennett (1987), Millikan (1984,

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2005) and Rosenberg (1974, 1980, 2002), endorse Sellars’ scientific realism and embark on a project about how to reconcile our self-­understanding as persons that perceive, think and act in the world with what science tells us about the latter, by explanatorily reducing the normativity of persons to non-normative physical, neurophysiological and evolutionarily developed structures posited by the scientific image.3 What is important in this dispute or division between left- and right-­ wing Sellarsians, if they are to be judged from a standpoint that remains faithful to the Sellars’ overall philosophical vision, is that they give disproportional emphasis to only one of the two fundamental pillars of Sellars’ philosophy, thereby ending up seriously distorting the spirit of Sellarsian philosophy as a whole. Along with a new generation of philosophers (such as Brassier, Sachs, Stovall, Seiberth), I believe that there is no tension or inconsistency in Sellars’ commitments to the ontological primacy of science and to the irreducibility of the normative. And I would be willing to go so far as to say that there is also no tension between Sellars’ particularly radical vision of scientific naturalism, namely, process nominalism, and the reality of the normative. One of the major aims of this book is to overcome the supposed divide between ‘left normativism’ and ‘right scientism’ and to show that the commitments to the autonomy of the normative and to the ontological primacy of science are not only compatible but also mutually presupposing and reinforcing. For example, as we shall see in Chaps. 3–5, the rejection of the myth of the Given far from being in tension with scientific realism or scientific naturalism (as the left-wing Sellarsians argue), when correctly understood (namely, as a critique of a supposed ability to discern the categorial structure of world and mind 3  Note that in the case of the division between left-wing and right-wing Hegelians, it was the left-wingers that took science to be the key for knowledge and human emancipation. By contrast, the post-1960s cultural left has been increasingly skeptical of science’s ability to emancipate us through the provision of a more accurate knowledge of the physical and social world and instead highlights the dependence of the orientation and of the very content of scientific research to ‘external’ political and economic factors. While it is undeniable that twentieth-century science did not fulfill the promises of universal emancipation and became even more entangled with political and economic power relations, it is unfortunate that whatever emancipatory potential science still has to offer is not explored by the left but has been handed over to the right. There is no reason why this unfortunate political situation should be reproduced in theory. A corrective here can be provided by Sellars himself whose overall position, as we shall see in this book, is such as to transcend the divisions between his left- and right-wing followers, while preserving some of their more important and radical elements.

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independently of self-correcting empirical inquiry), actually goes hand in hand with a commitment to scientific naturalism. And in Chaps. 6 and 9, I shall further argue that a resolute rejection of the myth of the Given not only is consistent with scientific naturalism, but, when all its consequences are properly drawn (one of them being the phenomenality, in the Kantian sense, of the manifest-image categorial framework and of its ‘general skeletal entities’ such as properties and relations, if they are interpreted ontologically), actually opens up the space for a plausible defense of a particularly radical version of scientific naturalism, namely, Sellarsian process nominalism.4 It was Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) who brought back Sellars into prominence in analytic philosophy of the 1980s and 1990s when a turn to rationalist metaphysics and ultimately away from central Sellarsian concerns was beginning to take place. This was admittedly a good thing, as it led at least two extremely talented analytic philosophers, McDowell and Brandom, to develop their highly original views through a direct and sustained engagement with Sellars’ work. This enabled the drawing of another more Kantian and even Hegelian path in analytic philosophy, in stark contrast to the prevailing ‘Leibnizian’ rationalist metaphysics of contemporary analytic philosophy. But Rorty’s exclusive distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ Sellarsianism, and the endorsement of this dichotomy by McDowell and Brandom, who opted for the left-­ wing dimension of Sellars’ thinking, skewed the interpretation of Sellars’ work and obfuscated his overall philosophical relevance, achievement and significance for contemporary philosophy. One of the major aims of this book is to undo this situation by providing an interpretation and extension (at times, based on criticism in spirit of friendly amendment) of Sellars’ philosophy that restores the critical, systematic and metaphysically ambitious character of his work and shows how and why it is pertinent and relevant to contemporary philosophical controversies not only in analytic philosophy, but also in contemporary phenomenology and continental philosophy.

4  As we shall see in Chap. 9, this Sellarsian view has the radical consequence that, contra McDowell and Brandom, the world, conceived as nothing other than the world of true thinkables, the set of conceptual contents, such that, if we think them, we think truly, though genuinely intersubjectively available, is ‘only’ phenomenal in the Kantian sense: it exists only as represented, not as it is in itself.

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References Brandom, R. (1994). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Harvard University Press. Churchland, P. (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78, 67–90. Churchland, P. (1988). Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. MIT Press. Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT Press. deVries, W. (2005). Wilfrid Sellars. Acumen Publishing. deVries, W. (2021). Wilfrid Sellars, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In E. Zalta (Ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/sellars/ deVries, W., & Triplett, T. (2000). Knowledge, Mind and the Given. Hackett. McDowell, J. (1987). De Re Senses. Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 325–363. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (1998). Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant and Intentionality. Journal of Philosophy, 95, 431–491. Millikan, R.  G. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. MIT Press. Millikan, R. G. (2005). The Father, the Son and the Daughter: Sellars, Brandom and Millikan. Pragmatics and Cognition, 13(1), 59–71. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press. Rosenberg, J. (1974). Linguistic Representation. D. Reidel Publishing Company. Rosenberg, J. (1980). One World and Our Knowledge of It. D.  Reidel Publishing Company. Rosenberg, J. (2002). Thinking About Knowing. Oxford University Press. Sellars, W. (1954). Some Reflections on Language Games. Philosophy of Science, 21(3), 204–228. Sellars, W. (1981). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sellars, W. ([1956] 1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press.

PART I

Sellars and Phenomenology: Normativity, Lifeworld and Science

CHAPTER 3

Husserl’s Lifeworld and the Scientific Image

1   Introduction I shall begin this section about Sellars’ contribution and relevance to contemporary philosophy by highlighting its intimate relations with issues and concerns coming directly from the phenomenological tradition. Sellars was not only well versed in continental philosophy, but had a very substantial knowledge of Husserlian phenomenology through Martin Farber, a prominent American phenomenologist, with whom Sellars studied Kant and Husserl. Indeed, Sellars himself, in his autobiographical reflections, says that “[Farber’s] combination of utter respect for the structure of Husserl’s thought with the equally firm conviction that this structure could be given a naturalistic interpretation was undoubtedly a key influence on my own subsequent philosophical strategy” (Sellars, 1971, 280). As we shall see in this chapter, Sellars’ attack on the myth of the Given and his conception of the dialectic between the manifest and scientific images can be used as critical tools for properly understanding the insights and limitations of Husserl’s crucial phenomenological notion of the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt). These Sellarsian concepts provide the key for understanding how we can reconcile his seemingly contradictory beliefs both in utterly respecting phenomenology and in wanting to give it a radically naturalistic turn. To this end, I shall first suggest that Husserl’s ‘lifeworld’ amounts to a very detailed and refined description of what Sellars calls the manifest © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_3

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image of man-in-the-world, which however absolutizes the latter’s categorial structure and mislocates the role of science within it. Further, it will be argued that a resolutely dialectical understanding of the relation between lifeworld and science could succeed in escaping the above kinds of problems, albeit only at the cost of blurring the boundaries between descriptive and revisionary phenomenology.

2   Husserl’s ‘Lifeworld’ as a Version of Sellars’ Manifest Image In his last major work, the Crisis of European Sciences (CR [1936] 1970), Husserl introduces the concept of the ‘lifeworld’ and takes it to be the key for a transcendentally grounded phenomenological philosophy.1 The lifeworld is the world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete practical world-life. It is the “actually intuited, actually experienced and experiencable world, in which our whole practical life takes place” (CR 50–51). The lifeworld is, above all, the common-sense ‘external’ world of middle-size perceptible objects which we put to use for various practical purposes, the world of living-animate beings, as well as the social and cultural world of values and institutions as the latter are straightforwardly experienced in everyday life. This ‘everyday surrounding world of life’ is the ground and ‘horizon’ of all human experience, activities and practices, including natural science. To experience the world in horizonal terms, among other things, means that the world is always already there as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, both theoretical and extra-theoretical. Moreover, in this connection, Husserl makes the interesting suggestion that the world is directly experienced in horizonal terms, as both one and non-objectifiable. As he puts it “the world … does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it” (CR 143). Crucially, our ‘lifeworld’ experience (and hence the lifeworld itself) is uncontaminated by theoretical-explanatory considerations characteristic of natural science. For example, we experience the earth—or, in general, our observational frame of reference—as immovable, even after the Copernican-Galilean revolution in physics. The postulated objects and processes of contemporary mathematized natural science, first introduced 1  It must be noted that major themes of Husserl’s last work, especially as regards the essential structure of the ‘lifeworld’, have been prefigured as early as 1913 in his Ideas II.

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by Galilean mathematical physics, are essentially abstractions from the concrete qualitative practice-laden structures of the lifeworld; they should not be understood as pointing to a ‘deeper reality’ which supposedly explains ‘lifeworldly’ phenomena, but are essentially conceptual instruments, which idealize certain coarse-grained perceptible features of the lifeworld for reasons of practical utility (for predicting the future course of lifeworld phenomena).2 Ultimately, for Husserl, the postulated objects and properties of mathematical physics have a ‘derived reality’: they can be about the world only if they refer back to concrete lifeworldly structures themselves. And in this sense, they are ontologically and semantically grounded in the lifeworld. The real world is the lifeworld, the world qua surrounding world of human life, not the ‘natural world’ of the natural sciences—which can ‘explain’ lifeworld phenomena only by essentially abstracting from the ‘pre-thematically’ given concrete qualitative reality of the lifeworld. 2.1   The Categorial Structure of the Husserlian Lifeworld In order to better understand this privileged status of the lifeworld with respect to science we must first briefly examine the basic features and structure of the former. According to Husserl, an essential feature of the lifeworld, which is accounted for by its theory-free nature, is that it remains remarkably stable in its essential structure and its ‘concrete causal style’ through the course of history (by contrast, the world of scientific theorizing changes and develops). Importantly, the lifeworld is holistically structured and systematically so. That is to say, each of the basic categories in terms of which the world of everyday experience can be pre-thematically understood and articulated, such as (middle-size) object, person, space, time, cause, mind, body, (inner and outer) perception, belief, desire, action and so on, presuppose all the others in different, though systematic, ways. Among the above

2  Here, it must be noted that for Husserl the essential feature of idealization is not simplification but exactness. The process of idealizing nature means only setting the infinite goal of its exact determination, an exact determination that no perception, in essence, can ever achieve (Trizio, 2021, 136). As we shall see later, Husserl’s scientific instrumentalism in that sense (about the ontological status of the notion of ‘exactness’) may not be without merit. What we find objectionable in Husserl’s account is his instrumentalism about the non-­ intuitable status of the entities and properties of scientific explanations. At any rate, this shows that his scientific instrumentalism is too sophisticated to be dismissed in its entirety.

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categories, those of (ordinary, middle-size, perceptible) objects and persons stand out as the most important (i.e. ‘transcendentally correlated’) ones. Persons are pre-thematically understood as essentially unified ‘things’ (substances), whose attributes are bodily and mental capacities and abilities. Ιn this way persons are distinguished both by inanimate objects and by other sentient animals. Those two dimensions of being a person (body and ‘mind’) are combined together in a unity, in the sense that mental capacities are essentially expressed in bodily capacities and abilities. This is reflected in the way we experience our body, namely, not just as a physical entity, subject to the laws of nature (körper), but as a locus of my ‘horizonal’ incorporation in space—as a center of spatial organization from which I perceive, will and act (leib) and over which I (partially) ‘hold sway’. Moreover, relatedly, we experience our affections by worldly things and our actions upon them as involving not mechanical causality but as caught up in a ‘web of motivations’. Our actions in the lifeworld are motivated (not caused) by our intentions, volitions or desires, and, on their part, lifeworldly objects do not affect us as external causes might do but motivate us in a wide range of different but characteristic and familiar ways (e.g. the glass of beer over there makes me reach out my arm to grasp it). Further, since persons not only perceive the world but act on it, they are constantly subject to the corresponding motivations and, for Husserl, this means that, in the context of the lifeworld, persons directly and pre-­ thematically (i.e. pre-theoretically) experience the world as containing values, which are themselves intimately connected with our goals or purposes. We directly experience, for example, certain things (tools, buildings, plants, animals) as dangerous, pleasant, sweet, bitter, their usefulness as equipment and so on. Space and time are not experienced in neutral, abstract metrical-geometrical terms, but as in terms of ‘near/far’, ‘up/ down’, ‘confining/comfortable’, ‘mine/alien’ (space), ‘long/short’ and ‘boring/interesting’ (time). We also directly experience other persons as having both physical and mental characteristics, for example, as sexually attractive, cruel, expressive and so on. Interestingly, webs of motivation do not pertain only to relations between individual people (through an ‘I-you’ synthesis), but also to communities of persons as such (through a more complicated ‘we’-synthesis, collective intentionality). In this way they constitute social facts which make social institutions (as well as laws, morals, customs) possible and hold them together. But what about the other basic category of the lifeworld, that of a ‘lifeworldly’ object? According to Husserl, within the context of the lifeworld,

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(1) objects are given as unities (substances) through change and have determinate proper and common sensible properties, indissolubly bound up and experienced as belonging to those objects themselves (i.e. not as images or sense data), (2) they are in constant causal interaction with other such objects, (3) they are individuated by their causal powers (their power to affect other objects and be affected by them) and (4) they have, so to speak, their ‘habits’, in the sense that they behave similarly under typically similar circumstances. And even if those ‘habits’ break down and something strikingly new happens, as it is occasionally the case, we still assume that the (everyday) world exhibits a ‘universal causal style’ which makes possible “hypotheses, predictions about the unknown of its present, past and future” (CR 31; Moran, 2012, 91–92). Moreover, the world of everyday life admits a distinction between reality and appearance, albeit in a sense that is applicable both to primary and secondary qualities. Things and their sensible properties, as well as the ultimate causes that explain their manifest behavior, may appear other than they really are, but we are always in a position in principle to determine their real nature without introducing any substantial changes in the basic ‘lifeworldly’ categorial concepts and distinctions.3 This is an expression of the following fundamental features of the lifeworld: (1) there is a distinction in all its spheres and dimensions between what is normal and what is abnormal in the behavior of its ‘objects’ (including persons). (2) Within the context of the lifeworld, abnormal behavior of any kind is, as it were, passed over without comment, in the sense that it is not held to yield data that is relevant to the general characteristic features of the lifeworld (i.e. not such as to give rise to the need to change our global understanding of its descriptive and explanatory dimension). That is to say, the lifeworld can subject itself to local but not to global (descriptive and explanatory) revision; judgments as to individual matters of fact can be overturned in the course of time, but the general beliefs/principles which stand fast at the heart of the framework simply cannot. This is because, in the context of the lifeworld, behavioral patterns (of objects or persons alike) which fall outside the realm of what is normal are taken as secondary to or as deformations of that optimal behavioral patterns which alone count as real. For example, the color of an object seen in optimal conditions (in sunlight, on a clear day, without the influence of other 3  This means, for example, that, contra Galilean mathematized natural science, we need not view the real world as bereft of secondary qualities.

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bodies which might affect the color appearance), by normal persons (both mentally and bodily), counts as the color in-itself. This applies to both primary and secondary qualities. Thus, the ontology of the lifeworld is that of the ‘direct realist’: in normal experience we have access to the things (and their properties) themselves (see also Smith, 1995). 2.2   Husserl’s Lifeworld and Sellars’ Manifest Image Now, one striking thing to note in Husserl’s description of the lifeworld is that its structure nearly exactly fits the Sellarsian manifest image of man-in-the-world. This becomes evident if we recall what the manifest image comes down to for Sellars: it is “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world” (Sellars, 1963a, 6). The basic conceptual category of the manifest-image framework—which cannot be further explanatorily reduced within this image—is that of a person, considered as the locus of a set of normatively individuated capacities and abilities. Persons are human beings conceived as single logical and metaphysical subjects that have the capacity to act at will and on the basis of reasons within a world composed of perceptible middle-sized objects (and lower forms of life such as plants and sentient animals), whose behavior is, by and large (but not always), predictable and lawlike. An important feature of the manifest image is that its explanatory methods are essentially correlational, in the sense that explanation in the latter (be it about the behavior of persons, animals or physical objects) is a matter of inductively correlating certain perceptible and introspective (essentially observable) phenomena with other such observable phenomena. This clearly distinguishes the manifest image from the scientific image, where explanation is essentially postulational: the scientific image explains by postulating the existence of certain unobservable entities and properties, which are non-­ normative in nature and constitute the underlying reality to which our common-sense conception of the world and ourselves is the surface ‘appearance’ (Sellars, 1963a). Most of Husserl’s categorial distinctions as well as the essential features of each lifeworld category are also to be found in the Sellarsian manifest image, as the latter is described, for example, in Sellars’ well-known article “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1963a)—with the welcome addition to the Sellarsian manifest-image framework of Husserl’s notions of the ‘horizonal’ structure of the (manifest-image) world and of

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the ‘web of motivations’ as explanatorily basic in accounting for specifically human experience. Indeed, I take it that from Sellars’ point of view, Husserl’s conception of the lifeworld would be an extremely sophisticated ‘transcendental description’ of the ‘pure form’ of the manifest image. And in what follows, I will argue that the Husserlian lifeworld, by depicting the manifest image as ultimately real and the scientific image as of derivative status, is essentially an absolutization of the manifest image.

3  Lifeworld and the Given But before embarking on this task, let me note that there are certain interpretations of Husserl’s conception of the lifeworld according to which the structure of the latter is ontologically and epistemologically grounded on a transcendental consciousness very similar to that introduced by Husserl in his Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations (see e.g. Philipse, 1995; Smith, 1995). I have shown elsewhere (Christias, 2018a) that, in such a case, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology would fall prey to the Sellarsian myth of the Given—where the Given element would be the ‘givenness’ (i.e. the presuppositionless status) of the correlation between the world and transcendental consciousness. There are certainly such ‘transcendental idealist’—and even ‘transcendental solipsist’—stands in Husserl’s thinking that persisted until the end of his career. However, the interpretation in question is not universally accepted (see, e.g. Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Moran, 2012; Zahavi, 2003).4 For instance, the concept of the lifeworld can be understood as itself a transcendental concept which delineates the transcendental conditions which make life possible as common life within a shared world. In this way, the lifeworld, far from being independently grounded in ‘transcendental consciousness’ or the transcendental ‘subject-­ object’ correlation, would actually be what those contentious terms attempt to express. And while in this way the concept of the lifeworld would retain its ‘transcendentally’ secured self-enclosed and ‘self-­sufficient’ status, this would not be the consequence of abstaining from all ontological world-involving factual commitments (including the belief in the very 4  Merleau-Ponty, Moran and Zahavi emphasize, for example, the essentially intersubjective, ‘communal’ character, and holistic structure, of transcendental subjectivity in later Husserl. Moreover, according to Zahavi, the later Husserl comes close to the view that the constitution-­manifestation of the world (as a public field of experience), the unfolding of self and the establishing of intersubjectivity are all parts in an interrelated and simultaneous process.

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existence of the world), but of bracketing specifically scientific commitments involving non-intuitable and idealized theoretical entities. In any case, I take it that the conception of the Husserlian lifeworld sketched out in Sect. 2, where the latter is understood as the structure which expresses the transcendental conditions of the manifestation of persons-in-the(public, common and external)-world, can stand on its own feet independently of any spurious—that is, completely presuppositionless, non-world-involving—transcendental idealist/solipsist baggage. Hence, the following question becomes important: Does this late-­Husserlian conception of the lifeworld, purged of its transcendentally idealist/solipsist connotations, manage to avoid the myth of the Given? It seems to me that this ‘deflationary’ understanding of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of the lifeworld has the merit of enabling the latter to escape the myth of the Given, at least in its epistemic and semantic forms. This is because nothing in the concept of lifeworld described above commits phenomenology to the claim that the structure of the lifeworld is epistemically or semantically presuppositionless. Semantic and epistemic consciousness of the ‘essential’ structures of the lifeworld amounts to an awareness of a systematically holistically structured network, namely, of a network of concepts and practices caught up in relations of mutual dependence. In this sense, the ‘pre-thematic’ awareness of the structures of the lifeworld amounts to an awareness of the holistically structured categorial framework of natural language (the Sellarsian ‘manifest image’) and need not logically antecede it. Again, precisely for this reason, lifeworld phenomenology (of this deflationary stripe) is not vulnerable to the version of the categorial Given that plagued Husserl’s previous versions of transcendental phenomenology (e.g. the transcendental correlation between noesis and noema). In that case, the problem was that the noesis-noema correlation was supposed to be a transparent structure of consciousness, which the mind, transcendentally considered as the modalities of correlation, imposes upon the sustained attention of the practicing phenomenologist as ‘a seal imposes itself on melted wax’ (see Christias, 2018a; Sachs, 2014). This kind of self-reflexive transparent awareness of the noesis-­ noema correlation is ‘there’ independently of any awareness of a holistically structured categorial framework in terms of which we understand our everyday dealings with others within a common world (such as the manifest-­image framework). By contrast, this is not so in the case of our immediate ‘intuitive’ awareness of the lifeworld (at least under a ‘deflationary’ understanding of the role of ‘transcendental consciousness’ in

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‘constituting’ the lifeworld). And this means that the intuitive awareness of the lifeworld need not and should not be understood as completely presuppositionless. However, I submit that even this deflationary—and, to my mind, far more plausible—understanding of the lifeworld5 does involve a commitment to an objectionable form of the Given, namely, a version of the categorial Given. This is because, even in this more ‘sober’ interpretation of the lifeworld, the basic categorial structures of the latter are understood as unchangeable ‘intuited essences’, that is, as basic categories that govern all lifeworldly descriptions and explanations which have an unchallengeable authenticity: they cannot be subject to revision on the basis of scientific or philosophical postulational/theoretical explanations of the world and ourselves. But this view, however free of transcendental idealist connotations, is a version of the Sellarsian myth of the categorial Given.

4  Lifeworld and the Scientific Image Yet, why is a commitment to this specific version of the categorial Given philosophically problematic? What is ultimately problematic with thinking that the manifest-image categorial structure of the lifeworld can reflect the fundamental general categorial structure of the world independently of any changes or refinements of the descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image—especially if we take into account the fact that, on this view, any particular empirical belief within the manifest-image framework can be subject to revision as a result of scientific advancements? One problem with this view is that it wrongly assumes that the manifest-­ image categorial framework is ‘(scientific) theory-free’, that is, descriptively and explanatorily autonomous, independently of the postulation of 5  Here I do not put forward this deflationary reading of Husserl’s lifeworld as the correct interpretation of Husserl’s text. As was mentioned above, it is possible that there are radical transcendental idealist or even solipsist connotations in Husserl’s lifeworld, as there are some passages in the Crisis in which the lifeworld seems to be itself grounded in the ‘givenness’ of the correlation between the world and transcendental (inter)subjectivity, which stands before the gaze of the transcendental ego in an absolute self-enclosed and self-sufficient manner, independently of all ontological commitments about the existence of the actual world, myself as an empirically existing human being or others (CR 233, 244, 258). The reason I focus on the deflationary reading of the Husserlian lifeworld is that I find it more plausible philosophically, in the sense that it successfully avoids some of the most important versions of the myth of the Given (namely, the semantic and epistemic Given), while the transcendental idealist interpretation does not (see Christias, 2018a).

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unobservable entities and processes by the descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image. Yet, in fact, scientific theorizing is a continuation of a dimension of discourse which already exists (in a crude, vague and schematic form) in the ‘pre-scientific’ stage of the lifeworld. That is to say, ordinary explanations within the lifeworld (of the ‘habitual’ behavior of lifeworldly entities and of deviations thereof) are already implicitly ‘theoretical’ or ‘postulational’ in the sense that, for example, exactly like more sophisticated scientific explanations, they are expressions of the attempt to explain why things which are similar in their observable properties differ in their causal properties and why things which are similar in their causal properties differ in their observable properties (see, e.g. Sellars, 1997, §52). 4.1   Husserl’s Sophisticated Scientific Instrumentalism However, at this point, a ‘lifeworld’ phenomenologist, and indeed Husserl himself, could object that even if it is granted that, in some sense, scientific postulational explanations are ‘continuous’ with ordinary ‘lifeworldly’ explanations (e.g. in that both may be understood as theoretical or ‘postulational’ explanations), it does not follow that lifeworld explanations are deficient or deprived of their autonomy with respect to scientific ones. However theoretical or ‘postulational’ it may be, the categorial framework of the lifeworld, with its distinctively ‘morphological’ (i.e. non-ideal), inexact (by nature approximate) and ‘intuitive’ explanations (CR 27; Zahavi, 2003, 130–132), can well be descriptively and explanatorily self-­ sufficient—for example, due to the status of those ‘lifeworld’ explanations as essentially non-ideal, non-exact and ‘intuitable’, as opposed to scientific explanations which are ideal, exact and ‘non-intuitable’ as a matter of principle (CR 127–129). And, from this point of view, unobservable objects and properties postulated by science could be understood as ‘calculational devices’, the value and status of which consist in their systematizing and heuristic role with respect to confirmable generalizations (i.e. occurrences of actual and possible experiential phenomena) formulated in more originary ‘lifeworldly’ terms. Here, I must pause to stress that I take the most important and defining characteristic of scientific explanation to be its non-intuitable character. Husserl adds that scientific explanations are also essentially ideal and exact

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because, understandably, he has in mind the Galilean-Newtonian model of explanation in which qualitative particularity is understood as a manifestation of universal, necessary and timeless natural laws expressed in the language of pure mathematics. And indeed, it can be argued that his scientific instrumentalism on the issue of the real existence of idealized exact entities and properties (whether Galilean-Newtonian or Einsteinian) in the world is not without merit. Many philosophers, including Sellars, have been, for example, skeptical about the real existence of topologically invariant metrical time ‘out there in the world’ (Sellars, 1962a, 573) or even about the ‘causal closure of the physical’ (Sellars, 1981a). Yet, we can assert the ontological primacy of the scientific image over the ‘descriptive ontology’ of the lifeworld without making controversial ontological commitments to the existence of idealized or infinite entities characterized by absolute exactness. This can be done if we realize that the Galilean-­Newtonian model of explanation need not be considered as essential to the scientific image. Indeed, I take it that a better model for capturing what is essential in scientific-image explanations is the Darwinian one, according to which scientific explanations are essentially historically informed and oriented, non-object-bound, dynamic (non-mechanical) and situated (i.e. they do not explain by subsuming particular events under eternal, necessary laws of nature) (see Chap. 5). If this is correct, it shows that, contra Husserl, mathematical idealization and exactness need not be considered as essential traits of an ideal scientific image—however necessary and indispensable they might be considered in the context of the current scientific image. Moreover, even at the level of physics, an ideal theory of microphysics need not be committed to ideal objects, infinity, or to absolute exactness. The world can well be populated by (non-­countable) ‘finite differences’, which can be ‘continuous’ in such a way that any mesh in which we conceptually cut up the world into objects with finite grain can in principle be replaced by a still finer mesh (Sellars, 1967a, 147–148). If the above are in the right direction they show that while Husserl’s position in the Crisis is indeed a version of scientific instrumentalism, his is a scientific instrumentalism of a very peculiar and sophisticated form, some parts of which can be more than plausible and may even ‘hit the nail on the head’ as to the controversial ontological status of scientifically idealized renderings of natural entities, properties and processes through exact determination.

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But is it not somewhat anachronistic to attribute this scientific instrumentalist view to Husserl? For example, it can be argued that in the context of anglophone analytic philosophy Husserl’s views on science and its relations with the lifeworld are sometimes not understood in the proper context of Husserl’s thought as a whole, but are just geared to fit a position within ready-made ‘philosophical problems’ such as that of scientific realism (Trizio, 2021, 4). There is certainly some truth in that remark, but here we must stress that when we speak of Husserl’s scientific instrumentalism in contradistinction with scientific realism, it is not our intention to place him within the ready-made analytic debate about scientific realism. Sellars himself had a view very similar to that of Husserl in that regard; as he used to say, philosophy of science is just philosophy which takes science seriously and we must not “confuse the sound idea that philosophy is not science with the mistaken idea that philosophy is independent of science” (Sellars, 1997, 171). Both Husserl and Sellars held throughout their career that the aim of philosophy is to understand how the two main ways of understanding ourselves-in-the-world, namely, through scientific and lifeworld categories, can be coherently accounted for as part of a single synoptic vision of our being-in-the-world. The debates about scientific realism and instrumentalism in the field of philosophy of science should be understood as contributions to this larger project and not as self-standing positions or solutions to ready-made philosophical problems belonging in supposedly self-standing philosophical fields. From this more comprehensive point of view, we can accept that Husserl’s view about science is not narrowly instrumentalist in that what Husserl actually holds is not that theoretical techniques like Galilean physics yield practical results (predictions) as opposed to truths, but that they yield truths without their proper sense (Trizio, 2021, 245). Yet this is consistent with also holding that in broad sense, namely, in the sense in which the categorial framework of the lifeworld remains unchanged in its essential structure by the practical and theoretical achievements of science, Husserl is and always has been a scientific instrumentalist: scientific ‘truths’ are not to be interpreted in a

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scientific realist way, but as ultimately grounded in their ‘sense of being’ on the intuitive categorial structures of the lifeworld.6 4.2   A Scientific Realist Response to Husserl’s Semantic/ Ontological Privileging of the Lifeworld Yet, the instrumentalist reading of the ‘non-intuitable’ character of the entities and properties posited by good scientific explanation is, I think, quite problematic. In this regard, it can be argued that the descriptive resources of the scientific image offer better explanations of the world and ourselves than those couched in lifeworld terms. The reason for this is that the scientific image (and its essentially non-intuitable content) is precisely the framework that arises out of the lifeworld itself in order to account for phenomena which, from the standpoint of the lifeworld, constitute irreducible explanatory anomalies. Below, we shall present the bare bones of a Sellars-inspired argument in support of this view. Lifeworld terms are essentially ‘schematic’, individuated in vague, open-­ textured and inexact, but relatively ‘stable’, ways by their perceptual, practical and inferential functional role—expressed in the counterfactually robust, that is, lawlike and essentially non-monotonic, inferences in which a ‘lifeworld’ descriptive term appears—within a complex system of social norms and practices. To say that the inferences in which a lifeworld term appears are essentially non-monotonic is to say that the goodness of the inference among other things depends on having a view about which 6  Another (related) option here would be to argue that scientific theoretical terms are founded on the categorial framework of the lifeworld only with respect to their reference, not their sense (that can well change) (Belousek, 1998). According to this line of thought, it is the validity, not the sense, of theoretical scientific concepts that is derived from the original self-evidence of the lifeworld that validates all founding meanings; and such validity is transferred from originary lifeworld meanings to theoretical scientific concepts via the relations of reference from the latter to the former. The sense of such concepts is founded upon (not derived from) originary meanings constituted in lifeworld experience through successive modifying intuitions that transform those originary meanings by adding distinctively new ‘higher-level’ meaning-formations, as in the case of scientific theoretical concepts (CR 140). But, again, even if this is Husserl’s view on this issue, it is still an expression of the myth of the categorial Given, as the reference of scientific concepts and categories is ultimately fixed by the originary meanings of the lifeworld categorial framework, which, in this respect, retains its (supposed) unchallengeable authenticity. Thus, it remains in this sense a broadly scientific instrumentalist attitude toward the being of scientific entities and categories.

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possible additional collateral premises or auxiliary hypotheses would, and which would not, defeat it. Chestnut trees produce chestnuts—unless they are immature or blighted. That is, the inferences in question are surrounded by a nimbus of unspoken ‘unless’es (potential defeasors) which, though essential for the determination of the goodness of the inference, are essentially open-ended and not antecedently surveyable (Brandom, 2015, 141–142, 164). This is, I think, the key for understanding the precise way in which lifeworld terms can be relatively stable/determinate and vague, open-textured and inexact at the same time. In Husserlian terminology, this line of thought about the content of lifeworld terms expresses their essential ‘morphological’ structure. This term gives expression to the fact that, unlike scientifically described ideal structures (e.g. of mathematical physics), the concrete structure of ordinary ‘cultural’ objects, such as knives, pens and glasses, or natural objects, such as birds, trees and stones, is characterized by configurations that are essentially vague and are directly seized upon on the basis of sensuous intuition. This means that the circumstances and consequences of application of lifeworld concepts are essentially fluid, although it is also true that this fluidity is ‘stabilized’ by the fact that those circumstances and consequences of application specify the rules (the counterfactually robust inferences in which a lifeworld term appears) which determine the range of circumstances under which lifeworld phenomena behave ‘normally’ (as they are expected to behave given their nature and properties) or ‘abnormally’ (due to known inhibiting factors or merely unexpectedly).7 7  Husserl seems to think that this essential fluidity or ‘indeterminacy’ of lifeworld concepts and phenomena is a framework condition of any determinacy—including the ‘ideal’ determinacy bestowed by scientific-image concepts. While this might be true on a certain Galilean-­ Newtonian interpretation of the scientific image, it must be stressed that they need not hold true of the scientific image überhaupt. The descriptive-explanatory concepts and methods of the scientific image are not such as to necessitate complete or completed exactness. As was mentioned above, the scientific world can well be populated by (non-countable) ‘finite differences’, which can be ‘continuous’ in such a way that any mesh in which we conceptually cut up the world into objects with finite grain can in principle be replaced by a still finer mesh (Sellars, 1967a, 147–148). But while the scientific image, in this sense, need not be characterized by absolute exactness, its ‘indeterminacy’ and unobjectifiable character (ceaseless occurrent monadic becoming) is of a different kind from the indeterminacy (horizonal vagueness) of current lifeworld terms, since, as we shall see in Chap. 7, it is not defined on the basis of the dispositional properties of ‘objects’ (contrast between enabling-inhibiting factors) or a distinction between the objects’ normal (expected) and ‘deviant’ (unexpected) behavior, but rather in terms of monadic occurrent processual becoming.

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Yet, our conception of what materially realizes this complex perceptual-­ inferential-­practical functional role of lifeworld terms can be subject to revision, improvement, becoming thereby less ‘schematic’ and more determinate (which is not to say that this process culminates in scientific objects characterized by complete or completed exactness—see n. 18). For example, it might be thought that ‘water’ is picked out as ‘whatever stuff causes certain effects’. In this case it would be a schematic (manifest-­ image) sortal which would really be a placeholder for less schematic (scientific-­image) sortals. And the latter, less schematic scientific-image sortals, in turn, would be the expression of our communal epistemic ideals built into our manifest-image concept of ‘water’—that is, of what ideally ought to be the case for something to count as ‘water’. That is to say, scientific-­image sortals would be justified by their superior explanatory power in accounting for explanatory anomalies of manifest-image observable ‘water’ phenomena. Moreover, it can be argued that sortals that identify and individuate intentional states and episodes are similarly schematic and function as placeholders for less schematic scientific-image sortals that are expressions of communal epistemic ideals (concerning ideally rational behavior) built into our manifest-image concepts of intentional states. As was cursorily implied above, empirical generalizations formulated in manifest-image ‘lifeworld’ terms turn out to be unstable (non-­lawlike), that is, subject to observationally unpredicted variation (see, e.g. Sellars, 1961). That is, ‘lifeworldly’ generalizations, by failing to be lawlike (counterfactually robust) under certain conditions, are defective in their own terms—as the drawing of an ‘intuitively’ clear distinction between inductive generalizations that do and those that do not support counterfactuals, being essential for the determination of the projectibility of our everyday inductions, is a demand that arises out of the lifeworld itself. Moreover, it turns out that it is only on the basis of the postulated unobservable entities and processes of the scientific image that we are in a position to explain the conditions under which lifeworld generalizations hold lawfully and the conditions under which they fail to hold. In other words, the descriptive resources of the scientific image are needed to explain why the inductive generalizations formulated in ‘lifeworldly’ terms hold (are lawlike, counterfactually robust, supported by manifest-image subjunctive conditionals) only within certain boundary conditions while in others they break down in unsystematic, unexpected and non-lawful ways (Sellars, 1961) such as to require an abandonment of fundamental background beliefs about its behavior for restoring lawfulness at the observational/manifest level.

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That is, in the last analysis, the unobservable entities and laws couched in scientific-image terms are indispensable because they explain why ‘lifeworldly’ observational/experiential generalizations about the behavior of persons or worldly objects are violated (i.e. they explain why lifeworldly entities under certain conditions do not behave as they are expected to do if their behavior had indeed been governed by the observational generalizations couched in lifeworldly terms). Here, importantly, and in contrast to Husserl (who holds that the sense of ontological claims about the existence of scientific entities prescribes that there is an in-principle way, following the motivations of our current perception, to experience them (Ideas II)), Sellars argues that scientific theoretical terms have ‘surplus meaning’ over their observational (‘intuitive’) counterparts (Sellars, 1961). This is because when the unobservable entities and laws couched in theoretical scientific terms explain why ‘lifeworldly’ observational/experiential generalizations about the behavior of persons or worldly objects are violated (in a way that makes them essentially unstable, non-lawful), they do this by changing the meaning and reference of the observable phenomena that obey the empirical generalizations in question and by ultimately identifying those observable phenomena with unobservable phenomena posited by the theory.8 As I have argued elsewhere (Christias, 2018b), the relation between manifest-image objects and scientific-image objects is explanatory, and an explanatory relation is not one of identity. The fact that manifest-image phenomena are explained in scientific-image terms implies that the former do not really exist, in the sense that they can be considered as being genuinely explanatory (i.e. causally efficacious) only if they are recategorized and ultimately understood in different, ‘successor’ scientific terms.9 According to this line 8  In Husserlian terminology, we can describe this self-correcting replacement process as follows: whereas Husserl held that the modification of sense by scientific theoretical terms of the originary intuition of what is given self-evidently retains the original validity of self-­ evidence insofar as the modifying intuition maintains a constant meaning-reference to what is given, what is actually the case is that the observational-‘intuitional’ validity in question is not necessarily transferred to the reality posited abductively by scientific theory, as abductive inference does not maintain such a constant meaning or reference, but rather shifts or extends meaning and reference from what is given in the context of the lifeworld to what is posited by scientific theory (theoretical entity) (Belousek, 1998, 85). 9  Note here that, from this point of view, the change of meaning in scientific-image explanations of manifest-image phenomena works by eliminating manifest-image objects, which means that the successor scientific-image concepts cannot possibly be understood as retaining ‘the same’ reference as their manifest-image ‘predecessors’.

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of thought, it is because the entities which obey the observational generalization in question really are unobservable entities with unobservable properties as described by the theory that explains why those observational generalizations are unstable, discontinuous and hold only within certain boundary conditions if they are understood as belonging in the categorial framework of the lifeworld (Sellars, 1961, §41–52). Moreover, unobservable non-intuitable entities do not explain observable lifeworld ‘phenomenal’ entities by being their (hidden) causes (as if the former were ontologically independent from the latter) but by turning out to be what these latter lifeworld entities really are. Thus, the Sellarsian view of ultimate reality, though patently one in which the ‘really real’ (scientific) world can be said to be what explains, underlies and elucidates the world of appearances (lifeworld), is not characterized by a mythical ‘causal depth’, rightly chastised by Husserl (Trizio, 2021, 115–118). Let us now give some examples that illustrate the process of replacement of lifeworld observational terms with scientific theoretical ones. The replacement of the Charles-Boyle empirical law with the kinetic theory of gases is an exemplary such case. If empirical generalizations are understood as having exclusively manifest experiential content, then the observed fact to the effect that, for example, gases do not obey the Boyle-Charles empirical law at very high pressures (where PV begins to rise—instead of staying stable—with increasing P) does not follow lawfully from past observational generalizations if we are restricted to the conceptual resources of the ‘manifest’ observational framework alone and can only be conceived as a brute anomalous fact whose behavior obeys no law (Sellars, 1976). By contrast, if we use the conceptual resources of the scientific postulational framework, the instability of the behavior of gases in very high pressures disappears and, given the theoretical framework of the kinetic theory of gases (with its unobservable entities, properties and the laws that relate them), the behavior of gases becomes again normal, lawful and only to be expected. Moreover, given the theoretical framework of the kinetic theory of gases, we can explain why empirical generalizations couched in ‘lifeworldly’ terms (the Charles-Boyle empirical law) are violated: this violation is ultimately an appearance (it only seems to be a violation) of a deeper (lawful) reality, whose entities, properties and laws are in a position to account for the fact that it presents itself to us as appearance (i.e. as usually obeying and occasionally violating the Charles-Boyle law) (see also Lange, 2000).

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Again, it must be stressed that Sellars agrees with Husserl (and, for that matter, with ordinary language philosophers or neo-Aristotelians) that it is essential to concepts of thing-kinds that they are qualified by ceteris-­ paribus generalizations—where the latter qualify as laws in virtue of being counterfactually robust and that these laws determine the range of conditions under which the thing in question behaves in a predictable way (normal conditions) and allow for a range of circumstances in which this behavior, that is, the actualization of its capacities-abilities (powers-­ dispositions), is hindered by external obstacles (abnormal conditions). Now, the instability of manifest-image empirical generalizations, its observational unpredicted variations, or ‘anomalies’, which call for scientific-­ image reconceptualization, are a proper subset of the above abnormal conditions. Anomalous conditions or observationally unstable circumstances in the behavior of a manifest-image middle-size object are those conditions of its behavior that are observationally unstable in a sustainedly incomprehensible, unpredictable manner, such as to require an abandonment of fundamental background beliefs about its behavior for restoring lawfulness at the observational/manifest level. Thus, not all abnormal conditions of the behavior of a manifest-image object (or in general, of the ‘thing’ framework) count as anomalous, observationally non-lawful. Another example here of the abandonment of a manifest-image observational generalization in favor of a scientific-image non-observational one due to the former’s inherent observational unpredicted variation under certain circumstances is the case of Mendel’s laws of inheritance and the postulation of Mendelian genes as an explanation of observationally unpredicted variations in the hereditary characteristics of pea plants. In this case the observational anomaly occurs as follows: while in the first generation of cross-fertilizing, for example, purple and white peas, we get either purple or white offspring (which is a predictable, expected observational given our manifest-image ‘intuitive’ conception of the behavior of peas as expressed in the ‘blending theory’ of heredity), in the second generation, if we blend purple peas with other peas of the same color, we get 75% purple peas and 25% white ones (in a 3-1 analogy). Here our manifest-­ image lifeworldly ‘intuitive’ explanations of the hereditary behavior of peas break down (not just as a result of an expected external hindrance due to ‘disturbing factors’ (abnormal conditions) but in the manner of an inexplicable, incomprehensible ‘brute anomalous fact’). The existence of white peas in the second-generation offspring cannot be accounted for as a result of a cross-fertilization of exclusively purple ones if we stick to the

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observational-phenotypical level. Even if we take it that the white pea finds expression in some invisible manner in one or both second-generation purple peas, we still cannot explain in purely observational manifest-image terms why and how exactly this happens and also why the resulting analogy of purple to white peas is always 3-1 and not some other analogy. It is only if we postulate the existence of unobservable entities (dominant-recessive genes) with specific properties (the purple character is dominant, the white is recessive) that explains why the analogy between purple and white peas in the second-generation offspring cannot be but 3-1. Thus, only in this way are we in a position to restore the observational anomaly in question and turn it to a lawlike generalization which is only to be expected given the genes’ properties and relations. A last and more pertinent example of the abandonment of a manifest-­ image observational generalization in favor of a scientific-image non-­ observational one due to the former’s inherent observational unpredicted variation under certain circumstances comes from folk-psychological descriptions and explanations. In certain cases, like those of brain-injured people of the kind observed by Oliver Sachs, normal cognitive processes breakdown in ways that cannot be accounted for in psychological terms (Schiffer, 1991, 4). All these breakdowns in normal cognitive function that falsify folk-psychological generalizations, such as brain damage, reveal serious discontinuities (random variations) in hitherto perfectly comprehensible behavioral patterns of the folk-psychological framework that, as far as the folk-psychological framework is concerned, are just brute ‘anomalous’ facts, beyond further comprehension; these sustainedly incomprehensible deviations from expected behavior in verbal or emotional expression due to brain damage can only ‘negatively’, derivatively and ‘abstractly’ characterized (precisely as ‘anomalous’) without further specification of their ‘positive’ nature. Recall that it is exactly in cases like these that a postulational (i.e. scientific-non-folk-psychological) theory is needed to explain why the folk-psychological generalization in question is violated in certain conditions and not in others (see, e.g. Christias, 2016a). Note also that by performing the aforementioned explanatory task— that is, by restoring the lawful character of hitherto unstable empirical ‘lifeworldly’ generalizations—the postulational scientific-image framework becomes indispensable for generating new testable lifewordly generalizations, that is, novel predictions, incapable of being anticipated and conceptualized as such within the categorial framework of the lifeworld. Thus, the scientific realist can justify his claim that scientific-image

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descriptive vocabulary ultimately better explains what from the point of view of manifest-image ‘lifeworld’ vocabulary (in its descriptive and explanatory dimension) seems to be brute, non-lawful, random behavior (experientially unpredicted variation) of the empirical generalizations couched in manifest-image ‘lifeworld’ kind terms. It seems then that, ironically, the supposed categorial autonomy or ‘insulation’ of the manifest-image framework is undermined by explanatory ideals built-in in its own descriptive and explanatory principles. The descriptive and explanatory resources of the lifeworld contain, so to speak, the epistemic seeds of their ontological destruction. Of course, there are no general rules for judging at what point the anomalies of a framework are sufficiently severe to necessitate its abandonment in favor of a better framework. This depends on a number of considerations many of which are essentially pragmatic (e.g. existence of a sufficiently developed new framework capable of explaining the anomalies in question, practical everyday needs that are hindered by the anomalies in question and are better satisfied with the application of the new framework) and others epistemic in nature (ability of the new framework to generate new testable generalizations, novel predictions, capacity of the existing framework to overthrow its anomalies in non-ad-hoc ways and to avoid long-term stagnation by producing novel concepts and testable generalizations). For example, the Freudian theory of drives might be considered as a novel kind of conceptual and explanatory extension of the folk-psychological framework. Whether it will prove a progressive or an ultimately (in the long run) recessive move remains to be seen. Sellars’ wager is that the correlations (lawlike generalizations) between publicly observable verbal and non-verbal behavior on the one hand and mental states and processes on the other, which are characteristic of the manifest-­ image folk-psychological framework, based as they are on a background understanding of human behavior (expressed in our distinctions between standard and non-standard conditions of actualization of our mental capacities) which sometimes breaks down, will themselves ultimately demand a deeper explanation in terms of a broadly neurophysiological point of view (Sellars, 1963a, 22–25).

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4.3   Can van Fraassen’s Objection to Scientific Realism Be of Use to Husserl? The above line of thought disarms an important anti-realist (or ‘irenic realist’) argument that we owe to van Fraassen (1975, 1980), which could be of use to Husserl if it were sound. According to it, scientific theories which postulate unobservable entities (such as the kinetic theory of gases) are perhaps practically indispensable means of discovering and formulating improved lifeworld generalizations that are more accurate empirical laws than our ‘manifest’ observational framework could ever itself generate. Yet this fact does not necessarily commit us to the existence of the unobservable entities and processes posited by the theory—however indispensable the latter may be in correcting inaccurate (i.e. strictly speaking false) empirical generalizations formulated in the ‘lifeworld’ observational framework. We can always accept scientific theories without committing ourselves to the literal truth of the unobservable entities postulated by the theory. We can instead restrict our commitment to the more refined observational generalization itself, because, in the last analysis, the latter, having been exactly refined or corrected and being in principle capable of independent inductive confirmation, is no less empirically adequate than the theoretically contaminated empirical generalization generated from the postulational theory with the help of which the new refined observational generalization was discovered and established. Both the theoretically contaminated empirical generalization and the lifeworld generated one cover the same observational evidence, have the same observational consequences and are, thus, both equally capable of ‘saving the phenomena’. Sellars’ response to this objection, as we saw, is that if the above radically different kinds of improved or corrected empirical generalization are properly distinguished, then we can clearly see that if the improved empirical generalization is conceived as having exclusively manifest observational content, then the observed fact to the effect that, for example, gases do not obey the Boyle-Charles empirical law at very high pressures does not follow lawfully from past observational generalizations if we are restricted to the conceptual resources of the ‘manifest’ observational framework alone and can only be conceived as a brute anomalous fact whose behavior

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obeys no law (Sellars, 1976, §48–56). Hence, the empirical generalizations formulated within the observational framework, being strictly speaking non-lawlike (accidental), cannot even be inductively confirmed by their instances, that is, by the particular observational facts that fall within their purview (since induction always involves going beyond one’s evidence from actual cases to counterfactual ones and accidental generalizations are precisely not counterfactually robust). By contrast, if we use the conceptual resources of the scientific postulational framework, the instability of the behavior of gases in very high pressures virtually disappears and, given the theoretical framework of the kinetic theory of gases (with its unobservable entities, properties and the laws that relate them), the behavior of gases is considered again normal, lawful and only to be expected. Thus, even if the two refined empirical generalizations are virtually coextensive, it is only the theoretically contaminated ‘scientific’ empirical generalization that can be projected lawfully to fresh cases.

5  Lifeworld and Science: A Dialectical Relation If the above analysis is in the right direction, Husserl’s most mature conception of phenomenology as a ‘science’ of the lifeworld seems to be ultimately untenable—even if it is purged of its transcendental idealist/ solipsist connotations. Pace Husserl, the distinctions between observational and postulational terms, ‘intuitive’ and ‘non-intuitive’ explanations, or, in general, between an essentially ‘non-objectified’ lifeworld and an ‘objectified’ theoretical science, are ultimately methodological, not substantive. The difference concerns how we know about something: non-inferentially and through our unaided senses in the former cases, by means of inference and technological aids in the latter; it is not about the kind of thing we know about. That is, the cash value of the above distinctions is epistemological, not categorial-ontological. Here it could be objected on behalf of Husserlian phenomenology that the difference between what we can know ‘intuitively’ through our unaided senses on the one hand and non-inferentially through mastering and internalizing the use of scientific concepts and through technological aids on the other is not just epistemological, but has a deeper ‘ontological-­ existential’ import: in the first case there is a direct and automatic actualization of concepts of proper and common sensible properties (as

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belonging in ordinary middle-sized external objects situated in ‘intuitive’ space-time) in experience itself, while in the second case, the non-­ inferentially elicited ‘observation’ is more theory-laden with categorial commitments that go far beyond those concepts of proper and common sensibles (or of ordinary ‘intuitive’ notions of middle-sized objects, space-­ time scales) and which, for this reason, do not count as being ‘intuitively’ or ‘bodily present’ in experience itself and, hence, cannot as a matter of principle obtain an observational, ‘intuitive’ status by being incorporated and non-inferentially used in observational reports and our practical dealings with the world. Now, it can be granted that there is indeed a phenomenological difference in those two ways of non-inferential observation. Yet, this does not in the least show that there is a substantive/ontological difference between unaided sense-experience and technologically mediated sense-experience. Consider, for example, the fact that technologically mediated non-­ inferential knowledge can effect changes in the very ontological-­experiential structure of our unaided senses (e.g. change of the range, scope and properties of the visual-auditory space itself), by being partly or wholly incorporated in our sense-fields and sensorimotor responses through prosthetic devices. It can thus change—and indeed expand—not only our conception, but our very experience of what counts as intuitive. One can retort here that there are factual limits in what can be ‘intuitively’ presentable. But the deeper point here is that, whatever might be the case regarding this issue, the categorial status of proper and common sensibles or of ‘intuitive’ space and time (and thus of the very horizonal structure of our experience) is not directly and automatically given in our intuitive experience of them in the context of everyday living. There are too many (evolutionary, practical, social) factors that causally and conceptually mediate our intuitive understanding of the categorial status of ordinary objects and of their spatial, temporal, proper and common sensible properties. Only a mythical conception of the mind as a categorially diaphanous medium, as capable of providing undistorted categorial knowledge while bracketing all empirical-scientific knowledge of ourselves-in-the-­ world, could ignore them as irrelevant. And it is only under the illusion of such categorially given knowledge that we think we are in a position to ‘intuitively’ distinguish between ‘natural’ intrinsically observational properties (e.g. of our unaided senses) and ‘artificial’ theoretical abstract scientific concepts or technological aids and prosthetic devices, which are supposedly ‘observational’ only in a second-class, inferior, non-literal sense.

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If what was said above is in the right direction, it follows, among other things, that the status of an object as theoretical (unobservable) or observable is not fixed and can change over time. This mutability, at bottom, concerns the conditions of possible experience themselves. Contra Kant and phenomenologists, the ‘conditions of possible experience’ are not categorially or transcendentally fixed in advance. They are not ‘eidetic essences’ distilled by everyday lifeworld experience. They are themselves historically mutable depending on the change of material and social conditions effected by changes in scientific knowledge, experimental advances and technical sophistication.10 The lifeworld may be prior in the semantic order or in the order of knowledge, yet posterior in the order of being. Here, of course, we must be careful not to ‘throw the baby with the bathwater’ in our endeavor to replace the categories of the lifeworld with those of science. Husserl’s scientific instrumentalism with respect to ideal mathematical or geometric entities of Galilean-Newtonian science aimed primarily at showing that a Cartesian-Lockean picture of nature as composed exclusively of ‘primary qualities’ is problematic and even incoherent. As Berkeley has shown, there can be no extension without qualities (color), no primary qualities without secondary ones and vice versa. Hence an interpretation of science as showing that nature is the locus of primary qualities bereft of secondary ones is unacceptable since it makes all lifeworld entities and processes (colors, sounds, desires, values) merely epiphenomenal ‘subjective ideas of the mind’, bereft of any causal efficacy (see also Soffer, 1990). For Husserl, what science has really shown is that there is a radical distinction between the ‘thing of physics’ (with non-­ intuitive mathematically idealized properties) and the ‘thing of perception’ (with intuitively accessible primary and secondary qualities) but has misunderstood the pragmatic and coordinating function of this distinction (its serving as an index to orient us in the world in which we live and act) for an ontological primacy of the thing of physics over the thing of perception. Yet, in reality, for Husserl, the lifeworld intuitively fulfilled object has 10  For example, the existence of Mendelian genes was initially postulated as an explanation of observationally unpredicted variations in the hereditary characteristics of pea plants; yet, later, Mendelian genes became able to be observed on the basis of (theoretically driven) predictions about where to look as well as the use of better microscopes. More importantly, it can be argued that even intentional states, such as thoughts, desires, intentions and beliefs, or non-intentional states, such as sensations, were also initially theoretical (unobservable) entities postulated to explain behavioral anomalies and only later became observational, that is, obtained a reporting role (Sellars, 1997, §46–63).

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a definite logical-semantic (and hence ‘ontological’) primacy (in ‘transcendental consciousness’) over the non-intuitive (unfulfilled, defeasible) ideal object of science (Ideas II, 40––52; Trizio, 2021, 103–106). The latter is necessarily transcendentally correlated to the former, and the ‘externality’ of the world it points toward can only be understood in light of the original sense of transcendence immanent in the eidetic structures of perceptual consciousness. In other words, the idealized object of mathematical physics, being ‘in-itself’ a complete abstraction, cannot do its job (serve as an index to orient us in the lifeworld) unless it is translated into—or correlated with—the concrete structures of perceptible lifeworld objects and procedures (through acts of measurement, experimental procedures, etc.). And since these ‘translating’ procedures are themselves understood in lifeworld categorial terms, scientific idealized objects and categories pose no threat to the categorial structure of the lifeworld, but only function in better orienting us within the latter by ‘horizontally objectivizing’ it. Now, interestingly, a scientific realist need not disagree here with Husserl about the indissoluble unity of primary and secondary properties in the perceptible objects of the lifeworld. S/he can well grant this point, thus accepting Husserl’s point that lifeworld qualities and relations must have a more-than-epiphenomenal existence, while still taking issue with Husserl’s attempt to semantically and ontologically ground scientific categories to lifeworld ones. And a way for the scientific realist to have it both ways is by insisting on the ontological primacy of non-intuitive counterpart qualities to ordinary (intuitive) extension, color and public space-­ time—thus also rejecting, with Husserl, the widespread view that the world in itself as described by science consists solely of primary properties characterized by ‘structure without content’ (qualities). Indeed, this is exactly Sellars’ own position on the matter, who endorses Whitehead’s view that nature cannot be conceived exclusively on the basis of structural-­ mathematical properties. According to this peculiar Sellarsian brand of scientific realism, lifeworld qualities and relations are indeed ontologically dependent (through isomorphic picturing relations) on a scientifically described world, but only on condition that the world is infused with counterpart qualities to ordinary (intuitive) extension, color and public space-time, and only if the lifeworld qualities and relations, though existing only as features of organism-environment complexes, have real causal

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efficacy in the world11 (see Chap. 7). This shows the complicated nature of the relations, proximity and rivalry between sophisticated forms of scientific realism and scientific instrumentalism as championed by such towering figures as Sellars and Husserl. Now, based on the Sellarsian view to the effect that the status of an object as theoretical or non-theoretical is not fixed and can change over time, we can further argue that, viewed from a historical-developmental point of view, the distinction between the manifest and the scientific image can itself be understood as essentially dialectical: scientific-image unobservable entities postulated to explain anomalies (observationally unpredicted variations) in the manifest image can provide new knowledge about—and accordingly effect practical transformations of—the world and ourselves such that they could well be subsequently incorporated to our perceptual and practical engagements with the world. In this way scientific entities could become features of a new conceptually transformed image, enabling us again to be horizontally ‘open’—albeit in novel,

11  Husserl does not discuss this option, not even as a possibility to be dismissed. This is perhaps because he thinks that science is essentially an attempt to reproduce as accurately and elegantly as possible certain aspects of the world as it is given in our immediate lifeworld experience. From this point of view, science provides us only with incomplete pictures of the world, as it can treat sense-qualities only indirectly by correlating them with geometrical properties such as shape, size and so on (CR 33). But such a view misrepresents the main thrust of the scientific enterprise. Science begins with the framework of our lifeworld experience, but its goal is to explain what it finds in this framework, including what is immediately experienced in terms of the latter. And to do this it finds it necessary to move to new (and autonomous) scientific frameworks. In this sense, science, far from attempting to reproduce the lifeworld framework, criticizes and replaces it with another that has greater explanatory power, thus potentially recategorizing immediate experience itself (see also Gutting, 1978). For example, within the framework of lifeworld experience colors are regarded as properties inhering in all the various external objects we encounter. But when we try to explain certain aspects of the behavior of colored objects (in illusions, hallucinations, dreams), we are led to instead regard them as products of the interaction of our sense organs with external objects. With this move, we do not omit secondary qualities from our picture of the world; we just recategorize them as features of the interaction of our sensory mechanisms with the environment and thus also recategorize the way in which they are causally efficacious (see also Chap. 8). We do not abolish them; they remain intrinsic qualitative properties of our (recategorized) experience (and the same goes with our intuitive conceptions of space and time). We just peer deeper into their way of functioning, thereby allowing for the possibility of controlling or even altering them to serve our deeper needs and purposes. (The fact that this might also open ‘Pandora’s box’, unleashing unheard-of dystopic possibilities for humanity is a wholly different issue that will be discussed in Chap. 12.)

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scientifically informed categorial and observational terms—to the world and ourselves.12 Unfortunately, Husserl, throughout his career, remained blind to this possibility of establishing a resolutely ‘dialectical’ relation between lived experience as it is lived through and conceptualized within the manifest image and the theoretical-postulational explanatory framework of the scientific image.

6  Objections: Does Husserl Have a More Nuanced Conception of the Relation Between Lifeworld and Science? Yet, to be fair to Husserl we must note that he explicitly held that although science is indeed grounded in the lifeworld, it constantly flows back into it, constituting thereby one of its parts. As he puts it: “We have two different things: [concrete] lifeworld and objective-scientific world, though of course they are related to each other. The knowledge of the objective-­scientific world is ‘grounded’ in the self-evidence of the lifeworld. The latter is pregiven to the scientific worker, or the working community, as ground; yet, as they built upon this, what they built is something new, something different” (CR 130–131). Hence, it seems that Husserl allows the possibility that through the course of history, spheres of scientific experience can constitute new layers of significance upon the lifeworld. Yet, even if we conceive the lifeworld in this extended sense as something capable of historical development, in which scientific experience can flow back into the lifeworld enriching it, the fact remains that the lifeworld is one and the same categorially at the primordial level (see also Theodorou, 2010). Its ‘primordial’ categorial structure is insulated from the historically developing categorial structures that the scientific experience builds out of it. This is also shown by the fact 12  A complication here is that in the Sellarsian synoptic vision the perceptible (‘intuitively fulfilled’) world of extension-color within public space-time would turn out to be ‘phenomenal’ in the Kantian sense (thus not in a ‘subjective’ or ‘illusory’ sense). Thus, the sense in which we are ‘open’ to them as ‘external’ objects and properties would itself be ‘phenomenal’. Yet, this would not amount to ‘losing our grip on the world’ (McDowell, 1994, 2009); if perception and action are construed in scientific-image terms, then their direct contact with the ‘really real’ world can be reestablished, albeit not in the sense of intentional directedness or openness, but in the picturing sense of those terms (directedness as qualitative ‘resonance’ between sensory/affective and environmental intensive processes). See Chaps. 8 and 9.

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that, for Husserl, the lifeworld is the ‘ground’ of the scientific world not just in a methodological sense (as it is for Sellars), but in a much more robust— semantic and even ‘ontological’—sense. And this means that Husserl is not in a position to conceive the relation between the lifeworld and science as a dialectical one, even if he adds a historical-developmental dimension to the former, as the primordial level of the perception-based morphological essences of the lifeworld is destined to remain categorially unchallengeable and thus undialecticizable. Again, it might be objected here that scientific truths themselves belong to the lifeworld as ends posited by the teleological activities of persons belonging to the scientific community. Since ends as teleological activities posited by persons are admittedly situated, as cultural formations, within the lifeworld, then scientific truths as such anticipated ends also belong within the lifeworld (as a regulative ideal, an infinite task of scientific inquiry). If this is correct, it follows that the lifeworld can potentially contain the posits of scientific thought (while both resting as units of sense in the intentional structures of transcendental intersubjectivity). But even after this inclusion, the lifeworld remains what it is, namely, the pre-­ scientific world in which we live, for the lifeworld is not a pre-scientific world because it is not scientifically determined, but because its worldliness is pre-scientific13 (Trizio, 2021, 268–272). Now, I will not judge the plausibility of this as an interpretation of Husserl’s view on the relations between lifeworld and science—although it seems to me that it makes scientific realism look far more congenial to Husserl than it actually was, and it cannot easily accommodate Husserl’s insistence to the effect that the fundamental categorial structure of the lifeworld, including its overall ‘concrete causal style’, is a-historical and unchangeable.14 One important question about this interpretive line from our point of view is whether the inclusion of scientific posits in the 13  As Trizio puts this interpretive point: “The lifeworld is given before science, and its being does not change if we discover a method for the exact determination (for the objectivation) of one of its abstract layers, a method by virtue of which the lifeworld harbors an infinitely distant truth in itself” (Trizio, 2021, 272). 14  For example, recall that Husserl explicitly says that “the lifeworld does have, in all its relative features, a general structure. This general structure, to which everything that exists is relatively bounded, is not itself relative” (CR 139). He also reminds us that “this actually intuited, actually experienced and experienceable world remains unchanged as what it is, in its own essential structure and its own concrete causal style, whatever we may do with or without techniques” (CR 51). Does this (according to Husserl, unchangeable) concrete causal style of the lifeworld remain phenomenologically identical regarding its ‘intuitive categorial structure’ even after lifeworld categories are replaced with scientific ones in a wholesale manner? I do not see how this might be Husserl’s view or a plausible one at that.

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lifeworld would be so extensive as to allow not only for the replacement of ordinary objects, properties or processes by scientific ones, but also for a—far more radical—replacement of current lifeworld categories of understanding our experience and horizonal openness to the world (the ‘descriptive ontology’ of the manifest image, in Sellars words) by radically different scientific ones. And how extensive could this replacement be? Can the inclusion of the scientific point of view in the lifeworld effect a change in our ‘categorial intuition’ of the latter’s essential structure? Can we fuse our non-intuitable scientific categories into our (intuitable, morphologically structured) way of life without instrumentalizing them, and how far could we proceed in this task given that it would demand a radical transformation of our ‘intuitive’ categories themselves? Trizio does not discuss these crucial issues, but since he explicitly says that the pre-scientific world has certain structural categorial features that are not subject to change, such as the world’s worldliness (i.e. its horizonal, intentional, ­adumbrational, teleological structure), presumably he holds that the categorial replacement of manifest-image categories by scientific ones could not affect the above structural categorial features that ‘open’ a world out there to a correlative (transcendental, intersubjective) consciousness. But again, from our point of view, this is not enough to escape the myth of the categorial Given: for, as we briefly mentioned in Chap. 1 and as shall see in detail in Chaps. 8, 9 and 12, a robust scientific realist interpretation of our descriptive and explanatory practices and a corresponding resolute rejection of the myth of the categorial Given ultimately lead to the view that a scientifically informed conception of ourselves-in-the world (structured by scientific categories), by affecting among other things our very sense and experience of horizonal openness to the world, would turn us into a new kind of person-in-the-world. Pace Husserl, even the seemingly platitudinous (or ‘transcendentally necessary’) fact that the sense in which we are open to the world is that of intentional openness would not be exempt from recategorization (see Chap. 8). In this sense, even in Trizio’s far more liberal interpretation which makes scientific realism and the possibility of categorial replacement of the ‘descriptive ontology of everyday life’ by scientific categories look far more congenial to Husserl, we can still find some remnants of a broadly instrumentalist attitude toward the being of scientific categories that ultimately vitiate ‘liberal’ Husserl’s attempt to resolutely dialecticize the relations between lifeworld and science. A similar response could be given to Gutting (1978), who argues that while Husserl’s assertion of essential, invariant features of all possible

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lifeworlds conflicts with scientific realism if these features specify the particular first-order predicates that must be used in any description of the world (e.g. if a particular spectrum of color predicates or a particular geometry were said to be essential, this would contradict scientific realism), if the essential features were limited to such general characteristics (second-­order predicates) as having some kind of qualitative predicates (like but not necessarily identical with our familiar colors) or having some sort of geometrical structure, then there would be no contradiction with scientific realism (even of the Sellarsian stripe). But, even if we concede that this could be Husserl’s actual position on this issue (which I very much doubt), would it not be the case that these second-order qualitative predicated essentially exhibit the property of openness or intentionality so that they necessarily be intuited as open to worldly objects in public space and time? If not, I confess that Husserl’s position about the necessary intuitive structure of the lifeworld in the Crisis starts to seem unrecognizable. But this possibility must be left open for a scientific realist who wants to avoid the myth of the categorial Given in all its forms. Last, but not least, it can be objected that phenomenology does not face the problem of having to decide whether the real world is the perceived one or the one described by physics. Within the absolute being of transcendental intersubjectivity, both ‘worlds’ are just constitutional layers of the world, they are both transcendent constituted poles. The world of physics cannot exist without the world of perception and the latter cannot achieve objectivity without the former (Trizio, 2021, 139). But note that the scientific world, however indispensable for the lifeworld’s objectivity, has a derived ontological status with respect to it. Thus, this conception of the relation between science and lifeworld remains a broadly scientific instrumentalist one (even if of a more ‘irenic’ form). Husserl’s position here (if it is indeed his own) has some affinities—though it is not identical—with irenic instrumentalism or irenic realism (Nagel, 1961; Hempel, 1965; Carnap, 1966), according to which, since the observable phenomena can be saved by both scientific realists and anti-realists, both viewpoints can be understood as different and incommensurable descriptions of the same things, in the sense that each of these is valid from its own point of view, that is, relative to the purposes it serves. (Husserl would add to this, of course, that these viewpoints are both valid, each in its own way, only to the extent to which they are the constituting poles of transcendental intersubjectivity.) But, as we have seen (Sect. 4.3), Sellars rejects (for good reasons) this reconciliatory move in the debate between the realist and the anti-realist as regards the ontological status of unobservable

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entities, holding instead that the ‘manifest’ empirical generalizations licensed by the observational framework do not (and cannot) ‘save the phenomena’ independently of the use of unobservable theoretical entities of the scientific image, as the former do not have the same empirical consequences (predictive power) as the theoretically contaminated empirical generalizations licensed by the scientific image. Soffer (1990) also makes a similar ‘irenic’ realist move by arguing that for Husserl both the lifeworld and the world of science are irreducibly real, although in different ways. According to this line of thought, the meaning of the concept of existence or ‘reality’ does not remain the same from one viewpoint to another and that our standards for what really exists shift in the process of the change of framework (in the lifeworld something is real if it is perceived as an external object with qualitative properties by normal human observers under normal conditions, whereas in the world of science something is real if it is intersubjectively validated by any rational being independently of its sensory endowment and contingent evolutionary history). If we understand that, we will realize that these two different ways of understanding the world and our place in it are not in conflict with one another but can peacefully coexist, provided of course that we give up the (ultimately meaningless) demand for a unified, fully comprehensive categorial account of the structure of reality. As was mentioned above, this reconciliatory move is unacceptable because it is premised on the incorrect view that lifeworld and scientific empirical generalizations can equally well ‘save the phenomena’. It is also based on another incorrect view to the effect that claims made in the context of the lifeworld about perceptible objects and their properties do not conflict with scientific claims about the latter. Soffer, for example, holds that while the ordinary lifeworld claim to the effect that my lamp is a solid, impenetrable object seems to conflict with the scientific claim that the lamp is in fact largely empty space, this is not in fact the case: at the level of the lifeworld, the lamp is solid, and its everyday solidity does not vanish when I become acquainted with or even come to believe the theories and discoveries of science. For the sense contained in the intentional horizon of my judgment, ‘this lamp is solid’ is that, for example, if I touch the lamp, I feel resistance; if I drop it on a glass table, the table will break; no matter what angle I choose, I cannot see through the lamp, and the same holds good for every normal person. By contrast, when science claims that ‘this lamp is not solid’, what is meant here is that, for example, if a beam of particles is shot through the lamp, most of them will pass undeflected. But, the objection continues, even if this latter judgment is granted, it

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does not contradict the judgment made at the level of the lifeworld, when this is understood with the meaning implicit in its horizon. Thus, both assertions, ‘the lamp is solid (in the everyday sense)’ and ‘the lamp is not solid (in the scientific sense)’, are true, each understood in terms of its horizon (Soffer, 1990, 93–94). Yet here, apart from the erroneous background presupposition to the effect that both viewpoints could equally ‘save the phenomena’ in their own terms (and hence could supposedly possess ‘equal explanatory power’), Soffer helps herself to this reconciliatory conclusion by surreptitiously focusing on very different levels of describing the phenomenon of perceiving the lamb and its properties (molar vs molecular) and by not making explicit the inferential implications of these claims. For the lifeworld and the scientific claim are in a direct conflict with one another if we understand them (as we must, if we want to realize why they seem to conflict) as claims about the categorial status of the perceived object and its properties: the lifeworld framework situates the lamp and its perceptible properties in a public, external world, existing independently of perceivers, while the scientific image views the lamp and its properties as features of the perceiver in its relation with an environment, where the latter is populated by external ‘objects’ with a very different categorial structure and essentially non-perceptible properties and is precisely here that the claim ‘this lamp is in fact largely empty space’ becomes relevant, namely, as a description that causally explains the different categorial status that our ordinary perceptible objects and properties have from the standpoint of the scientific image. Thus, I conclude that the interpretive line that attempts to present Husserl as a reconciliatory irenic realist with respect to the reality of the manifest and scientific image fails both as a substantive position and, a fortiori, as a way to show that Husserl’s conception of the lifeworld may in the end be compatible with robust scientific realism. To my mind, Husserl’s view of the relation between lifeworld and science remains a broadly scientific instrumentalist one, even if it is admittedly an instrumentalism of a very intriguing, novel and sophisticated form. Yet, in all fairness, it must be acknowledged that even from our, Sellars-­ inspired, point of view, there is an important truth in Husserl’s conception of the lifeworld and its relation to science that any scientific realist must accommodate: scientific explanatory posits cannot have a concrete cash value in our experiential and practical life, that is, cannot be really internalized and affect our sense of self and world directly at the experiential and

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practical level, unless they are incorporated into the ordinary lifeworld and become integral part of our everyday dealings with the world. Moreover, since the ordinary lifeworld has a holistic and systematic categorial (experiential-conceptual-intentional-horizonal) structure in which each of its basic categories, such as (middle-size) object, person, space, time, cause, mind, body, (inner and outer) perception, belief, desire and action, presuppose all the others in different, though systematic, ways, it follows that even if the scientific image is ultimately categorially superior to our current lifeworld categories, it can only meaningfully replace the latter by taking up all its roles (perceptual-inferential-practical), thus by being stereoscopically fused with it and not in a merely piecemeal manner (e.g. by first fusing (by replacing) the common-sense conception of physical objects with that of theoretical physics and then by fusing, as a separate venture, the common-sense conception of man with that of theoretical psychology)15 (Sellars, 1963a, 19; 1963c, 97). Thus, Sellars’ scientific realism is a very idiosyncratic and sophisticated one, as is Husserl’s scientific instrumentalism. Both, strictly speaking, are non-standard positions and cannot be understood in the narrow terms of contemporary analytic philosophy of science, but only in the context of their overall philosophical vision of the world and our place in it. The ‘only’ real disagreement between Sellars and Husserl on this issue concerns the ontological (and, indirectly, the semantic and practical) consequences of the incorporation of scientific categories into the ordinary lifeworld, and not whether the former provides the correct ontological interpretation of the latter in the abstract, in a merely objectifying manner.

15  Also, for Sellars, to say that manifest-image phenomena do not really exist in the dimension of description and explanation is not to say that there is good reason for adopting the envisaged new scientific framework in practice. Indeed, there are sound methodological reasons for not teaching ourselves to respond to perceptible situations in terms of constructs in the language of the scientific image. For as Sellars puts it: “While this could, in principle, be done, the scientific quest is not yet over, and even granting that the main outlines are blocked in, the framework of physical objects in space and time, shaped over millennia of social evolution, provides when accompanied by correct philosophical commentary, a firm base of operations with which to correlate the developing structure of scientific theory, refusing to embrace any stage without reserve as our very way of perceiving the world, not because it would not be a better way, but because the better is the enemy of the best” (Sellars, 1963c, 97).

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7  Conclusion The bottom line of all the above is that while the lifeworld might well be the ground of the sciences in a methodological sense as well as in the sense that it is always is the unthematic background horizon in which scientific research can be meaningfully conducted16, to say that this amounts to the view that science, however expansive and creative in constructing new ways of world-making, ultimately inherits the meaning and ontological import of its claims from lifeworld intuitive categories, is not only wrong-­ headed, but actually reverses the order of explanation. If this is correct, and if, as we argued above, the categorial framework of the lifeworld is understood in a transcendental sense, as a way of articulating Husserl’s ‘founding transcendental consciousness’ (which describes the transcendental conditions of the manifestation of persons-in-the-(intersubjective, common, external)-world), then it follows that even these ‘transcendental conditions of manifestation (of the world and ourselves in it)’ are not exempt from reconceptualization, at least in the dimension of description and explanation.17 I conclude that the key for overcoming the myth of the Given in all its forms for ‘lifeworld’ phenomenologists lie in their willingness to de-­ absolutize and resolutely ‘dialecticize’ the distinction between the lifeworld and the sciences. Yet, although I think that there is some truth in this suggestion, I also believe that it comes with a significant cost for the phenomenologist. For it can be suggested that, in this way, phenomenology would be free of the myth of the Given only at the cost of blurring the boundaries between ‘phenomenological’ and non-phenomenological (non-descriptive) philosophical standpoints. In this case, phenomenology would have to work with a very different ‘de-transcendentalized’, potentially revisable and non-intuitive conception of the lifeworld. Thus, at best, it would end up being a radically different kind of phenomenology (what we might call ‘revisionary’ phenomenology), while, at worst, what would be left over would not be recognizable as ‘phenomenology’ anymore.

16  For an interpretation of the lifeworld as the unthematic background horizon in which all our theoretical and practical dealings with the world take place, including science, see Føllesdal, 2010 and Moran, 2012. 17  For a way to salvage the sound core of the transcendental without reifying it as an absolute ontological, semantic or epistemic ground of our practices, see Chap. 6.

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References Belousek, D. (1998). Husserl on Scientific Method and Conceptual Change: A Realist Appraisal. Synthese, 115, 71–98. Brandom, R. (2015). From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars. Harvard University Press. Carnap, R. (1966). Philosophical Foundations of Physics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Basic Books. Christias, D. (2016a). Can Sellars’ Argument for Scientific Realism Be Used Against His Own scientia mensura Principle? Synthese, 193(9), 2837–2863. Christias, D. (2018a). Sellars’ Naturalism, the Myth of the Given and Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. The Philosophical Forum, 49(4), 511–539. Christias, D. (2018b). Thinking with Sellars and Beyond Sellars on the Relations Between Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. In A. Nunziante & L. Corti (Eds.), Sellars and the History of Modern Philosophy (pp. 257–276). Routledge. Føllesdal, D. (2010). The Lebenswelt in Husserl. In D. Hyder & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), Science and the Lifeworld (pp. 27–45). Stanford University Press. Gutting, G. (1978). Husserl and Scientific Realism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 39(1), 42–56. Hempel, C. (1965). Aspects of Scientific Explanation. Free Press. Husserl, E. ([1936] 1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press. Lange, M. (2000). Salience, Eupervenience and Layer Cakes in Sellars’s Scientific Realism, McDowell’s Moral Realism, and the Philosophy of Mind. Philosophical Studies, 101, 213–251. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (2009). Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Moran, D. (2012). Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. Nagel, E. (1961). The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Philipse, H. (1995). Transcendental Idealism. In B. Smith & D. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (pp. 239–323). Cambridge University Press. Sachs, C. (2014). Intentionality and the Myths of the Given: Between Pragmatism and Phenomenology. Routledge. Schiffer, S. (1991). Ceteris Paribus Laws. Mind, 100(1), 1–17. Sellars, W. (1961). The Language of Theories. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science (pp.  57–77). Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Sellars, W. (1962a). Time and the World Order. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 3, 527–616. Sellars, W. (1963a). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1963c). Phenomenalism. In W. Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 60–105). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1967a). Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1971). Autobiographical Reflections. In H.  N. Castaneda (Ed.), Action, Knowledge and Reality (pp. 277–294). Bobbs-Merill. Sellars, W. (1976). Is Scientific Realism Tenable? Proceedings of PSA, II, 307–334. Sellars, W. (1981a). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sellars, W. ([1956] 1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press. Smith, B. (1995). Common Sense. In B. Smith & D. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (pp. 394–437). Cambridge University Press. Soffer, G. (1990). Phenomenology and Scientific Realism: Husserl’s Critique of Galileo. The Review of Metaphysics, 44(1), 67–94. Theodorou, P. (2010). A Solution to the ‘paradoxical’ Relation Between Lifeworld and Science in Husserl. Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2010, 143–165. Trizio, E. (2021). Philosophy’s Nature: Husserl’s Phenomenology, Natural Science and Metaphysics. Routledge. van Fraassen, B. (1975). Wilfrid Sellars and Scientific Realism. Dialogue, 14, 606–616. van Fraassen, B. (1980). The Scientific Image. Clarendon Press. Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Lifeworld Phenomenology After Husserl: Merleau-Ponty, Enactivism, Heidegger and Science

One can attempt to defend lifeworld phenomenology against accusations of succumbing to the myth of the categorial Given by arguing that even if this is true for Husserl’s brands of transcendental phenomenology, it does not apply, for example, to Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, as they both radically depart from Husserl’s transcendental methodology while at the same time remaining recognizably ‘lifeworld’ phenomenologists. This could well be true in a sense; I do not claim that the critique of ‘lifeworld’ phenomenology presented in Chap. 3 can be applied to all conceivable versions of the latter. I believe, however, that the above critique does apply to those versions of ‘lifeworld’ phenomenology that transcendentally privilege the ‘intuitive’ categorial structure of the lifeworld over that of the scientific image, irrespectively of the level (apperceptive or non-­ apperceptive) in which they take the lifeworldly correlation between the ‘self’ and the ‘world’ to be established, or the method (phenomenological reduction or transcendental hermeneutics) through which they arrive at this view.

1   Merleau-Ponty, Lifeworld and Science Consider, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s innovation over Husserl’s phenomenology: he switched the emphasis of the fundamental transcendental correlation between the self and the world from the level of apperceptive consciousness (the Husserlian transcendental Ego) to that of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_4

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non-apperceptive consciousness (the Merleau-Pontyan correlation of body and world at the level of ‘pre-reflective’ intentionality). As is well known, in Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Merleau-Ponty develops a transcendental phenomenology of ‘embodied intentionality’ according to which the self is intentionally connected to the world at the pre-reflective level through the pre-reflective intentionality of the body. Embodied intentionality is more ‘originary’ than the intentionality of thought and is conceived by Merleau-Ponty as an openness to being sensuously affected and solicited by the world through the medium of our living body, while the world itself is not understood as the totality of facts in the sense in which ‘facts’ have propositional form, but rather as a horizonal web of attractions and repulsions to which we are pre-reflectively—albeit still intentionally—responsive. Importantly, Merleau-Ponty rejects the Husserlian conception of the transcendental, that is, his idea that we can reach a level of pure description of the world understood as an intentional correlate of a purely disinterested and self-transparent transcendental Ego. The basic transcendental structure which correlates the self and the world is no longer to be found at the level of apperceptive consciousness, as is the case in the Husserlian noesis-noema correlation, but at the level of non-apperceptive consciousness: it is the correlation between the pre-­ objective unity of the thing and the pre-objective unity of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.  367). More specifically, this ‘pre-reflective’, embodied intentionality is distinct from the discursive intentionality exhibited in thought and judgment in that, unlike the latter, it is not characterized by aboutness. Embodied intentionality lacks aboutness in the sense that there is no distinct intentional object even notionally separable from the intentional act directed toward that object (Sachs, 2014, pp. 104–105). Thus, embodied intentionality lacks the act-object structure of the intentionality of judgment: it does not individuate contents in the fine-grained way that discursive intentionality does. Yet, it does have directedness: it is the intentionality of purposive behavior at the pre-­ reflective, non-apperceptive level. Correlatively, the perceived thing at this level of non-apperceptive consciousness is not, strictly speaking, an object, because it lacks the requisite determinacy for the attribution of properties (qualities, sortals, causal dispositions) and also lacks the requisite determinacy for the assigning of completely precise spatiotemporal location. Instead, what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘the pre-objective unity of the thing and the pre-objective unity of the body’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 367) must be understood as ‘poles’ of a perceptual-practical field. The

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pre-objective unity of the thing is identified with the figure-ground structure that oscillates around a perceptual norm, though it is not an object with well-defined properties and powers (Sachs, 2014, pp. 108–109). In this sense, embodied intentionality at this non-apperceptive level differs from discursive intentionality exhibited in judgment in that, unlike the latter, it is non-decomposable: it cannot be abstracted and extracted from its context and it does not conform to the Generality Constraint (according to which, for someone to understand the thought that a is G, one must be able to think it possible that b is G or that a is H). The above core features of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy are directly animated by his decisive rejection of Husserlian phenomenological reduction: as he famously puts it: “The lesson from the phenomenological reduction is that it cannot be completed” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xiv) since the world itself insistently resists reduction. The world we perceive is always more than what we perceive, things cannot be fully grasped in perception since they only permit us to apprehend some of their profiles at a time. The world exceeds our perception, it resists full disclosure to our perceptual (and intellectual) powers. Thus, our access to reality is and will always be limited due to our very situatedness within the world. The embodied nature of our perception makes all knowledge perspectival, historical and therefore limited. The philosophical knowledge of the phenomenologist is no exception to this. And this limitation is precisely what reveals the world as exceeding us and our representations of its content (Sparrow, 2014, pp. 43–47). It is also what makes our basic intentional relation to reality, that is, the transcendental correlation between the pre-­ objective body and the pre-objective reality opaque, essentially ambiguous and incapable of being fully transparent to the detached gaze of the transcendental Ego. Thus, essentially, Merleau-Ponty develops a ‘deflationary’ conception of the lifeworld, which construes its non-thematic structure in terms of a pre-reflective intentional correlation understood in embodied, embedded and perspectival terms. And, importantly, contra Husserl, the thematization of this non-thematic structure of our intentionality remains essentially embodied, embedded and perspectival as a form of understanding. Does this move suffice to render Merleau-Ponty immune to our critique of Husserl? I think not, since this Merleau-Pontyan view still transcendentally privileges the ‘intuitive’ categorial structure of the lifeworld (the lifeworldly pre-reflective embodied and embedded correlation between the ‘self’ and the ‘world’) over science and hence is susceptible to

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exactly the same line of critique as the one we mobilized against Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld. Here it might be objected that Merleau-Ponty’s transcendental-­ phenomenological descriptions of our ‘lived experience’ are not disconnected or explanatorily isolated from science since they are the dialectical outcome of an intense engagement with (and internal critique of) scientific explanations. Thus, it might be argued that, for Merleau-Ponty, the validity of the transcendental descriptions of the lifeworld is thoroughly mediated through our awareness of the contradictions of empirical-scientific explanations of psychological (and, especially, pathological) phenomena. As is well known, for Merleau-Ponty, these explanations are either empiricist or rationalist-oriented. But, according to him, in either case, that is, whether we begin with ‘empiricism’ and attempt to explain experience in terms of causal interactions between atomic components (‘sensations’) or with ‘intellectualism’ and attempt to explain experience in terms of a unified consciousness that acts on what is given to it, we will be driven to contradictions. By showing that neither intellectualism nor empiricism can account for the diversity of normal perceptual phenomena or for pathological cases (such as the strange case of Schneider), Merleau-Ponty confronts our established scientific theories with their own limits (Sachs, 2014, p.  212). Merleau-Ponty’s own transcendental description of the lifeworld emerges as the dialectical outcome of this internal critique of both empiricist and intellectualist ‘scientistic’ standpoints. Yet, even if it is indeed true that both rationalistic and empiricist-­ minded scientific theories of psychological phenomena are in fact explanatorily inadequate, how can Merleau-Ponty exclude the possibility that some future scientific theory which is neither rationalistic nor empiricist-­ minded will live up to the explanatory task? It seems that he can do so only under certain controversial assumptions about the essence of scientific inquiry, according to which no conceivable scientific image of humanity-­ in-­the-world, being as it is a description of the world and our place in it in third-personal, objectifying, disengaged terms, could succeed in capturing the essential non-apperceptive intentional correlation between embodied subjects and the world. The conception of nature and ourselves in terms of the scientific image cannot but be, for internal-structural reasons, an abstraction from the ‘singularity’ or ‘concreteness’ of our ‘lived experience’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. vii–ix). Here Merleau-Ponty essentially follows Husserl and his instrumentalist account of scientific explanation developed in the Crisis. For example, the following passage, from the

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preface of Phenomenology of Perception, is surely suggestive of Merleau-­ Ponty’s instrumentalist understanding of science (and of his concomitant absolutization of the lifeworld): “The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-hand expression. […] To return to things themselves is to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific schematization is abstract and derivative sign-language, just like geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest, a meadow or a river is” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. viii–ix). Thus, Merleau-Ponty seems to be susceptible to the same arguments developed in Chap. 3 against Husserl’s version of scientific instrumentalism.

2   Merleau-Pontyan Enactivism and the Scientific Image Yet, again, it might be objected that, on my reading, Merleau-Ponty must reject the very possibility of any science attempting to account for the non-apperceptive embodied body-thing correlation in third-personal, objectifying terms, including contemporary enactive cognitive science.1 And since Merleau-Ponty is seen as the patron saint of enactivism, this would be quite controversial.2 Now, Ι agree that we may well envisage a scientifically updated Merleau-­ Pontyanism which would not have principled reasons to reject enactive cognitive science. What is potentially problematic about this Merleau-­ Pontyan enactivist conception of science is not so much that it equates science with an objectifying, detached explanatory standpoint but that, by (potentially) admitting the form of explanation of enactive cognitive science as legitimately scientific, it blurs the distinction between scientific-­image explanations (which I take to be non-intuitive) and manifest-image (‘intuitive’) explanations of the embodied and embedded relation between brain, body and world. 1  According to enactivists, the mind is an embodied dynamic system such that cognitive processes emerge from the non-linear and circular causality of continuous sensorimotor interactions involving the brain, body and environment (Chemero, 2009; Thompson, 2007). 2  Carl Sachs voiced this concern (personal communication).

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A non-intuitive scientific-image explanation of this relation (represented by the tradition of autopoiesis3) would roughly hold that far-from-­ equilibrium self-organizing physical systems (the brain-body-environment complex) occur as an evolutionarily explicable result of processes of ongoing stabilization, where the (allostatic) processes in question can be understood without reference to the system’s goals, purposes or intentions or to normative considerations in terms of what may be good or bad, beneficial or harmful for the ‘universal’ (e.g. species) to which the individual system (e.g. particular organism) is an actual instance. Such quasi-normative notions might be important heuristic tools for understanding the relations between organisms and environment, but at bottom they can be explanatorily discharged in resolutely non-teleological terms of, for example, ‘allostatic balance’ of a brain-body-environment system, evolutionarily explicable in terms of the system’s actual causal history (genealogical ancestry). This causal history, in turn, need not make essential reference to species (universals) and organisms (particulars) but can instead only involve individually characterized dynamically coupled (genetic-­ neurophysiological-­ environmental) morphogenetic and metabolic processes, self-organized by minimizing variational free energy and selectively retained by gradually eliminating alternatives in conditions of specific evolutionary pressures.4 Moreover, from this point of view, the appearance of teleology, that is, the fact that an organ, like the heart, or a molecule, like hemoglobin, inherits its function via involvement in the organism’s survival and reproduction, in other words, the fact that, in a sense, these organs or molecules exist because of the consequences they tend to produce, or in ordinary teleological terms, for the sake of maintaining the life of the organism, can be explained non-teleologically. The teleology involved can be reconceptualized in terms of the convergence of the organ-molecule-organism-environment system toward certain ‘target’ states (i.e. in terms of their function as ‘dynamic attractors’), which is itself 3  See, for example, Maturana & Varela, 1980. In his later work, Varela et al. (1991) parted company with Maturana and developed a more teleologically oriented interpretation of selforganizing living systems, giving birth to contemporary enactivism. 4  It is crucial here to stress that the above non-normative causal-functional explanatory concepts are invoked by evolutionary theory to explain phenomena that do not make full sense from an ‘organismic’ perspective, such as the transformation of species, the selection of maladaptive traits (the peacock’s tail, the rigidly altruistic behavior of ants), unilateral gene transfer, symbiotic interdependence and so on.

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exhaustively explained by the actual causal-evolutionary history that, through a series of stages that were initiated by a variety of multifarious selective pressures (i.e. different from those that turned out to ‘survive’ in the long run), gradually brought into being, sustained and reproduced specific ‘symbiotic’ molecule-organ-organism-environment systems, due to a (not antecedently foreseeable) gradual increase in their collective ‘survival value’.5 On the other hand, an intuitive explanation of the brain-body-world relation (represented by enactivism) holds that this relation, and its self-­ determining and organizationally closed nature, is such as to make the self-organizing systems in question (even at the level of unicellular organisms) experience themselves from ‘within’, as agents capable of making choices according to their own ‘natural’ norms and values, as controlling their behavior according to their own goals and purposes and as ‘inwardly directed’ to a world that is not an indifferent environment, but a meaningful horizon of possibilities. From this point of view, organisms have natural ends and purposes (natural normativity), organs function for the sake of maintaining the organism and a kind of non-metaphysical ‘natural teleology’ or ‘intrinsic normativity’ characterizes the ‘life-form’ of every

5  Sellars also explicitly attempts to retain the right to say that evolutionary phenomena, such as a particular wiggle of a bee, occurred because of the complex bee dance to which it belongs, while at the same time being very careful not to attribute a causal force to an abstraction (natural ‘ends’ or ‘purposes’ construed as ontological-explanatory types exemplified in particular organisms). Specifically, he argues that (1) the pattern is first exemplified by particular bees in a way that is not appropriately described by saying that the successive acts by which the pattern is realized occur because of the pattern. (2) Having a ‘wiring diagram’ which expresses itself in this pattern has survival value. (3) Through the mechanisms of heredity and natural selection it comes about that all bees have this ‘wiring diagram’. It is by mention of these items that we would be justified saying of the contemporary population of bees that each step in their dance behavior occurs because of its role in the dance as a whole (Sellars, 1954). Here we must always bear in mind that in the evolutionary history leading up to a given form of adaptation, the materials, dynamics and constraints that are retained are merely those that were not eliminated. This evolutionary ‘logic’ stands in direct contrast to our everyday ‘engineering’ logic, embodied in designed mechanisms, which tends to focus on the properties that we discern to be most relevant in our abstract sense of a given function. Life is only dependent on excluding those that are least helpful. In this sense, evolution is not imposed design, but progressive creation, preservation and replication of specific constraints (Deacon, 2013, p. 426).

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organism, including humans. We can call this ‘the existential explanatory stance’ toward living beings.6 Another, related, way to characterize this debate is the following: Are self-organizing metabolic processes best understood in teleological terms and as bearers of an intrinsic normativity whose standard is the species to which individual organisms are specimens or as individual expressions of non-teleological conservation principles (minimization of entropy) and as processes whose ‘intrinsic biological normativity’ is not dictated by ought-­ principles of ‘proper function’ in accordance to the species to which they belong? In this latter case, the ‘intrinsic biological normativity’ in question would instead be understood in terms of ‘metastable attunement’ (being attuned to opportunities for making progress in error reduction) by ‘minimizing surprise’, without any reference to proper function, ought-­ principles, purposes or species-universals (general essences) (Hohwy, 2020; Miller et al., 2021).7 To the extent to which enactive cognitive science, at least in its present stage of development, takes the above ‘existential’ explanatory stance toward living beings, it can be construed as an extension or refinement of the categorial structure of the lifeworld, regarding our understanding of ‘life’, rather than a direct challenge or abandonment of its basic categories. Manifest-image concepts and categories can well be at work even in theories that belong to our current scientific image (and this entanglement is much more probable in the case of relatively ‘immature’ sciences such as 6  Indeed, from the point of view of this ‘manifest-image’ conception of life, organisms and life-forms, it can be argued that the specific traits of human life-form, namely, the self-conscious self-knowing intellectual powers traditionally identified with personhood, are a species of the wider genus of ‘naturally normative’ capacities characterizing our ‘first nature’ such as feeling pleasure and pain (Thompson, 2008, 2013). 7  For a paradigmatic example of an existential explanatory stance toward living beings in the phenomenological tradition see Jonas ([1966] 2001). Moreno and Mossio (2015) provide a more scientifically oriented variation of this general stance by viewing organisms as biologically self-determining systems characterized by organizational closure (relations of reciprocal constraint  among parts of an organizationally differentiated system), thereby imbuing life with intrinsic normativity and teleology. For a defense of a different, non-teleological point of view of self-organizing, autopoetic systems, see Villalobos and Ward (2016). A unifying framework for understanding the self-organizing, far from equilibrium, character of biological systems in (non-teleological) terms of minimizing variational free energy (minimization of the difference between the model of the world and the associated ‘perception’ of the system, which is performed by continuous correction of the world-model of the system) is provided by Friston (2010, 2013).

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enactive cognitive science). Here, I take the concepts of ‘intentional directedness’ and of ‘organisms’ regulating their behavior according to ‘natural ends’ distinctive of their ‘species’ in response to an ‘external environment’, to be manifest-image ones, at least if they are taken as explanatory—that is, as ontologically committal ‘natural kinds’ that ‘cut nature at its joints’. However pragmatically important these concepts are in organizing and systematizing our understanding of the relation between organisms (including us) and the environment, they need not be taken as explanatorily fundamental by evolutionary theory, dynamic systems theory or autopoietic theory.8 By this I do not mean to discredit enactive cognitive science, but just to highlight the fact that we must be cautious about possible manifest-image explanatorily dispensable remnants in its conceptual framework. I conclude that if contemporary enactive cognitive science insists on privileging the intuitive categorial structure of the lifeworld over the radically non-intuitive categories of the scientific image, then even a thus updated Jonasian Merleau-Pontyanism cannot easily escape the myth of categorial Givenness—regarding, in this case, the categorial structure of the peculiar ‘inwardness’ of living beings as opposed to the ‘extensive’, ‘external’ and ‘outward’ nature of non-living matter. Our concept and categorial status of ‘life’ is not Given to consciousness, ‘from the inside’ or from an analysis of the meaning or use of the term. Neither is it (along with concepts such as ‘human being’, ‘human life-form’, ‘human species’) a basic, unrevisable representational category presupposed by empirical judgments of special sciences such as physiology, biology, anthropology, psychology or social science (Thompson, 2008). It is a culturally inherited concept which comes with a host of unacknowledged metaphysical presuppositions and is thus subject to critically controlled revision with respect to its categorial status. Indeed, it can be argued that the very emergence of the category of life (as opposed to non-living matter) was a consequence of a radical categorial revision: the sharp manifest-image categorial distinction between living and non-living things is an instance of the more general categorial change from the original ‘animistic’ image—where everything in nature was conceived as a way 8  See also here Deleuze and Guattari (1980), who offer a very different framework for understanding inorganic, organic and human life, based on a radically non-teleological conception of life as creative morphogenetic process, which does not invoke at any point categories such as ‘organisms’, ‘natural purposes’ or ‘kinds’ for explaining life-processes.

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of being a person and imbued with life—to the manifest image—where everything, except humanity, is depersonalized. Once this categorial transition was gradually consolidated, physical objects and processes began to be conceived in terms of privation, first as ‘truncated persons’ (as mere creatures of habit, acting out routines, broken by impulses) and then, in the advent of the scientific revolution, as ‘lifeless’ or ‘dead’ matter (and not just purely descriptively or ‘positively’ as expressing a distinctive way of being). This is because the categorial transition from the original to the manifest image depersonalized nature by pruning natural objects of many essential features of persons (intentions, purposes and eventually life cycle) without introducing a new category for conceptualizing this depersonalization (Sellars, 1963a, pp. 12–13). This, interestingly, suggests that in an envisaged new categorial (process) framework, which transcends both persons and objects, viewing both as ways of being processes, the categories of ‘animate’ (organisms) and ‘inanimate’ (inorganic matter) could well have a similar fate: they would both be reconceived in counterpart processual terms (as different ways of being dynamic self-organized processes), which make no essential reference to these categories (see Chaps. 7 and 9). This is not to say that there is no important distinction to be drawn between sentient and non-sentient processes. Sentient physical systems may well be loci of emergent dynamic regimes of causally efficacious sensory-­affective qualitative processes (Sellars, 1981a) and thereby have needs, desires and care about their own being in a way that is not the case for non-sentient systems. It’s just that this distinction is not further illuminated ontologically by saying that sentient metabolic systems are ‘living’ while inorganic systems are ‘non-living’—as if the former causally influence the world around them by being instantiations of universals (‘natural ends’), that is, by being the ‘tokens’ of types that have real physical consequences as such, and the causal powers of which are ‘expressed’ to their embodied instances. Again, this is not to deny that sentient beings can have emergent properties that do not show up in non-sentient processes. But we must carefully distinguish between what we might call ‘nominalistically respectable’ emergence, where emergent (dynamic qualitative sensory-­affective) properties make a difference to the world as concrete

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processual individuals, that is, not as types, generals or kinds,9 and a ‘universal realist’ emergence, where ‘ends’, ‘purposes’ or ‘values’ directly influence the world as generals, as types of things, as final, formal and efficient causes.10

3  Heidegger, Lifeworld and Science What about Heidegger? Can he avoid the problems that plague Husserl’s transcendental conception of the lifeworld and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘intuitive’ conception of life and embodied intentionality? As we shall see, Heidegger makes a vigorous attempt to salvage the transcendental and existential 9  Note that while the nominalistic rejection of any form of final, formal or efficient cause is historically connected with the rise of the ‘impact’ paradigm of causation and mechanistic explanation in which causal influence is understood on the ‘push-and-pull’ model of physical interaction, it is nevertheless conceptually distinct from it. Indeed, as we saw, Sellars himself rejected this overly restrictive understanding of causation and believed that the idea of the ‘causal closure of the physical’, which is the logical consequence of projecting this understanding of causal explanation to everything that exists, is the reason why the qualitative (sensory-affective) features of consciousness cannot be accommodated within a scientific worldview (Sellars, 1981a). Moreover, relatedly, Sellars’ dynamic and nominalistic conception of emergence, based as it is on a process metaphysics, escapes the devastating critique of mainstream emergence theories that (unsuccessfully) attempt to combine a mereological and supervenient conception of levels of physical and mental causation (ultimately grounded on a traditional substance ontology) with the claim that some causal relationships invert this logic (Kim, 1993). 10  See also Deacon (2013), for an elaboration and defense of a yet third view, according to which ‘ends’, ‘purposes’ and intentional properties in general are understood as emergent ‘contragrade’ processes that indirectly determine which differences can or cannot make a difference in the world by constraining or restricting the expression of other processes that could have taken place in the absence of these constraints. From this point of view, emergent properties—including ‘teleological’ ones—are not something ‘over and above’ lower-level properties, but rather a reflection of something restricted via scale-ascend due to constraints propagated from lower-level dynamical properties. Interestingly, on this view, against both realism and nominalism, generals determined by constraint relationships are not types or classes, but neither are they individuals. I find this proposal promising and worthy of further examination and elaboration. My main reservation is that the teleological generality that does the ‘causal work’ here, namely, the notion of ‘absent (constrained) possibility’, inherits many features of the traditional notion of possibility (and of the substance-property metaphysical framework, otherwise firmly rejected by Deacon), as opposed to the non-traditional (non-teleological and non-general) notion of ‘virtuality’, explored by Deleuze, which I find more attractive for process metaphysics (see Chap. 7).

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features that make phenomenology both uniquely relevant for understanding human experience and a ‘first philosophy’ that can ultimately ground it. And he does this, among other things, by means of a highly innovative ‘existential’ critique of science. It must be remembered that Heidegger flatly rejects the objectifying, ‘apperceptive’ version of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology— which he would interpret as an absolutization of ‘the theoretical attitude’, adopted by a supposed radically uninvolved spectator of the world in the guise of the ‘transcendental subject’. Moreover, he attempts to devise an entirely new philosophical method for understanding the ‘being’ of the lifeworld, the existential-hermeneutical method, which radically departs from Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. Heidegger points out that Husserl’s insistence on ‘bracketing’ being or existence overlooks an important and irreducible aspect of our experience: the brute fact that we always already find ourselves existing in a surrounding world, in which things do not go as expected, being sometimes boring or painful, and in which people eventually die. Heidegger calls this the ‘thrownness’ of our existence: we are thrown into a world which was not of our making and which we never fully control or comprehend. This brute ‘facticity’ of our existence is expressed in our taking our being as ‘an issue for us’, as something that we essentially care about—with this caring being essential to our very pre-theoretical understanding of ourselves as ‘open’ to the world in a temporal way, as what Heidegger calls ‘thrown projection’ (anticipation of an open future in conditions partly determined by our cultural-biological past). Thus, for Heidegger, contra Husserl, existence comes before essence, and any adequate understanding of ourselves-­ in-­the-world must take account of this fact. This, again contra Husserl, does not mean that philosophy is fatally psychologized by being transformed into a broadly empirical branch of anthropology. The task of philosophy as phenomenology is to investigate in a non-objectified manner the a priori structure of our existential constitution as beings-in-the(life)world. Given this framework, Husserl’s notion of intentionality is radically transformed and is now understood as a non-intentional openness to the (life)world based on an always already existing, non-thematic and non-­ theoretical ‘pre-understanding’ of its basic contours and our place in them. Indeed, any interpretation of something as something, including the linguistic assertions that point out and communicate about entities in any definite way, presupposes a more basic, unexplicated

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pre-understanding. Again, this is related to what Heidegger calls ‘Dasein’s essential finitude’: the fact that we are always already in the midst of the world, situated within it through culturally mediated and project-oriented spatiotemporal perspectives. This spatiotemporally embodied and culturally embedded nature of our ‘being-in-the-world’ makes all understanding and knowledge perspectival, historical and hermeneutic in structure. It is also what makes our basic ‘directional’ relation to reality, that is, the world-disclosing function of ‘Dasein’, incapable of being fully transparent to the detached gaze of the (Husserlian) transcendental Ego (Heidegger, [1927] 1996). As for the concept of givenness, Heidegger maintains that the environing world is not something given, because for something environmental to be given to us we must have already performed a theoretical abstraction (by adopting a ‘present-at-hand’, de-historicized attitude toward the world and ourselves) (Grollo, 2022, p.  10). The ordinary things of the world, like the books, tables and chairs within a classroom, are not given to the theoretical gaze but are primarily encountered in their significance, which essentially involves our everyday practical and emotional attitudes toward them (Heidegger, 2008, p.  69). According to Heidegger, our world is not populated by objects of contemplation but by things of practice that form a web or nexus of tools and equipment where every one thing refers to others and to the practical context it belongs to and can be used in. Consequently, it is not theoretical cognition that marks our primary approach to the world but a practical kind of knowledge of handling things which we care about. Primarily the (life)world is that which we find ourselves in, in the horizon of which we act, not a collection of objects to which subjects stand over against, or an object of a theoretically rigorous ‘science’ based on the disinterested gaze of the Husserlian ‘transcendental subject’. Thus, Heidegger in effect not only adopts what we above called the ‘deflationary’ interpretation of the Husserlian lifeworld but radicalizes the latter by conceiving it in essentially existential terms. We cannot really understand the lifeworld and our place in it unless we conceive it in resolutely non-objectified, non-present-at-hand terms, always remembering (contra Husserl) that ‘existence precedes essence’. Yet, for all his important differences from Husserl in his conception of the lifeworld, Heidegger follows Husserl in transcendentally privileging the ‘intuitive’ categorial (in Heidegger’s case ‘existential’) structure of the lifeworld over that of the scientific image and for the same reason as Merleau-Ponty: his unreserved adherence to Husserl’s instrumentalist conception of science and scientific

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explanation. In Heidegger’s hands, Husserl’s instrumentalist conception of science takes an existential turn: the scientific image conceives the world and ourselves as ‘present-at-hand’ entities, that is, in third-personal, objectifying, disengaged terms, which cannot capture the essentially ‘ready-to-­ hand’ embodied, embedded and engaged manner of our being-in-the-world, of the lifeworld. In other words, in science we discover entities shorn of their practical involvements, as merely occurrent (present-at-hand). We then talk about, for example, a hammer not as appropriate and available for a task at hand, but as an object with mass and spatiotemporal location. It thereby acquires a new mode of intelligibility. Its local, contextual involvements are displaced by a theoretical contextualization, which projects nature as mathematizable and as a gigantic machine governed by mechanistic laws. As Heidegger himself puts this point: “What is decisive for the development [of mathematical physics] lies in the mathematical projection of nature itself. This projection discovers in advance something constantly occurrent (matter) and opens the horizon to look for guidance to its quantitatively determinable constitutive aspects (motion, force, location, and time)” (Heidegger, [1927] 1996, p. 362). From this point of view, science—and theoretical cognition more generally—is seen as a derivative mode of understanding. Assertions about present-at-hand entities are intelligible only through Dasein’s prior immersion into a ready-to-­ hand world, and this latter mode of Dasein’s being cannot be represented as an object of knowledge (by science), as this very move would immediately distort its ownmost way of being. Ready-to-hand knowledge is unobjectifiable. Thus, the conception of nature and ourselves in terms of the scientific image is—and is destined to remain forever—an abstraction from the ‘singularity’ or ‘concreteness’ of our lived experience. Later in his career, Heidegger departed somewhat from this line of thought and again criticized science from an existential point of view, which, now however, was not based on an attempt to articulate essential differences among ways of being (present-at-hand, ‘ready-to-hand’) and was supplanted by a historicized understanding of the intelligibility of entities. Attentiveness to the difference between entities and their intelligibility was no longer expressed by a philosophical classification of essentially different ways of being. That, in turn, meant that science could no longer have the ontological significance of discovering entities as present-­ at-­hand (of taking the ‘contemplative stance’ over nature and ourselves). Having lost its fundamental-ontological significance, science was reconceived as an essential phenomenon of modernity. Modern science is now

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seen as a research program, as an enterprise, that does not suspend practical concern with entities, but intensifies it (Rouse, 2005). From this point of view, the main problematic feature of science and the scientific image of humanity-in-the-world is that the latter in modernity becomes the theoretical expression of a more fundamental essentially instrumental practical stance or mode of experiencing the world and ourselves as natural or human resources to be mastered and controlled (as opposed to their being treated as something that has value for its own sake) (Heidegger, [1949] 2012). Thus, even if science, for example, as enactive cognitive science, claims to provide essential insights into the embodied, embedded and engaged manner of our being-in-the-world (Sect. 2), Heidegger would insist that (a) it presupposes in an unacknowledged manner his own more fundamental ontology that provides a direct phenomenological description of our modes of disclosing worldly entities in the context of the lifeworld and (b) it essentially impoverishes the wealth of human experience on which it is grounded by providing objectifying explanations of that phenomenological experience for scientific one-sided instrumental purposes—which for Heidegger come down to domination and control of the environment, others and ourselves through means-ends rationality (Heidegger, 1993). As we saw, Heidegger’s conception of science, although heavily influenced by Husserl’s view of science in the Crisis,11 is not a mere reiteration of the latter but is deeply original especially in its attempt to unearth the deeper existential stances or modes of experiencing the world that make science a practice that inevitably brings forth only certain (dominating, controlling, calculative) aspects of our everyday lived experience while concealing others. Does this mean that Heidegger can evade our critique of Husserl’s scientific instrumentalism? Before we can say that much, we must first consider the following three points: (1) While science may reduce objects to instrumental means rather than ends, this need not necessarily be the case. For example, according 11  Recall that the early Heidegger, under the influence of Husserl, holds that modern natural science constituted itself by objectifying nature as an essentially mathematically described realm of mechanistically related events. That is, he accepts Husserl’s analysis to the effect that the essence of science lies of the Galilean mathematization of nature—and that the experimental dimension of science is a consequence of this mathematical projection upon nature (Heidegger [1927] 1996, p. 72).

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to Marcuse (who was himself influenced by Heidegger’s critique of techno-science), while scientific rationality, as things stand, is directed toward domination, this need not be conceived as an essential, unalterable orientational feature of scientific practice. It is contingent and thus changeable. A new type of theoretical reason, fostered by changes in the relations of production and the abolition of the ‘performance principle’ characteristic of contemporary capitalism, would generate a new science and new technological designs (modeled on aesthetic practices) which could place us in harmony with nature rather than in conflict with it (Marcuse, [1964] 2013). Also, O’Neill (1993) develops such an analysis by drawing explicitly on the Marxist notion of the humanization of the senses. Scientific practice depends on—and is one form of expressing—the capacity for the specifically human disinterested use of the senses (which is also a basic characteristic of artistic creation). In this sense, there is no a priori reason for thinking that scientific practice cannot be compatible with (or even foster) a non-instrumental responsiveness to natural objects as ends rather than merely as means. Here it must be noted that even Heidegger himself hints at the possibility of a novel mode of technological revealing which is supposed to be completely disentangled from the modern scientific way of thinking. This novel mode of technological revealing would be effected through a revival of craftsmanship as art, where art as a kind of expertise incorporated in craft, would bring forth telic tendencies of being (e.g. in the form of ordinary artifacts whose very production process would incorporate moral and aesthetic standards characteristic of their ‘essence’, as was the case in the pre-modern ancient Greek world). Thus, Heidegger suggests that art is technological as techné and its mode of revealing, fused through expertise with craft, can open up new non-instrumental and non-alienating ways of world-disclosing (Heidegger, 1977; Ihde, 2010). Perhaps the above views stem from the later Heidegger’s heavy romantic overtones of a nostalgic merging of art and technology as exemplified in ancient Greek culture (which, incidentally, did not find any fault with having slaves—and excluding women from—performing this merging), as well as from his conviction that technology can be authentically world-disclosing only if it is straightforwardly embodied in a non-dominating ready-to-hand manner (his example is handwriting as opposed to typewriting). But Heidegger forgets that for any technology (including handwriting and indeed writing

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itself), there must be an initial discomforting and experientially opaque learning process where our relation to it is present-at-hand and involves ‘controlling’ or ‘dominating’ attitudes, in order for it to be later withdrawn, and allows us to express skillfully and artfully the novel possibilities it discloses (Ihde, 2010, pp.  123–124). This is perhaps why Heidegger does not see that science, technology and techné as art are inextricably entangled not only in antiquity, but also in modernity, and will continue to be so in the future. And this is also why he is blind to the fact that science, as embodied technology, by decontextualizing worldly entities does not only ‘conceal’ or closes off possibilities, but thereby opens up hitherto unforeseen spaces of possibilities for the efficient and creative expression of our powers to think and act. (All this becomes clear if we remind ourselves that writing is also a culturally invented technology, no less artificial and control—or domination-involving than any other.12) (2) An important clarification is also here in order about the various senses in which scientific practice might be considered as having an ‘instrumental’ character. Science (as indeed any human practice) is ultimately informed by deep-seated human practical interests and purposes, and in this sense it is inevitably thereby ‘existentially oriented’ toward certain world-disclosing possibilities. Up to this point Heidegger is right in that science (and technology) is not in this sense neutral. But, contra Heidegger, this existential orientation must not be fatalistically construed. The needs-interests and general existential orientation of science might, for example, be ‘the domination and control of nature, others and ourselves’ (Heidegger, 1977; Horkheimer & Adorno, [1944] 2002) or might be related to our need to liberate ourselves from any kind of ‘exter12  Indeed, the reminder that even writing is ultimately an artificial ‘linguistic’ technology and that we can express ourselves in terms of it gives dramatic expression to the fact that our very inner self and its ‘authentic’ expression is not given in advance but is an ongoing selfconstructing process shaped by technological, initially ‘artificial’ (abstruse, opaque) innovations. Contra Plato (Phaedrus), there is no such thing as the ‘authentic’ self that can unearth the ‘truth’ about itself and the world independently of ‘techno-scientific’ innovations such as writing. For only the latter, with the idealized concepts it brings into existence, the related ‘calculative-controlling’ attitudes, and the ensuing huge enhancement of ‘collective memory’, makes pragmatically possible to thematize, stabilize, control, criticize and culturally reproduce space of reasons structures in a large-scale manner, in a reliable and collaborative way.

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nal’ limitation, constraint or obstacle (be it physical, psychical or social) which hinders the free expression of our capacities and abilities in the world. Note that although these interests can well coexist in practice, they are clearly different in kind and hence point toward very different ways in which science might be considered as having an ‘instrumentally’ oriented world-disclosing dimension. Specifically, in the latter case, the domination of nature, far from being a self-perpetuating end in itself would ultimately be a means for satisfying the deeper need/end of liberating ourselves from any kind of external limitation, constraint or obstacle to the free exercise of perceptual and intellectual capacities and abilities. Moreover, even in the case that scientific instrumentalities were directly linked to the ‘domination and control of nature, others, and ourselves’, this by itself would not necessarily imply that the latter are thereby coerced, distorted or oppressed. This is so for the following reasons: a. As we saw above, the ‘enframing’ of worldly entities by the techno-­ scientific way of thinking, namely, their abstraction, decontextualization and susceptibility to control and manipulation through standardized procedures, does not only ‘conceal’ or close off possibilities but is also the condition of possibility of bringing to light hitherto unforeseen spaces of possibilities for the efficient and creative expression of our powers to think and act. Recall again that the very practice of writing is an artificial technology. b. The fact that ‘instrumental’ reason attempts, by its very nature, to gain mastery and control over its ‘objects’ by using them as means to achieve a certain end—be they natural processes, us or other people—does not necessarily imply that the ‘objects’ in question are thereby treated merely as means, that is, not also as ends in themselves. Although in practice it is often the case that treating something or someone as a means amounts to not treating it as an end in itself, this is not necessarily so: treating something as a means to an end does not automatically imply that it is thereby not treated as an end in itself (Kant, 1993, p. 36). In this sense, instrumental reason in its theoretical dimension (science), by exercising control over its ‘objects’, need not be considered as necessarily revealing

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them as a ‘standing reserve’,13 but, in ­treating them as means, it can well treat them, always, at the same time, as ends in themselves, as objects of respect, thus deserving to exercise and maximize their capacities and abilities in a ‘collectively resonant’ manner. The above distinctions enable us to distinguish between an emancipatory and a non-emancipatory dimension in this practical stance and process of dominating and controlling nature, ourselves and others (a possibility that seems to be absent in Heidegger). Domination over nature, ourselves and others would be emancipatory only if it thereby contributed to our deeper need for liberation from all kinds of epistemic, practical, biological, psychological, individual and social constraints to the free expression, cultivation and enhancement of our sensory and intellectual capacities and abilities (see also Chap. 12 for further elaboration and defense of these points). And a scientific rationality oriented to this latter liberating end, joined by a thereby reoriented technology, need not at all be considered as inherently oppressive and distortive of our lived experience—as if modern science and technology had some unchangeable existential essence. Of course, in actual practice the dominating attitude of scientific reason can well prevail over the liberating dimension, but the ultimate point is that these two dimensions are not only capable of being normatively distinguished (as above), but are always intertwined in actual practice, and in many cases, what explains the prevalence of the dominating over the liberating dimension of science might not be necessarily internal to scientific practice. (3) In any case, irrespectively of the view one has of the deeper needs-­ interests that inform our scientific practices (‘domination as endin-­itself’ or ‘control in the service of liberation’ view), it does not follow from any of those views that the conceptual framework of everyday ‘lifeworldly’ experience (which is composed of both instrumental and non-instrumental elements) has an unchallengeable authenticity which cannot be trumped by any postulational explanatory framework constructed along different categories. 13  According to Heidegger, contemporary techno-science reveals things to us as ‘standing reserve’, in the sense that everything is imposed upon or ‘challenged’ to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on interminably (Heidegger, 1993; Braver, 2014, pp. 194–197; Ihde, 2010, pp. 33–35).

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This would follow only if it could be shown not only that there is a non-instrumental way of practically relating ourselves to the world and others (this much is true and could be conceded by science and scientific realism), but also that philosophy—in the guise of existential phenomenology—has privileged and more authentic semantic and epistemic access to the way of being of this phenomenon in the context of the lifeworld, independently of empirical inquiry (i.e. our theories about what non-­instrumentality is and its complex relations to instrumental behavior). The mere fact that the lifeworld has a ‘ready-to-hand’ structure and science an (initially) ‘present-at-hand’ one does not suffice to show that we, as philosophers, have more ‘authentic’ semantic and epistemic access to the former. Our understanding of ourselves in the context of our lifeworld experience, what we take ourselves to be in this context, need not correspond to what we really are (in the dimension of describing and explaining). To think otherwise smacks of the myth of the categorial Given. The kind of instrumentalism that we are opposed to and is at issue in our critique of Husserl in particular and lifeworld phenomenology in general is thus the view that the conceptual framework of everyday ‘lifeworldly’ experience has an unchallengeable authenticity which cannot be trumped by any scientific postulational explanatory categories. Scientific realism is only incompatible with this narrower sense of instrumentalism (which we might call ‘categorial instrumentalism’) and is fully compatible with the broader sense of term according to which something serves as an instrument if it can be conceived as a tool in the service of deep-seated human practical interests and purposes. Moreover, scientific realism does not have any specific reason to deny the reality of the non-instrumental point of view. Scientifically informed concepts could even exemplify such a point, by their being conceptually incorporated in our perceptual and practical non-inferential responses to the world and others. Scientific realism would be incompatible with the non-instrumental point of view only if the latter, and its ‘ready-to-hand’ structure, were to be understood in complete independence from theories about non-instrumental behavior informed by empirical-scientific inquiry. But absent a reifying, absolute distinction between empirical-scientific and a priori philosophical (phenomenological) theories about the world and our place in it, there is little reason to accept the above view. And what

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reason do we have to believe in such an absolute distinction—especially if we take into account that it would presuppose the existence of an inquiry-­ independent point of view from which the phenomenologist could ‘intuitively’ peer into the existential essence of humanity? Moreover, as we shall see in Chaps. 5 and 12, scientific explanations, pace Heidegger, need not be essentially ‘calculative’, ‘deductive’ or ‘orderable as a system of information’ (Heidegger, 1977, p. 23), like Newtonian explanations, but can well be historically oriented, situated and dynamic like Darwinian explanations. Indeed, as Rouse points out (2005), certain revolutionary shifts in scientific practice, far from invariably seeking greater mastery over nature, may sacrifice calculative precision and laboratory control to advance different concerns. For example, Dobzhansky’s adaptation of Drosophila genetics to study genetic variation in natural populations deliberately sacrificed both experimental precision and mathematical tractability of inheritance (Kohler, 1994). Heidegger could perhaps insist here that scientific explanations, however situated, historically oriented or non-calculative they might be, remain inherently objectifying since one of their essential functions is to ‘decontextualize’ our lifeworldly experience. This is correct so far as it goes, but only if we add that this objectifying function thereby opens up novel possibilities of perceiving, thinking and acting and serves the (critical) purpose of reconceptualizing or even recategorizing our ‘lifeworldly’ (perceptual, affective, practical) experience. The bottom line of all this is that the fact that scientific explanations are objectifying would have an ‘inauthentic’ effect in our lived experience only if we already tacitly endorse the view that was challenged in Chap. 3, according to which there is some definite way of ‘intuitively’ apprehending the ‘authentic’, true concreteness of our everyday lived experience, which, for this reason, forms an autonomous stratum of self-­authenticating intuitive descriptions and explanations that cannot be challenged by scientific counterpart, categorially different, ‘non-intuitive’ descriptions and explanations. Thus, it turns out that the Heideggerian account of science, which indeed delves more deeply into the practical underpinnings of our scientific practices, needs to engage directly with our argument against scientific anti-realism in Chap. 3, since, as we saw, scientific anti-realism cannot be just derived from the fact that science as a practice uses (‘present-at-hand’) descriptions and explanations as tools or instruments to fulfill the basic human need of liberating ourselves from constraints through the control

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and harnessing of hitherto untamed (unpredictable, threatening, anomalous) parts of nature, ourselves and others.14

4  Heideggerian Transcendental Hermeneutics to the Rescue? Here a Heideggerian could object to the above line of thought as follows: it is true that in one sense Heidegger follows Husserl ([1913] 1983) in conceiving of phenomenology as a theoretical enterprise that aims to reveal the a priori, transcendental conditions that shape and structure our lived experience, through an equally a priori philosophical method (existential analytic of Dasein). These transcendental structures are presupposed—and thus are in a sense present—in all experience, but as they cannot simply be read off from experience itself, the need emerges for a careful phenomenological analysis to reveal them as they are. But, as was mentioned earlier, contra Husserl, Heidegger claims (under the influence of Dilthey) that phenomenology is not just transcendental but is also hermeneutic (see also Braver, 2014; Caputo, 1984; Kisiel, 2002). That is, its goal is always to provide an interpretation of our being-in-the-world, which, on the one hand, is guided by certain historically embedded ways of thinking (ways of taking as reflected in Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of Being) that the philosopher as ‘Dasein’ and as interpreter brings to the task and, on the other hand, is ceaselessly open to improvement, revision or replacement. For Heidegger, this hermeneutic structure is not a limitation on understanding, but a precondition of it, and philosophical understanding (conceived as fundamental ontology) is no exception15 (Wheeler, 2020). Does this not challenge our above-sketched picture of the existential phenomenologist supposedly presupposing the existence of an inquiry-­independent ‘transcendental’ point of view from which s/he could ‘intuitively’ peer into the existential essence of humanity? Before responding to this challenge, we must first note that there is a certain tension between the hermeneutic conception of phenomenology 14  However, as the issue of the sense in which the instrumentality inherent in scientific intelligibility may or may not have a detrimental or distortive effect on our experience, thinking and acting is somewhat more complicated than the sketchy remarks of this section suggest, we will examine it again in more detail in Chap. 12, this time in the context of Frankfurt School’s critique of science. 15  Thus, Being and Time itself has a spiral structure in which a sequence of reinterpretations produces an ever more illuminating comprehension of Being.

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and a project that aims to uncover the a priori transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of being-in-the-world (the working out of the ‘fore-structures of understanding’). And this tension is never fully resolved in Being and Time, albeit perhaps only in the sense that the transcendental itself is in a sense historicized.16 But note that the transcendental is not historicized in an empirical or a posteriori sense of this latter term. The existential structures of Dasein are not historicized in an ordinary empirical sense of ‘history’ that would make the latter a legitimate object of empirical-scientific inquiry. Instead, historicity becomes one of the necessary existential features of Dasein. Thus, Heidegger bridges the gap between the transcendental and the historical only by opening another between transcendental historicity and empirical-scientific historical investigation. It seems therefore that Heidegger never escapes the tendency of turning the methodological (at bottom, normative) distinction between a priori and a posteriori (transcendental and empirical) into a substantial dualism between two irreconcilable ways of openness to the world and ourselves (existential-hermeneutical and empirical-scientific) (see also Chap. 6). By not recognizing that the transcendental (existential-­ hermeneutical) and the empirical (scientific inquiry) are distinguishable yet inseparable and mutually supporting normative distinctions within our practices, ultimately justified by broadly pragmatic considerations, Heidegger comes dangerously close to mythical Givenness, despite his alleged openness to revision and self-correction with the use of the existential-­ hermeneutical method. A method that revises and corrects itself independently of empirical-scientific inquiry and its own self-­ correcting procedures does not seem to embrace the possibility of revision and self-correction resolutely enough to escape mythical Givenness. In effect, whatever revisions or corrections the existential-hermeneutical phenomenologist performs from the ‘armchair’ (based on a priori, non-­ empirical, ‘intuitive’ criteria), the fact remains that for the existential phenomenologist there are some definite ways of ‘intuitively’ apprehending the ‘authentic’, true concreteness of our everyday lived experience, which, for this reason, form autonomous strata of intuitive philosophical 16  There is something of a divide in certain areas of contemporary Heidegger scholarship over whether one should emphasize the transcendental dimension of Heidegger’s phenomenology (Crowell, 2001; Crowell & Malpas, 2007) or the hermeneutic dimension (Kisiel, 2002).

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transcendental ‘elucidations’ of our lived experienced that cannot be challenged by scientific counterpart, categorially different, ‘non-intuitive’ descriptions and explanations, but only by supposedly ‘better’ such transcendental elucidations of the same (a priori, ‘intuitive’) kind. And I think that this artificial and absolute insulation of transcendentally from empirical-­scientifically informed discourse (and  corresponding forms of revision, replacement or challenge) eventually leads Heidegger to the reification of certain structural ‘ready-to-hand’ features of the ordinary lifeworld and  to the relegation of the features of the lifeworld that are susceptible to empirical-scientific investigation to a merely ‘ontic’ (secondary, instrumental) status. But, to adopt to Heidegger’s case what was said in Chap. 3 about the reification of the observable-unobservable distinction, the status of an object as ‘ready-to-hand’ or ‘present-at-hand’ is not categorially or transcendentally fixed in advance, and no a priori transcendental methods—however indispensable they may be as normative tools for coordinating inquiry—can all by themselves (or by being ‘hermeneutically’ improved and revised) insulate and circumscribe lived experience from an empirical-scientific rendering of its being and intelligibility. Indeed, this latter empirical-scientific dimension of the being and intelligibility of the world ‘out there’, along with scientifically informed metaphysics, are indispensable for disclosing the ‘phenomenologically dark’ dimensions of lived experience—something that no a priori transcendental method can do for structural reasons. These phenomenologically dark dimensions find expression in unconscious habitual behavior, dreams, hallucinations, systematic yet incomprehensible abnormalities in verbal and non-verbal behavior in autism, schizophrenia, split-brain patients and so on. Understanding these phenomenologically dark dimensions is precisely something which we deeply (if somewhat opaquely) care about, as they directly—yet inconspicuously—affect our survival and well-being. And as we shall see in Chaps. 5 and 8, the scientific image, through its experimental settings and technological applications (themselves being the practical cashing out of novel scientific concept-formation), reconfigures and rearticulates the world (worldly possibilities) in novel, previously invisible, ways, thus continuously shifting the boundaries between the world as perceived and understood in the context of lived experience and the larger

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physical setting, opaque to our experience and understanding, against which the lifeworld environment stands out.17 It is precisely this vital capacity for disclosing part of the phenomenologically dark worldly domains that provides the cash value (i.e. gives us an ‘existential’ reason) for thinking that the scientific image captures ‘what really exists’ in the order of description and explanation.18 Control or mastery over nature and ourselves is justified only to the extent to which it contributes to this liberating existential project of humanity. From this point of view, the scientific spirit, guided and constrained by the normative theoretical and practical collective ideals of the space of reasons, must be seen not as aiming at mastery, but at mastery of mastery; not as the power to dominate, but as the power to dominate domination, thereby abolishing it19 (Brassier, 2020).

References Brassier, R. (2020). The Human (Unpublished Manuscript). file:///C:/Users/ dxris/Downloads/Ray%20Brassier%20'The%20Human'%20[unpublished%20 text]%20(2).pdf Braver, L. (2014). Heidegger: Thinking and Being. Polity Press. Caputo, J. (1984). Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘hermeneutic’ Phenomenology. Husserl Studies, 1, 157–178. Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. MIT Press. Crowell, S. (2001). Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning. Northwestern University Press. Crowell, S., & Malpas, J. (Eds.). (2007). Transcendental Heidegger. Stanford University Press. Deacon, T. (2013). Incomplete Nature: How Mind emerged from Matter. W.W. Norton. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Friston, K. (2010). The Free-Energy Principle. A Unified Brain Theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.

17  Thus, according to this pragmatic conception of science, scientific practices rearrange their surroundings so that novel aspects of the world show themselves, familiar features are manifest in new ways and new guises, while other seemingly intelligible possibilities are closed off or reconfigured. Importantly, scientific practices thereby transform what is at issue and at stake in how we live our lives and understand ourselves (Rouse, 2015, pp. 215–220). 18  Chapter 5 can be seen as an elaboration of this latter point. 19  This theme is discussed in some detail in Chap. 12.

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Friston, K. (2013). Life as We Know It. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 10(86), 20130475. Grollo, S. (2022). Rethinking Husserl’s Lifeworld: The Many Faces of the World in Heidegger’s Early Freiburg Lecture Courses. Continental Philosophy Review, 1–16. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology. Harper and Row. Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. Routledge. Heidegger, M. ([1927] 1996). Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. (2008). Ontology  – The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. ([1949] 2012). Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Indiana University Press. Hohwy, J. (2020). New Directions in Predictive Processing. Mind and Language, 35(2), 209–223. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. ([1944] 2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press. Husserl, E. ([1913] 1983). I deas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Ihde, D. (2010). Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives. Fordham University Press. Jonas, H. ([1966] 2001). The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kant, I. ([1785] 1993). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Hackett. Kim, J. (1993). Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge University Press. Kisiel, T. (2002). Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts. Continuum. Kohler, R. E. (1994). Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago University Press. Marcuse, H. ([1964] 2013). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge. Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Publishing Company. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Miller, M., Kieverstein, J., & Rietveld, E. (2021). The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-being. Emotion Review, 14(1), 15–30. Moreno, A., & Mossio, M. (2015). Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Inquiry. Springer. O’Neill, J. (1993). Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World. Routledge. Rouse, J. (2005). Heidegger on Science and Naturalism. Division I Faculty Publications. Paper 36.

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Rouse, J. (2015). Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. University of Chicago Press. Sachs, C. (2014). Intentionality and the Myths of the Given: Between Pragmatism and Phenomenology. Routledge. Sellars, W. (1954). Some Reflections on Language Games. Philosophy of Science, 21(3), 204–228. Sellars, W. (1963a). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1981a). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sparrow, T. (2014). The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh University Press. Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press. Thompson, M. (2008). Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought. Harvard University Press. Thompson, M. (2013). Forms of Nature. In G. Hindrichs & A. Honnett (Eds.), Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress (pp. 701–735). Vittorio Klostermann. Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press. Villalobos, M. and Ward, D. (2016) Lived Experience and Cognitive Science. Constructivist Foundations, 11(2), 204–212. Wheeler, M. (2020). Martin Heidegger, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In E.  Zalta (Ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/ heidegger/

CHAPTER 5

Toward a Non-representational Conception of Science and the Lifeworld

1   Non-representational Scientific Realism As we saw in Chap. 4, scientific instrumentalist in the broad ‘pragmatic’ sense is compatible with scientific realism. And what is more, these two views are intimately connected and even mutually reinforcing. This is because (1) it can be suggested that the very recognition of explanatory anomalies within a framework as something disturbing, problematic and in need of ‘renormalization’ (novel explanatory accommodation) does not make sense except in the context of our deep-seated ‘instrumental’ need for a removal of whatever hinders the ‘optimal’ expression of our capacities and abilities as persons-in-the-world. (2) But, as we saw in Chap. 3, we cannot make proper sense of the way in which the above novel explanatory accommodation works, that is, of how an explanatory framework accounts for the explanatory anomalies of a predecessor framework, unless we interpret the former realistically. From this point of view, it is precisely the deep-seated ‘instrumental’ need for unconditional freedom from constraint that demands for its satisfaction a realistic interpretation of the entities and processes disclosed from the standpoint of scientific reason. An important consequence of this line of thought is that, despite appearances to the contrary, the scientific image’s claim to disclose what is ‘really real’ (as opposed to what is represented or taken as real) does not presuppose its taking an overarching ‘neutral’ stance (as Dennett (1987, 2013) seems to suggest) or a ‘stance outside all stances’ (Kukla, 2017). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_5

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The realistic interpretation of scientifically described entities and processes is indispensable if we are to make sense of practical and epistemic demands and commitments that are formulated from the inside of our descriptive and explanatory practices and have a coordinating role in empirical inquiry. This means that scientific realism’s account of what is ‘really real’ is internally related to what it is for human organisms to find their way around in the environment (in an ever-increasing range of contexts of action). The ‘really real’ is precisely that which resists our efforts to optimally find our way around in an ever-increasing range of environments. All this, of course, comes at a cost, which, however, I hope to show it is indeed no cost at all, but rather a solid and tightly coherent position. The ‘cost’ in question is that a resolutely non-representational scientific realism must adhere to a non-representationalist semantics which rejects substantial word-world meaning, truth and reference relations, and, ideally, it must be complemented with an ontology that makes this feature explicit in its own structure. At first sight the combination of scientific realism and non-­ representationalist semantics might be considered odd, as most contemporary versions of the former adhere to a naturalistic ontology, which, although not directly inconsistent with non-representationalism in semantics, seems to be more naturally combined with representationalist semantics, especially if naturalism is motivated by scientific realist considerations. Doesn’t scientific realism, precisely as a self-avowed realist position, imply the existence of substantial word-world meaning, truth and reference relations? Not necessarily. And, what is more, it can be argued that an explanation of the semantic notions of meaning, truth and reference word-world relations in non-representational terms is something perfectly natural and only to be expected from strictly naturalistic standpoint (i.e. from a point of view within science itself ). It is extremely doubtful whether substantial (i.e. representationalist) semantic notions of truth and reference can themselves be consistently investigated in a scientific naturalistic spirit, namely, as empirically contingent relations. Instead, in most versions of contemporary philosophical naturalism, these semantic properties are treated as (non-naturalistically explicable) brute primitives. But if we focus our attention, as we surely must, on the fact that any scientific naturalist position worthy of the name must ontologically commit only to the entities, relations and facts yielded via the a posteriori descriptive and explanatory methods of empirical inquiry, then it seems that a scientific naturalist has neither need for nor automatic entitlement to the existence of substantial

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‘word-world’ semantic relations—since, by naturalism’s own lights, this is at best a broadly empirical matter (Price, 2013, pp. 13–14). If this is correct, and if the best scientific (i.e. naturalistically acceptable) explanation of word-world semantic relations is non-representationalist in character, then we have an argument from within science itself, that commits us, if we are scientific realists, to a non-representationalist account of semantic facts. Thus, strangely enough, a strict scientific realist stance is not only compatible with but might even entail a non-representationalist pragmatist account of semantics. In this case, as was mentioned above, a decidedly non-representationalist scientific realism is not ‘realist’ enough unless it leads to an ontology that makes this explicit in its own structure. How must the world be like if it is to include human beings whose semantic practices orient them to the surrounding world without directly mirroring the latter?

2  Evolutionary Thinking as the Key to a Comprehensive Non-representationalist Scientific Realism To my mind, a most likely candidate for this role would be an immanent Darwinian ontology of problem-posing-and-solving processes of differential adaptation in which interaction with the environment (other processes) differentially selects (preserves and reproduces) certain elements, while eliminating others. This insight is encapsulated in the concept of (evolved) habit, which can be used to explain not only evolution at the level of species, but also, importantly, learning processes at the level of individual1 as well as the existence and function of institutions at the social level:2 Mutatis mutandis, these are both also understood as the evolution-­by-­selection of a population of habits. In this way, evolutionary explanations make intelligible the contingent emergence of collective 1  Sellars himself explicitly uses an evolutionary model for understanding language learning, by regarding a single organism as a series of organisms of shorter temporal span, each inheriting dispositions to behave from its predecessors, with new behavioral tendencies playing the role of mutations, and the ‘law of effect’ the role of natural selection (Sellars, 1954). 2  On the issue of ‘cultural evolution’, see Richardson and Boyd (2005, pp. 88–90), who plausibly suggest that features of how we influence each other socially, such as our tendency to conform with the majority view and our practices of actively policing social norms, might help to maintain group-level variation that selection can act on, even when single individuals rarely copy each other in ways that parallel faithful genetic inheritance.

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order from individual randomness by providing concrete, situated historical narratives of local, contingent, mutable practical reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats3 (Brandom, 2011, pp. 36–37). Note that this is compatible with saying that what is ‘really real’ can exist (as problem-­ posing-­ and-solving inorganic processes) independently of beings who care about their survival and can explain their emergence and relative success or failure in their attempt to adjust to their environment. Importantly, this understanding of evolution based on random variation and selection through ‘inheritance’ of adaptive traits, as well as the corresponding concept of ‘habit’, is functional and thus broad enough to allow for specifically different realizations of evolutionary processes in organic, cultural and even non-organic contexts. Each of these evolutionarily developed contexts can be characterized by different kinds of self-­ organization, dynamics and material constitution, and it is the task of scientific inquiry (aided by a scientifically informed metaphysics) to determine which of these differences must (or need not) be accounted for by the presence of emergent dynamic regimes in the respective organizational contexts. From this point of view, natural selection is ultimately an operation that differentially preserves certain alternative forms of self-­organizing processes compared to others, with respect to their ‘synergy’ with one another and to the boundary conditions that enable them. Thus, natural selection in the most general sense is not defined in terms of replication of genetic information (Deacon, 2013, p. 315). This latter mechanism is a specific material realization of the more general functional principles of natural selection. Interestingly, this suggests that evolution might itself evolve with respect to the complexity, intricacy and refinement of the specific material structures that realize the basic functional evolutionary principles (variation, competition for resources and selection through inheritance of adaptive traits). We are not just the ‘products’ of evolution but its concrete instantiations at this stage of its development (see also Sect. 5). Now, based on the abovementioned evolutionary principles, we can understand the emergence of fundamental discursive practices such as the ‘assertion language game’, as well as the first-personal practical knowledge 3  The first philosopher who realized the importance of this new mode of intelligibility for philosophy was C.S.  Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism (Peirce, 1931–58). My view which takes evolutionary thinking as the key for developing a global explanatory model for the scientific image is inspired by Peirce.

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needed for reliable ‘navigation’ in the inferentially structured ‘space of reasons’, in terms of flexible adaptive habits (forming a novel kind of embodied coping) that have occurred in specific environments (e.g. obligate cooperative foraging) through evolution-by-selection (see, e.g. Tomasello, 2014, 2015). From this point of view, the assertion language game can be understood in non-representational terms, as a multipurpose tool—sustained by a special kind of utterance-involving embodied skillful coping—that was selected for due to its capacity to express, align and revise the behavioral dispositions or other variable aspects of speaker’s situations in hypersocial niches, where our ancestors increasingly depended on coordination and collaborative action (Price, 2011). The above selection pressures could incrementally increase by the fact that reasoned discourse would provide with a means of coordinating our verbal dispositions in cases of conflict or disagreement,4 thereby shaping them in mutually beneficial directions: the efficient coordination of cooperative ventures, learning from each other different perspectives, making collective plans or decisions, pooling knowledge by indicating credible individuals worth relying on or deferring to and so on (Koreň, 2021; Mercier & Sperber, 2017). Interestingly, a similar evolutionary model can be applied also in the case of explicitly theoretical knowledge or detached reflection: it can be understood in terms of adaptive inferential ‘meta-habits’ (habits about first-order habits) occurring and sustained in an environment where the practical know-how of playing ‘the game of giving and asking for reasons’ ceases to be smooth and skillful coping within the ‘space of reasons’ breaks down—for example, due to unfulfilled expectations about the behavior of objects and other people that forces us to realign our conceptual network of material consequences and incompatibilities, unexpected intra-­ perspectival divergences between perception and conceptualization, incompatibilities between different discursive perspectives and so on. 4  Price (1990) interestingly argues that all we need to account for our expressing and recognizing attitudes of conflict or disagreement in the verbal dispositions of ourselves and others is a device with the pragmatic significance of denial (as opposed to the logical device of sentential negation). The speech act of denial provides a general means of registering and pointing out incompatible claims and thus intra- and transperspectival conflict and disagreement. Sentential negation, though it expands and transforms the expressive power of language, presupposed attitudes of denial and cannot independently account for them. I find this line of thought congenial to Sellars, who also argues that the logical operation of negation is a metalinguistic expressive tool that presupposes a more primitive attitude of rejection (Sellars, 1981).

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Moreover, the characteristic diversity of forms (and subject-matter) that the game of giving and asking for reasons takes when materially expressed in specific practices can, in turn, be understood in terms of the spontaneous unconscious production of various different kinds of ‘discursive coordinating devices’ some of which have been evolutionarily selected for due to their key contribution in sustaining and promoting the collective practical and epistemic welfare in the historical process of the division of practical and cognitive-intellectual labor. Consider, for example, how the division of intellectual labor within the ‘assertion language game’ into mathematical, aesthetic, moral and empirical discourse (as well as within those discourses themselves) enables us to increase the sophistication and flexibility of our behavioral responses within different and changing natural and social environments and gain individually and socially valuable— though, of course, not always categorially or factually accurate—information about the world, ourselves and others without needing to produce it ourselves from scratch or being naively trustworthy or overly suspicious of its reliability. It is precisely this deeply embedded practical need and utility of the division of labor within the ‘assertion language game’ itself that provides the cash value of the relative autonomy of empirical, mathematical, moral and aesthetic discourse (knowledge, facts, truths) with respect to one another, or in general, of the irreducibility of manifest-image normative facts to scientific-image non-normative processes. In the context of a neo-­ Sellarsian philosophy, this irreducibility is conceived as being ultimately practical in nature, and it is ultimately explained in terms of the long-term collective benefits of the division of intellectual labor in human societies. It is not understood in representationalist terms, for example, as involving the representation of incommensurable domains of reality (knowledge, facts, truths), but in terms of difference in the semantic functional roles of propositions, that is, of their placement in the context of practices with different criteria of individuation, subject-matters and procedures of explanation and assessment, which is itself ultimately justified by the collective benefits incurred by the intellectual division of labor. What is more, from the perspective of evolutionary naturalism discussed above, the distinctive—seemingly ‘representationalist’ but actually non-descriptive, metalinguistic—functions of the ‘space of reasons’ (modal, intentional, semantic, categorial normative facts necessary for describing and explaining in the context of the object-property framework) could be understood as patterns of discursive habits selected and

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retained through a self-differentiating process which, by progressively differentiating the expressive tools needed for better orienting ourselves in the world (descriptive-explanatory tools of empirical-scientific discourse) in an ever-expanding collaborative manner (prescriptive-expressive tools of normative discourse), makes it possible for both sets of tools to better serve these purposes, thereby creating a flexible, dynamic, mutually beneficial and self-reinforcing ‘symbiotic discursive relationship’. A related story could be told about the relation of empirical-scientific discourse with moral, aesthetic or mathematical discourse. From this point of view, the irreducibility of practices or discourses within the general context of the ‘assertion language game’ is understood as a fundamental discursive tool that precisely forges such a symbiotic discursive relationship that is collectively beneficial for the community and not as something that points toward mutually irreducible domains of reality or existence. In this connection, it must be noted that our general evolutionary selectional model of explanation does not find application only in issues pertaining to the evolution of human practices, but can be generalized to include even inorganic nature: what (under the spell of Newtonian models of explanation) we take to be eternal, immutable, necessary, universal laws of nature can be understood as themselves, in the broadest sense ‘habits’ (sufficiently stable patterns/regularities) of the universe—a kind of order that has arisen contingently, but ultimately statistically explicably, by a selectional-adaptational process operating on a population of such regularities, which in turn provides the dynamic habitat to which all must collectively adapt (Peirce, 1892). This has two important consequences: (1) it enables us to accept the radical view to the effect that even our most basic scientific-image conceptual resources, such as causal or modal necessity and possibility, have an ultimately expressivist, ‘non-big-R-­ representationalist’ function (e.g. they are ‘tools’ that successfully enable us to control and predict what will happen in the surrounding world) (Price, 1991, 2012). (2) It opens the possibility (pace Price) of formulating a picture of an ‘a-perspectival’ reality (e.g. composed of a-modal, non-­ causal, non-thingish, evolving processes) on the basis of which we can—again evolutionarily—explain this very expressivist and ‘perspectival’ function of those scientific-image resources. Last but not least, evolutionary explanations of the above kinds hold the key of independently explaining the very emergence of the manifest-­ image categorial framework and, more specifically, the way in which the community mediates the individual’s acquisition of this categorial

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framework. For “we are beginning to see this as a matter of evolutionary development as a group phenomenon […] incapable of explanation in terms of a conditioning impact of the environment on the individual as such” (Sellars, 1963a, pp. 17–18). The general idea here is that the complex and dynamic ‘manifest’ conceptual structures we find crucial for our everyday understanding of ourselves-in-the-world are not explanatorily self-standing but produce ‘anomalies’ that can be removed only by their being reconceptualized in terms of scientifically construed ‘underlying’ complex dynamic evolutionary socio-historical structures. Some important things to notice as regards this latter highly ambitious, even if extremely sketchy proposal, are the following: (1) since, as is well known, Sellars takes scientific-image explanations to be non-intentional, non-person-like and non-normative in their content, he believes that, effectively, those kinds of explanations (their model being in this case evolutionary biology, as applied to cultural processes) can account for the emergence and representational function of social-collective dimension of the manifest image as such. (2) Interestingly, for Sellars, these non-­ intentional, non-normative and non-person-like evolutionary explanations (which do not ‘resemble’ what they explain) will also have to be placed at the level of the group, rather than of the individual organism, to do their explanatory work. The big picture that seems to emerge out of this is that the complex and dynamic conceptual structures necessary for normatively understanding the relation of the world to ourselves through the mediation of the community must be somehow explanatorily grounded (for accounting for their possibility) in–presumably equally complex and dynamic—socio-historical causal structures, themselves operating at the group-collective level. Just as in the case of the correspondence between the dancing of a worker bee and the location, relative to the sun, of the flower from which she comes, we can explain this correspondence not in terms of a direct conditioning impact of the environment on the individual bee as such, but, presumably, in terms of the survival and reproductive value that this correspondence confers in evolutionary time to a hive of bees within a certain environment, so in the case of the correspondence (in the non-conceptual sense of ‘picturing’, not in the logical-conceptual sense of ‘intentionality’) between man’s original image and the world, we can explain it in terms of an evolutionarily conferred group adaptation to a specific environment, which is sustained and reproduced due to the survival and reproductive value that its coordinating function confers to the group or species (and, derivatively, to its members) in relation to other

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such groups or species within a certain environment. Moreover, if we take it that certain socio-historical ‘forces’ transcending the individual serve the role of the ‘environment’ to which we collectively adapt (think, e.g. of Marx’s modes of production, productive forces, relations of production), then this evolutionary way of thinking can be applied, mutatis mutandis, even to issues about the emergence, function and development of particular social practices and institutions within society.5 This would be Sellars’ peculiar way of revitalizing central notions of Hegel’s system and of German Idealism (especially the dialectic of the complex and dynamic conceptual structures necessary for normatively understanding the relation of the world to ourselves as it appears, e.g. in Hegel’s Phenomenology), while simultaneously transposing them in a decidedly naturalistic key.6 In line with the above, thus, I take it that such independent scientific-­ image descriptions and explanations of social-normative structures would involve pre- or supra-personal categorial concepts, with resolutely non-­ normative and non-intentional content, which yet would express essentially group-phenomena, “incapable of explanation in terms of a direct conditioning impact of the environment of the individual as such” (Sellars, 1963a, p.  17). (On the other hand, manifest-image descriptions and explanations of such normative structures would essentially involve (analogical extensions of) the categorial concept of a person and its normatively individuated capacities and abilities, as the latter are primarily expressed in 5  Of course, it does not follow from this that Sellars ought to be committed to a strictly Marxist explanation of history (although he was a Marxist, and even said that although he rejected the pseudo-Hegelian jargon of Marxist Naturphilosophie, he found more congenial the Hegelian overtones of Marxism as a schema of historical explanation) (Sellars, 1971). Sellars here would be at most committed to the existence of complex and dynamic sociohistorical causal structures that provide an evolutionary explanation (in the broad sense) of the correlative complex and dynamic socio-historical structures operating at the conceptualnormative-intentional level. Marx’s theory of historical materialism is one way in which such a general explanatory program might be cashed out, but obviously there might be others too. 6  Again, here Sellars, in his programmatic adoption of the Hegelian or German Idealist agenda with regard to the significance of the social-historical dimension of social-normative phenomena, could be compared to Marx, who, like Sellars, takes Hegel very seriously, and even adopts parts of his methodology, while transposing his ontology in a materialistic key. Interestingly, Sellars may turn out to have been more radical than Marx in this naturalization of the Hegelian social-historical account of normative structures in that he attempts to offer a naturalistic-evolutionary explanation not only of the emergence and function of particular social practices within society, but of the emergence, maintenance and cultural reproduction of the whole categorial framework in terms of which we make sense of ourselves-in-the-world.

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the formulation of individual ‘I-intentions’ or collective ‘we’-intentions’ (i.e. intentions of the form ‘I, as one of us, (as a member of the relevant group), shall do x, in circumstances of kind y’) (Sellars, 1967, pp.  220–222).) Candidate scientific-image explanatory concepts here might be certain impersonally described group-attitudes, embodied in human collective pattern-governed utterance-involving behavioral dispositions and habits, sustained by a complex system of rewards and sanctions. And the emergence, maintenance and reproduction of those sanctioned pattern-governed utterance-involving dispositions and habits would be, in turn, accounted for in terms of their causal-functional role in better coordinating collaborative action (than other ‘competitor’ patterns) within a certain environment. Now, just as, for Sellars, the scientific-image account of worldly objects and properties goes beyond a manifest-image rendering of the latter in that it postulates unobservable entities and processes to account for observationally inexplicable anomalies (e.g. observationally unpredicted variations) in the behavior of these objects and processes, so the scientific image as applied to the social sciences (e.g. anthropology, psychology, history, economics), and, in general, to the study of social-­ normative structures and institutions, goes beyond a manifest-image rendering of those phenomena in that it postulates unobservable (i.e. non-manifest) and impersonal or pre-personal states, ‘forces’ and mechanisms (themselves, of course, unintended products of human activity) to account for inexplicable anomalies in the behavior of these normative-­ social phenomena as they are conceptualized within the ‘personalistic’ manifest-image framework.7 Moreover, since the manifest-image itself (its very representational power) is revealed, through the refinement of its own descriptive-explanatory conceptual resources, to be one more such social-normative phenomenon (as opposed to pointing toward a direct representational word-world relation), it seems that it generates a systemic anomaly at its very heart. It cannot explain its emergence and function as a community-mediated system representing the world to individual minds without presupposing that its basic categorial determinations (persons 7  From this point of view, I think that, for example, Weber’s theory of social action (1978), Honnett’s theory of social recognition (1992) and contemporary rational choice theory (which is offered as a framework capable of grounding social sciences in general) are examples of a personalistic ‘manifest-image’ way of doing social science, while Durkheim’s and Marx’s theory of society, and current applications of dynamic systems theory to social phenomena (DeLanda, 1997), are ways of doing social science that are more ‘scientific-image’ oriented.

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obeying to norms, with intentions, desires, wants, ends) were always already in place. In other words, it is constitutively blind to the possibility of explaining social-collective structures in a non-person-like way and is forced to construe social-normative structures as irreducibly new, ‘brute fact’ realities, radically discontinuous from more elementary (e.g. evolutionary) group processes and facts. But, as Sellars always stressed, there is a way out from this descriptive-explanatory impasse. Human categorial concepts are not fixed ‘Givens’ or ‘essences’ distilled from the categorial framework in terms of which we first encountered ourselves as distinctively human.8 We can always develop novel categorial concepts and determinations, new ways of schematizing social-normative categories, in response to explanatory anomalies in our manifest-image conception of ourselves-­ in-­the-world. Evolutionary scientific-image concepts, in an extended sense of the term that can find application in cultural (i.e. non-genetically transmitted) phenomena, if they prove explanatorily fruitful (e.g. by leading to novel predictions and explanatory accommodation of anomalies of the former categorial framework), can well be precisely such novel ways of schematizing social-normative categories, as to their descriptive and explanatory dimension. Although Sellars did not delve further into this issue, his notion of picturing (Sellars, 1960), as expressing causally efficacious we-attitudes in individual minds considered as natural processes (i.e. as instantiated in the central nervous system), is here the main explanatory placeholder for accounting for the emergence of complex socially articulated worldviews and functions. As we shall see in more detail in Chaps. 6 and 8, picturing is a non-intentional, material ‘correlation’ between minds, considered as natural processes and the physical and social environment. It can be understood as an  evolutionarily developed, emergent, non-linear dynamic regime, implemented in nervous systems, which tracks and ‘translates’ changes in the external and internal environment of an organism and is tied in with motor actions and affective responses that ultimately serve navigational purposes of living organisms, including humans (Seibt, 2016). In explaining the emergence of complex socially articulated worldviews phylogenetically and ontogenetically, picturing must presumably 8  As Sellars himself put this point: “The human mind is not limited in its categories to what it has been able to refine out of the worldview of primitive man, any more than the limits of what we can conceive are set by what we can imagine. The categories of theoretical physics are not essences distilled from the framework of perceptual experience” (Sellars, 1963a, p. 10).

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come in a primordial unreflective ‘we’-form that precedes the conceptually structured distinction between the individual self and an independent a-perspectival reality to which the former stands over against. Such is the form of ‘shared practical picturing’ which involves the capacity for mirrored neural coordination across humans engaged in joint action and of its more developed species of ‘deontic picturing’: the transperspectival exercise of non-discursive emotional and reactive attitudes—a kind of pre-­ reflective and non-linguistic ‘sympathetic resonance’, which disposes us to share the perspective of others in an evaluatively relevant (yet not fully fledged normative) manner9 (Stovall, 2022). Note that although picturing relations are structure/information-preserving relations of dynamic mapping (second-order isomorphisms) between two ‘complex physical systems’ (in this case, between a categorial framework considered in rerum natura and environment), pictorial acts do not as such have  intrinsic intentionality, do not stand in a representational word-world relation of truth or reference and do not qualitatively ‘resemble’ what they picture (e.g. they can be realized in reverberating patterns of activity in populations of recurrently connected neurons in the form of dynamic attractor networks that trace various different manifolds of ‘shapes’ through a multidimensional phase space). Thus, they are not representational acts in the relevant (disputed) sense discussed here. 9  In this way, based on this kind of unreflective we-picturing capacity, members of a human community could be capable of being motivated to perceive, think and act on the basis of a shared intention with a group one belongs to, without being able to thematize or represent this shared intention as such, and thus without knowingly thinking and acting on a basis of a recognition of such an intention. It is our contention that, contra Bratman (1993), to think or act on the basis of a shared intention does not necessarily require the cognitive capacity to represent representational mental states (intention, belief, knowledge) (see also Koreň, 2021, p. 155). The latter arguably depend on language, thus presupposing that the categorial framework of persons standing over against objective reality (manifest image) is already in place, which is not the case for thinking and acting on the basis of shared intentions in the above we-picturing mode. Indeed, if the former is to be independently explained by the latter, shared intentions must be understood in resolutely non-propositional, non (big-R)-representational terms, which antecede the subjective-objective, appearance-reality distinction. Moreover, I take it that the Sellarsian ‘original’ ‘animistic’ image of humanity-in-the-world, in which everything is understood as being a kind of person, yet without us having any selfconscious understanding or ourselves as distinctively persons—or, for that matter of the reality-appearance, reality-illusion (or dream), subjective-objective, substance-property, living-dead, name-object (meaning-reference) distinctions—may provide an illuminating model for the evolutionarily developed primitive proto-categorial structure of our we-picturing capacity, bearing in mind that in this case the features of the latter are ‘teleologically projected ‘out there’ in a direct realist manner, which of course does not reflect its real ontological status (see also Chap. 11).

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3  The Evolutionary Selectional Model of Explanation as Both Global and Non-representational Moreover, it can be argued that a scientific image informed by the evolutionary selectional model of explanation through and through can be in a position to explain not only the emergence and function of the manifest image but also (1) its own emergence and function and (2) why the manifest image misrepresents itself as being explanatorily autonomous. Although Sellars does not say much with respect to these issues, I take it that he has the general explanatory resources to cash out this claim. For example, the fact that the manifest image misrepresents itself in that it conceives of itself as an explanatorily autonomous image can again be explained by evolutionary considerations. Our basic categorial concepts and distinctions through which we represent the world and ourselves are not God-given and did not evolve for the purpose of ontological insight. There is no ontological ‘pre-established harmony’ between the general structural features of our existing categorially structured means of representing the world and the world (or experience) as it is in-itself. Rather, categories are culturally evolving functional roles, transmitted through language from generation to generation (Sellars, 1963b). At the fundamental level of explanation, our categorial concepts and distinctions evolved under selective evolutionary pressures within a largely unpredictable and hostile environment because of their central role in facilitating collaborative action; their raison d’être is practical, ultimately to be cashed out in terms of their contribution in our being able to collectively ‘find our way around’ within our physical and social environment (see, e.g. Sellars, 1953a, 1953b). And while this might require the existence of a dynamic second-order isomorphism or covariation between human organisms and the environment, it does not presuppose—and in fact it can explain the evolutionary improbability of—the existence of ‘big-R’ representational mind-world relations of ‘reference’ ‘mirroring’ or ‘resemblance’ between the structure of language or concepts and the world. This evolutionary way of thinking about the emergence, sustenance and reproduction of categories makes it possible to explain why the initial stages of our conception of ourselves-in-the-world might misrepresent it as explanatorily sufficient. For most practical purposes, and in human-adjusted time-scales, this misrecognition (e.g. attributing misfortunes or catastrophes to person-­like entities) would not in the least jeopardize our survival, physical or cultural

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reproduction, even if it were ultimately false as an account of how things really are. Moreover, conceiving the world and ourselves under manifestimage categories would significantly simplify and compress the amount and complexity of the information processed by the human organism for its relatively successful navigation in the environment, without any significant practical loss (at least in the ‘short-run’, e.g. for a few centuries). In fact, not only would this simplification and compression of informational influx through original-image or manifest-image categorization not involve any significant practical loss, but it would give human organisms the ‘distanced freedom’ needed for manipulating external-world processes for their purposes thereby arming them with ‘epistemic self-confidence’, that is, positively enabling them to be collectively vigilant for responding successfully to life-threatening changes in the environment and anticipating the near future with a measure of success. In other words, originalimage or manifest-image categorization would make possible and facilitate relatively successful collaborative action through partial control of the surrounding environment. I think that the above, coupled with the fact that, for relatively similar evolutionary reasons, the surface grammar of categorial concepts and propositions involving such concepts is the same as that of ordinary empirical concepts that are ‘about the world’, provides some reason for thinking that the practical success in question could be easily (and without much practical cost, at least in the ‘short-­run’) misinterpreted as an ontological insight into the very structure of reality.10 The key feature of evolutionary explanations that make them exemplary of a non-representational scientific realism is that they explain in a global, single, monistic way the emergence, becoming and dissolution of worldly things and processes (including human societies) but do so in a resolutely non-representationalist manner, namely, without presupposing fixed natural essences, laws, kinds or forms to which human minds have access through relations of meaning or reference (contra, e.g. Rouse (2015), who seems to think that a proper scientific explanation cannot have both those features at once). In this sense, a scientific or philosophical practice can describe and explain ‘how things really are’ without being committed to treating its concepts in a ‘big-R’ representationalist manner, 10  Thus, from this evolutionary selectional point of view, we also are able to explain why human social practices generate social forms that they do not intend, that is, forms that are opaque to the practices that generate them. It is the task of science to de-reify these ‘objectively’ existing social forms and bring them into intersubjective self-consciousness.

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namely, as ‘mirrors’ of the world through substantial relations of truth and reference (note that causal referential ties through fixed natural laws between mind and world are also cases of ‘big-R’ representational thinking). What is more, in the case of evolutionary thinking, to explain ‘how things really are’ is not only compatible with, but in effect entails, that the world is such as to immanently produce novel ‘spaces’ of worldly possibilities (including ‘conceptual’-‘semantic’ ones). From all the above I conclude that pragmatic and scientific realist ontological concerns are inextricably intertwined in our attempt to make sense of the world and ourselves. As we may put it in a slogan: Ontology without pragmatism is empty; without pragmatism, ontology would be at best the ‘shadow of grammar’, which falsely takes itself to be a ‘mirror of nature’. Pragmatism without ontology is blind; without ontology, pragmatism would not be able to distinguish between more and less adequate conceptual tools for skillfully coping with the environment.

4  Concepts as Non-representational Tools from an Evolutionary Perspective A certain picture about the function of concepts also emerges from this evolutionary perspective. Concepts are tools that function as rules for guiding behavior by making salient certain patterns and possibilities of experience. They have evolved for purposes of collective coordination within certain (unpredictable, hostile) environments, and thus they are not psychical powers (mental images, states) directly illuminated by the essential structures of reality that give transparent categorial access to the world that created them. Nor do they represent or correspond to worldly patterns and structures in the sense of being categorially or logically isomorphic to the latter (note that this is not incompatible with the existence of other kinds of—non-representational, non-logical—physical isomorphisms between concepts considered as empirical structures and worldly situations11). As collectively instituted rules within a human practice, they come with conditions of correct and incorrect use, thus prescribing action and informing criticism of our perceptual-inferential-volitional patterns of behavior. Even concepts themselves (as opposed to their particular application in linguistic practice) can be susceptible to criticism as 11  This is precisely what Sellars’ notion of picturing is designed to account for. See also Chap. 6.

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fundamentally flawed (e.g. calling an attitude expressing courage ‘manly’). This criticism essentially involves a commitment to effect changes in the combination, decomposing and recombination (schematizing) of the relevant parts of the dynamically evolving perspectival non-conceptual experiential flow of our sensorimotor and social experience. In traditional terminology, concepts are evolutionarily and culturally evolved rules for the modification of a (non-conceptual) complex of impressions into a (unified, conceptualized) impression of a complex (Sellars, 1978). But concepts as rules should not be considered as ‘detached’ from practice, as operative at a reflective distance from the acting subject immersed in practice. As Sellars reminds us “the mode of existence of a rule [thus, of a concept] is as an embodied generalization which tends to make itself true, a generalization written in flesh and blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than in pen and ink” (Sellars, 1949, §17). Concepts as rules are immersed in practice (in perception-­action feedback loops) and are already operative at that level—albeit in a non-representational, non-correspondence-like manner. Concepts essentially abstract from the dynamic particularity of experience (which, of course, is not itself categorially given as such to the knowing subject) but they are concrete abstractions as it were, as they are immersed in practice and are involved in (conceptualized) experience itself. Again, it must be reminded that as rules for regulating perceptualinferential-­volitional experiential patterns concepts make salient certain (not immediately perceivable) possibilities of their continuation in certain ways under certain conditions, and they preclude other such possibilities. And their ultimate raison d’être lies in transforming the world and in shaping our perceptual-inferential-acting habits in such a way that an initially false empirical generalization, which lies at the core of the formulation of the rule [e.g. ‘there is a unified solid object over there exhibiting suchand-­such lawful behavior under such-and-such circumstances’], be gradually turned into the respective true empirical generalization, or, in other words, so as to bring it about, by shaping the ‘right’ perceptual-inferential-acting habits, that what the rule prescribes be concretely realized in the world in the form of embodied generalizations that are dynamically ‘in harmony’ or ‘resonance’ with the ever-changing regularities of the environment (see also Chap. 8). This idea can be further elaborated by understanding rules (concepts, categories, etc.) in terms of collectively constrained (reinforcing) sensorimotor loops and as ways of shaping collectively shared pictures (in the technical Sellarsian sense) of the internal and external environment (Sachs, 2018). In this way, concepts are

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precisely tools for reliably orienting us in a collective manner in the environment, without directly mirroring or corresponding to the (monadic, processual, a-categorial) worldly patterns and structures of the latter (for this conception of the ultimate structure of reality in terms of monadic processes, see Chaps. 7 and 9).

5  Toward a Non-foundational, Normative-­Functional Conception of the Lifeworld What is the picture of the lifeworld that emerges out of our sketch of a non-representational evolutionary naturalism coupled with our critique of ‘lifeworld’ phenomenology in Chaps. 3 and 4? At least two points are here in order: (1) Our objection against Husserl’s, Merleau-Ponty’s and Heidegger’s scientific instrumentalism is not targeted against the view that the theoretical-­explanatory concepts of the scientific image are third-personal and abstract from the lived experience of the lifeworld (manifest image). The objection has to do with the tendency of phenomenology in nearly all its guises to reify a methodological-epistemological mutable distinction (at bottom, the distinction between the abstract and the concrete) and turn it to an immutable ontological-substantive one. As we mentioned in Chap. 3, the theoretical/observational distinction is not ontological-­ categorial; it does not ‘cut nature at its joints’. The same goes for the distinction between the third- and the first-person point of view or that between what is ‘present-at-hand’ and what is ‘ready-to-hand’ (which ultimately attempt to mirror the distinction between the abstract and the concrete). They might be useful for capturing important phenomenological aspects of our lived experience. But they are not grounded in any kind of ‘categorial intuition’ and hence they should not be conceived as being immutable or categorially transparent and thus as belonging in the ‘order of being’. (2) From a non-representational, evolutionary and pragmatic point of view we can conceive of abstract/theoretical/third-personal scientific explanations as de facto methodologically indispensable tools for changing the way we understand our ‘lived experience’ itself. This process of gradual revision of descriptive and explanatory resources and commitments of the manifest image in favor of those of the scientific image does not eliminate our lived experience and its categorial or ‘existential’ forms. It transforms them. That is, it changes our conception about their ultimate function:

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the categorial structures of the lifeworld are not ‘intuitive’ descriptions or explanations of a special or privileged region of reality (the ‘lifeworld’), inaccessible to empirical-scientific theorizing; rather, they can be understood as (socially transmitted and individually internalized) expressions of collectively held and practically operative normative attitudes pertaining to perceiving, inferring and acting, whose ultimate raison d’être is to serve as collective coordination devices for finding our way around (in increasingly adjusted ways) within the natural and social environment. From this point of view, the structural features of our lived experience, being essentially normative-functional (i.e. not descriptive-explanatory) in nature, do not depend for their existence on our current ways of understanding their material realization and embodiment. But, of course, the process of changing our conception of the latter would radically transform the content and orientation of our lived experience. The external world and ourselves would be depersonalized, and they would both gradually lose their ontological meaning and metaphysical significance as reflected in our own lived experience (see Chaps. 8 and 12). Yet, this might well be necessary (though not sufficient) for the material realization of regulative ideals which are an integral part of our lived experience itself, by liberating persons from unforeseen, uncontrollable and hitherto unknown biological, psychological and socio-historical restrictions and impediments (see Chaps. 8 and 12). Our understanding of these impeding factors is confused or even entirely blocked partly due to an unstable and ultimately flawed anthropocentric conception of nature and ourselves (in the dimension of description-explanation) (see Sects. 2 and 3). If this is correct, it follows that, paradoxically, it is only through the development of a resolutely non-anthropocentric conception of the world and ourselves that our deepest needs and interests—that is, what we most deeply care about—in the long run might have a chance of being more fully fulfilled (and expressed in our lived experience as such). And this completes the (hopefully benign) explanatory circle of evolutionary naturalism: the world in its historical unfolding gradually self-­ differentiates (via morphogenetic processes that do not ‘resemble’ their outcomes) into an ‘infinite’ diversity of forms-structures, for example, the living ones, some of which further self-differentiate in a way that part of their activity gains a relative autonomy (the social network of normative attitudes) over others so as to better regulate our collective commerce with the environment. This collective tool, far from violating evolutionary principles, is actually a novel way of expressing them. Language, culture

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and social institutions, as such novel evolutionary structures, are obviously part of nature and not something that stands over against it metaphysically. But there is a grain of truth in the view that culture (in the sense of social normativity and the institutions it makes possible) ‘stands over against’ nature in the sense that, whenever nature produces unnecessary suffering to sentient and sapient beings, we desire and are committed to minimize this suffering, through the novel evolutionary tool of normativity, even if this, in the last analysis, demands intervention into those evolutionary patterns that are related to this unnecessary suffering. In this way, the way opens for a reconciliation not only between pragmatism and naturalism, but also, curiously enough, between pragmatic naturalism and rationalism.

References Brandom, R. (2011). Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classic, Recent and Contemporary. Harvard University Press. Bratman, M. (1993). Shared Intention. Ethics, 104(1), 97–113. Deacon, T. (2013). Incomplete Nature: How Mind emerged from Matter. W.W. Norton. DeLanda, M. (1997). A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. MIT Press. Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT Press. Dennett, D. (2013). Kinds of Things: Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image. In D.  Ross, J.  Ladyman, & H.  Kincaid (Eds.), Scientific Metaphysics (pp. 96–107). Oxford University Press. Honnett, A. (1992). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Koreň, L. (2021). Practices of Reason: Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientific Image. Routledge. Kukla, R. (2017). Embodies Stances: Realism Without Literalism. In B. Huebner (Ed.), The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett (pp. 2–35). Oxford University Press. Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press. Peirce, C.  S. (1892). The Doctrine of Necessity Examined. The Monist, 2(3), 321–337. Peirce, C. S. (1931–58). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss, Eds.). Harvard University Press. Price, H. (1990). Why Not? Mind, 99(394), 221–238. Price, H. (1991). Agency and probabilistic causality. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 42, 157–76. Price, H. (2011). Naturalism Without Mirrors. Oxford University Press.

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Price, H. (2012). Causation, Chance and the Rational Significance of Supernatural Evidence. Philosophical Review, 121, 483–538. Price, H. (2013). Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism. Cambridge University Press. Richardson, P., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press. Rouse, J. (2015). Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. University of Chicago Press. Sachs, C. (2018). Why Rules Need Habits: Behavior, Culture, and the Myth of the Categorial Given. Paper Presented at Deakin University, 5 November 2018, Victoria, Australia. Seibt, J. (2016). How to Naturalize Sensory Consciousness and Intentionality Within a Normative Gradient: A Reading of Sellars. In J. O’Shea (Ed.), Sellars and His Legacy (pp. 187–221). Oxford University Press. Sellars, W. (1949). Language, Rules and Behavior. In S. Hook (Ed.), John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (pp. 289–315). Dial Press. Sellars, W. (1953a). Inference and Meaning. Mind, 62, 313–338. Sellars, W. (1953b). Is There a Synthetic a Priori? Philosophical Studies, 20, 121–138. Sellars, W. (1954). Some Reflections on Language Games. Philosophy of Science, 21(3), 204–228. Sellars, W. (1960). Being and Being Known. Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 34, 28–49. Sellars, W. (1963a). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1963b). Abstract Entities. Review of Metaphysics, 16, 621–671. Sellars, W. (1967). Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1971). Autobiographical Reflections. In H.  N. Castaneda (Ed.), Action, Knowledge and Reality (pp. 277–294). Bobbs-Merill. Sellars, W. (1978). The Role of Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience. In H.  W. Johnstone Jr. (Ed.), Categories: A Colloquium (pp.  231–245). Pennsylvania State University Press. Sellars, W. (1981). Mental Events. Philosophical Studies, 39, 325–345. Stovall, P. (2022). The Single-Minded Animal: Shared Intentionality, Normativity, and the Foundations of Discursive Cognition. Routledge. Tomasselo, M. (2014). A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasselo, M. (2015). A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society. University of California Press.

PART II

Sellars’ Relevance for Continental Philosophy

CHAPTER 6

Toward the Thing-in-Itself: Sellars’ and Meillassoux’s Divergent Conception of Kantian Transcendentalism

1   Introduction In this chapter, I shall attempt to show the explanatory relevance, timely character and fertility of Sellars’ philosophy by putting his views in conversation with the recent ‘speculative realist’ movement in contemporary continental philosophy. This conversation will have as a common frame of reference Kant’s views about the transcendental and the thing-in-itself, as it is precisely out of an immanent critique of Kantian ‘finitude’ that contemporary speculative realists, such as Meillassoux, develop their own original position. It is a well-known fact that there is a more than intimate connection between contemporary continental anti-realism and Kantian transcendentalism. This is because both continental anti-realism and Kantian transcendentalism share the view that, due to our essential epistemic ‘finitude’, we cannot, as a matter of principle, have cognitive or perceptual access to the world ‘as it is in itself’, that is, independently of the way in which worldly things are ‘disclosed’ to us. For example, as we saw in detail in Chaps. 3 and 4, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty all take up and modify the transcendental project inaugurated by Kant, for whom the conditions of possibility of the experience of objects are conditions of possibility of the objects of experience. Each in his own way signals this continuity with Kant in using Kantian language when characterizing their own philosophical projects—specifically, as transcendental phenomenology (Husserl), © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_6

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fundamental ontology or existential analytic of Dasein (Heidegger) and a phenomenology of the transcendental field (Merleau-Ponty).1 According to this line of thought, inaugurated by Kant, access to the ‘things themselves’ presupposes an impossible epistemic standpoint, a ‘God’s eye view’, an (impossible) ‘aperspectival perspective’ from which all possible cognitive and perceptual perspectives could be inspected and assessed.2 This intimate relation between anti-realism and Kantian transcendentalism explains why, nowadays that times have changed, the resurgence or realism in contemporary continental philosophy, as expressed by the notorious ‘speculative realist’ movement, has more often than not been accompanied by an explicit critique or even outright rejection of Kantian transcendentalism.3 However, the contemporary enthusiasm of certain continental circles with a robust realism according to which there is no epistemic barrier to our access to the ‘in-itself’ has often been accompanied with a wholesale rejection of the very idea of the transcendental4 (Gironi, 2015). But does this not throw out the baby with the bathwater? That is to say, could it not be that, whatever its problematic features (e.g. the prohibition of access to things-in-themselves), Kantian transcendentalism can be credited with at least some fundamental insights, the preservation of which is necessary if we do not want to relapse to a pre-Kantian naïvely metaphysical hypostatization of the ‘in-itself’? In this chapter, we will be concerned with the work of two philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars and Quentin Meillassoux, each of which is a representative example in his own tradition of the above complex attitude toward Kantian transcendentalism: both Sellars (within the context of 1  There are number of recent edited volumes that focus on the ways in which phenomenology inherits and transforms Kant’s transcendental project. See Crowell and Malpas (2007) and Gardner and Grist (2015). A discussion of the relation between Kant and Heidegger is provided by Crowell (2018) and the relation between Kant and Merleau-Ponty is the focus of Gardner (2007). 2  For an excellent survey into contemporary continental anti-realism (with Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault as its major representatives) see Braver, 2007. 3  Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy, including Brassier, Harman, Grant and Meillassoux, that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian ‘correlationist’ philosophy, according to which mind and world are always already given to us as essentially related to (or shaped by) one another and cannot be conceived as independently existing realities. 4  Harman, for example, tends to formulate his robust realism in such a way as to entail a complete rejection of transcendental or epistemological concerns (Harman, 2018). But this sometimes comes at the cost of his being overly dogmatic in his ontological claims.

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analytic philosophy) and Meillassoux (in continental philosophy) attempt, in their own distinctive ways, to disentangle the sound insights of Kantian transcendentalism from what they both take to be its fundamental error, namely, the thesis of the in-principle inaccessibility of the ‘in-itself’. Hence, a dialogue between them is important since, among other things, it can contribute to the task of delineating this unexpected general theoretical convergence between two seemingly incommensurable philosophical traditions, namely, analytic and continental philosophy. This chapter will be structured as follows: In Sect. 2, we shall describe Meillassoux’s take on Kantian transcendentalism. Meillassoux believes that what he terms ‘strong correlationism’ (a strong version of Kantian transcendentalism, mostly associated with Heidegger, according to which things-in-themselves are not only unknowable but also unthinkable, yet not necessarily non-existent) contains important insights that must be preserved (in transposed form) in any sound philosophy that aspires to delineate the structure of the ‘in-itself’ without relapsing to a pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics. Meillassoux proposes to do this by turning strong correlationism on its head, showing that, paradoxically, it leads inexorably to a de-phenomenologized rationalistic realism in which we are in a position to directly ‘intellectually intuit’ the absolute (the thing-in-itself). Yet, in Sect. 3, it will be suggested that, from a Sellarsian point of view, both Meillassoux and the strong correlationists conceive of the transcendental as a sui generis mode of existence which cannot be reduced to merely ‘ontic’ empirical existence. And this is precisely the reason why Meillassoux himself does not succeed in fully overcoming all forms of correlationism. Moreover, in Sect. 4 it will be argued that Sellars’ take on Kantian transcendentalism fares better than Meillassoux’s in that (1) Sellars is in a position to hold that the transcendental is conceptually irreducible to the empirical while at the same time insisting that his theory can (in principle) account for the empirical conditions of the emergence of the ‘transcendental correlation’ itself and, (2) unlike Meillassoux, Sellars understands that the key to avoid all kinds of suspect transcendental correlationisms lies in developing a conception of the transcendental which does not hypostatize the notion of categorial necessity. In this connection, it will be suggested that the Sellarsian candidate for the ‘in-itself’, namely, the world of ‘absolute processes’, can be understood as the outcome of a transcendental investigation of the conditions under which alone our thought can have empirical content or objective purport. Lastly, in Sect. 5, I will attempt to show that while Sellars’

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view of the ‘non-correlational’ ‘in-itself’ is strikingly similar to Meillassoux’s own view in that they both reject the ontological/explanatory import of the principle of sufficient reason and take it that worldly processes are ultimately contingent and not characterized by any causal necessity (causal laws), from a more penetrating point of view, their views on these issues are in fact radically different (the difference being traced in their very different commitments about the ontological and epistemic status of the transcendental): Meillassoux accepts the legitimacy of the question which lies at the heart of the formulation of the principle of sufficient reason (‘why are things as they are and not otherwise?’) and argues that this principle can be refuted by reason alone, by showing that reason’s own principles actually entail what Meillassoux calls the ‘principle of unreason’, a meta-modal principle according to which it is necessary that nothing has a necessary reason for being the way it is. By contrast, Sellars would not accept that the above question has any ontological/explanatory import, and hence he would, in effect, reject both the principle of sufficient reason (as animated by the above question) and the meta-modally based Meillassouxian ‘principle of unreason’. Yet, I take it that Sellars would simultaneously argue that the principle of sufficient reason, this time understood as having normative, epistemological (not ontological) import, is not only legitimate, but actually indispensable for the self-­ correcting function of empirical inquiry in general. From this (resolutely normative) point of view, the principle of sufficient reason can be understood as a regulative principle of empirical inquiry, which, yet, does not commit us ontologically—and indeed ultimately gives us reasons not to be committed—to the existence of real necessity at the ‘non-correlational’ level of ‘things themselves’.

2   Meillassoux’s Take on Kantian Transcendentalism: The Sound Insights and Fundamental Errors of Strong Correlationism As was mentioned above, Meillassoux’s examination of strong correlationism can, among other things, provide important insights as regards the issue of what, according to Meillassoux, is right and what is wrong in Kantian transcendentalism. ‘Correlationism’ is Meillassoux’s term for a whole family of views according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between

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thinking and being and never to either term considered apart from the other (Meillassoux, 2008, 5). According to correlationism, we can never grasp an object ‘in itself’ in complete independence from its relation to the subject, but at the same time, we cannot grasp a subject which would not be always already related to an object. The origins of this ‘correlationist’ thesis, which has been (mostly through Husserl’s and Heidegger’s influence) the dominant view in twentieth-century continental philosophy, lie in Kant, and his fundamental insight that it is not the mind that conforms to (metaphysical) worldly principles, but rather the world conforms to the mind, in the sense that human experience is structured by a priori categories of understanding and forms of intuition which alone provide the universal basis of all knowledge. Now, of course, Kant’s notion of the ‘in-itself’, which cannot be an object of knowledge in the above sense, shows that Kant was not a correlationist all the way down. But a moment’s reflection on the history of subsequent German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and ‘fundamental ontology’ (Heidegger), which, for all their important differences (e.g. German Idealists absolutize the correlation itself while Heidegger deabsolutizes it), were united in completely rejecting the Kantian ‘in-itself’ on account of it being not only unknowable but essentially meaningless, shows the Kantian roots of ‘correlationist’ thinking. With the resolute abolition of the Kantian in-itself, post-Kantian correlationism first came to philosophical self-consciousness, as the way was clear for recognizing the primacy of the correlation between the subjective and the objective over the terms themselves. Correlationism comes in weaker or stronger forms. Weak correlationism, which is essentially Kant’s own thesis, holds that while things-in-­ themselves are completely unknowable, they are nonetheless perfectly thinkable (e.g. as non-contradictory). By contrast, strong correlationism, mostly associated with Heidegger, holds that things-in-themselves are not only unknowable but also unthinkable (i.e. meaningless) yet without that implying that they do not exist. That is to say, strong correlationism is opposed both to Kant’s ‘weak correlationism’, according to which things-­ in-­themselves are unknowable yet perfectly thinkable, and to Hegelian absolute idealism, according to which things-in-themselves are unknowable, unthinkable and hence cannot exist. This latter difference between strong correlationism and Hegelian absolute idealism is related to the fact that the latter absolutizes the correlation between thinking and being, thereby insisting on the necessary isomorphy between them, while the

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former retains the Kantian emphasis on the ineluctable contingency of the correlation. Now, Meillassoux believes that strong correlationism, in particular, contains important insights that must be preserved (in transposed form) in any sound philosophy that aspires to delineate the structure of the ‘in-­ itself’ without relapsing to a pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics. However, those insights should first be disentangled from certain deeply problematic features of strong correlationism. And the proper way to do this is to radicalize strong correlationism from within. According to Meillassoux, the fundamental insight of Kantian transcendentalism that needs to be preserved from strong correlationism is not the (subject-object) correlation itself but rather the facticity/contingency of the correlation.5 On the other hand, strong correlationism’s radical mistake is that it does not realize that the only way to hold fast to the facticity of the correlation—as opposed to the absolute idealist’s construal of the correlation itself as something absolutely necessary—is to absolutize facticity/contingency itself, by ultimately claiming not that the correlation is absolutely necessary, as the absolute idealist does, but rather that the facticity/contingency of the correlation is absolutely necessary. How does Meillassoux effect this dialectical Aufhebung of strong correlationism? To see this, notice, first, that the philosophical target of strong correlationism is not only the metaphysical realist, but also the absolute idealist à la Hegel, who absolutizes the correlation itself. Yet, strong correlationism can be distinguished from absolute idealism only if it stresses not just the correlation between thought and being, but, principally, the facticity of the correlation, that is, the fact that the correlation is not a necessary feature of being as such (although our knowledge of being, and, even more radically, our very meaningful access to it, is always a function of the correlation). According to this—deeply Kantian—line of thought, there can be certain structural invariants necessary for the minimal 5  In other words, what is correct in Kantian transcendentalism is Kant’s transposition of our ordinary ‘empirical’ notion of contingency, which is attributed to particular empirical facts, to the transcendental level, that is, to the conditions under which anything can count as an empirical fact. We might call this latter transcendental notion of contingency (Meillassoux’s ‘facticity’) ‘second-order’ contingency (Brassier, 2017), which pertains not to actual empirical ‘beings’ (‘ontic’ level) but to the ‘being of beings’ (‘ontological’ level). This move of transcendentally focusing on the facticity of the subject-object correlation (as opposed to the correlation itself (Husserl) or its supposed absolute necessity (Hegel)) was, of course, first made in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927).

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organization of representation (e.g. the laws of logic, the law of causality, forms of perception), but they can only be described, not justified or founded. There is no further reason why the correlational structure is one way rather than another. In this way, strong correlationism professes to establish the impossibility of gaining any kind of knowledge of a ‘wholly other’ (i.e. the world ‘as it is in itself’, independently of our means of access to it) while, at the same time, admitting that nothing can be said to be impossible in an absolute sense, not even the unthinkable or the meaningless. Yet, here lies its radical mistake. For Meillassoux shows that the above correlationist argument against absolute idealism is sound only if it is presupposed that we have access to an absolute possibility: the possibility that the in-itself could be radically different from the for-us (the correlation). And this absolute possibility is grounded in turn on the absolute facticity of the correlation. It is because we can always conceive the non-­ being of the correlation (i.e. something outside the correlation) that we can conceive the possibility of an in-itself essentially different from the world as correlated to human subjectivity. In this way, strong correlationism implicitly absolutizes facticity—and thereby distinguishes itself from absolute idealism.6 But, by conceiving facticity itself not as factual but as eternal/necessary, strong correlationism leads by its own inner logic to Meillassoux’s own thesis, namely, speculative materialism, according to which we can indeed know the real structure of the world (the in-itself), and necessarily so, but this structure is just that of the radical contingency 6  That is, strong correlationism ultimately distinguishes itself from absolute idealism by holding that it is absolutely impossible that anything (including the correlation between thinking and being) be necessary. Yet, here, a strong correlationist, for example, a Heideggerian, could object that there is yet another way in which the strong correlationist can be distinguished from absolute idealism, namely, by claiming (contra Hegel and contra Meillassoux’s construal of strong correlationism) that we can say neither that the correlation is necessary nor that it is contingent, thereby accepting that it is indeed possible that the correlation exists necessarily. According to this line of thought, contra Meillassoux, it is not necessary for the strong correlationist to deny the possibility of the necessity of the correlation (Carman, personal communication). Of course, if this is correct, Meillassoux’s argument against strong correlationism, and his attempt to convert this latter view into a form of his own brand of speculative materialism, would be rendered immediately problematic. Although I am sympathetic to this argument in defense of strong correlationism, in this chapter I will not investigate this issue further, as I believe that, from a Sellarsian point of view, the whole discussion between Meillassoux and his strong correlationist opponents is based on unacknowledged controversial assumptions about the notion of the ‘transcendental’ (see Sect. 3) that can be also attributed to the version of strong correlationism that escapes Meillassoux’s own critique.

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of everything. The facticity (non-necessity) of the transcendental forms of representation which, for Kant, alone implied that we cannot have any positive knowledge of the in-itself, is shown by Meillassoux to be nothing other than the thing-in-itself—in all its radical—but necessary and demonstrable—contingency. And, in this bizarre ‘hyper-chaotic’ Meillassouxian ‘in-itself’ everything is contingent, everything can be realized or destroyed (including laws of nature), except contingency itself which is eternal/necessary. In the Meillassouxian ‘in-itself’ the principle of unreason rules: it is necessary that nothing has a reason for being the way it is.7 Necessarily, everything is without reason and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. In this way, Meillassoux turns strong correlationism (this existential-­ phenomenological version of Kantian transcendentalism) on its head, showing that, paradoxically, it leads inexorably to a de-phenomenologized rationalistic realism in which we are in a position to directly ‘intellectually intuit’ the absolute (the thing-in-itself, the ‘being of beings’) and, moreover, deduce its essential (in this case ‘meta-modal’) properties through the sole use of mathematical discourse. Specifically, Meillassoux contends that mathematical discourse is uniquely privileged for the representation of the world as it is in itself due to the fact that the essential characteristic of this ‘language’, which for Meillassoux is the possibility of a formal repetition of otherwise meaningless signs (such that it is not the meaning of the sign which is the same in each sign, it is just the sign, but grasped through its facticity, the pure arbitrary fact of the sign), exactly corresponds to the essential nature of the world as it is in itself, namely, the necessity of its radical contingency (Meillassoux, 2012). Moreover, Meillassoux takes it that a condition of the possibility of the radical contingency of the ‘in-itself’ is that the latter be characterized by an untotalizable transfinite structure, and he justifies this latter view by appeal to Cantor’s work (in this he follows Badiou 1988, 2009).8

7  Note that this, interestingly, means that the venerable principle of sufficient reason is refuted by means of reason itself. 8  The above clearly indicate that Meillassoux’s professed scientific realism goes hand in hand with an uncompromising mathematical rationalism.

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3  Sellars’ Alternative Conception of Kantian Transcendentalism: A Critique of Meillassoux’s Argument Against Correlationism As was mentioned in Sect. 1, Sellars would agree with Meillassoux’s claim to the effect that knowledge of the in-itself can indeed be obtained, albeit only on condition that we first properly delineate and make use of the fundamental insights contained within Kantian transcendentalism. That is, Sellars, exactly like Meillassoux, believes that it is only in this way that we can avoid relapsing into pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics. However, Sellars would not at all agree with Meillassoux about the more specific and equally substantial issue of what precisely must be preserved or discarded from Kantian transcendentalism. Sellars’ positive proposal for combining Kantian transcendentalism with a scientific naturalism which enables us to gain a non-metaphysical access to the ‘in-itself’ will be discussed in the next section. This positive proposal will be shown to be intimately connected with a specifically Sellarsian critique that can be launched against Meillassoux’s view about what must be salvaged and discarded from Kantian transcendentalism. This will be the topic of the present section. I contend that, from a Sellarsian point of view, the root error of Meillassoux’s view and of Kantian transcendentalism alike (both in its weak and strong version) is that while all parties agree that the transcendental level is irreducible to the empirical (‘ontic’) level (this is the sound insight of Kantian transcendentalism), they construe this irreducibility in descriptive and explanatory terms instead of (exclusively) practical and normative ones. By not clearly distinguishing between the prescriptive-­ expressive function of normative vocabulary (to which talk of the transcendental properly belongs) and the explanatory role of descriptive vocabulary (which alone is ontologically committal and provides us with provisional ‘categorial knowledge’, always amenable to recategorization on the basis of empirical-scientific inquiry), Meillassoux, along with his supposed enemies, that is, the weak and strong correlationist, is inevitably committed to the construal of the irreducibility of the transcendental to the empirical in terms of surplus ontological content of the transcendental over the empirical. I take it that this implicit ontologization of the transcendental level by Meillassoux lies at the heart of his (and the transcendental correlationist’s) conviction that there is a sui generis categorial structure (the meta-modal structure (necessary contingency) of every possible world in Meillassoux’s case or the correlation between mind and

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world, in the correlationist’s case) to which we have a sui generis (i.e. non-­ empirical) epistemic access, through a special, decidedly non-empirical, enquiry tailor-made for that purpose: ‘intellectual intuition’, in Meillassoux’s own case, or ‘the analytic of Dasein’, in the case of a Heideggerian strong correlationist.9 The above schema is exemplary of what Sellars calls ‘the myth of the categorial Given’, and it seems that, in their own distinctive ways, both Meillassouxian ‘speculative materialism’ and strong correlationism fall prey to it. Indeed, if we take it, as I think we must, that being committed to the categorial Given amounts to being committed to a form of (transcendental) correlationism, it follows that, ironically, Meillassoux’s own position, despite its proclamations to the contrary, cannot escape the ‘correlationist circle’. Now, in order to justify the above Sellars-inspired objections against Meillassoux and correlationism alike, it is instructive to begin by briefly describing Sellars’ conception of Kantian categories and the transcendental. Sellars construes the Kantian categories (substance, cause, necessity, possibility, universal, particular, etc.) as belonging to the semantic-­ normative, not the real/natural order. The Kantian transcendental level, according to Sellars, does not have (direct) ontological (descriptive-­ explanatory) import. Instead, Kantian categories are second-order generic concepts that functionally classify the most basic kinds of first-order (i.e. empirical) concepts we possess, with respect to their epistemic-semantic role (O’Shea, 2007, 115; Sellars, 1967b, §23). Sellars thinks that categories, construed as functional classifications of the most generic kinds of concepts of an empirical framework with respect to their epistemic role, are normative (practical-expressive-prescriptive), rather than descriptive-­ explanatory. Yet, at the same time, like Kant, he contends that this normative character of the categories is a necessary condition for the function of empirical-scientific representation (i.e. description-explanation) of the world within a conceptual framework. More specifically, the role of 9  Notice that this does not entail that the correlationist must view reality (‘what really exists’) as something commensurable to the mind-world correlation. As we saw in Sect. 2 when we examined strong correlationism, one may well be completely agnostic about ultimate ontological questions, pointing to the non-necessity of the correlation itself and contending that, although one cannot attach any meaning to a thought about a world as it is in itself, independent of its correlation to the mind, this does not necessarily mean that such a world cannot or does not exist. Still, even this anti-absolutist kind of correlationism conforms to the above schema, at least as regards the categorial features of the correlation between mind and world.

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categories is to make explicit (not describe or explain) what is implicit in the use of ground-level empirical (i.e. properly descriptive-explanatory) concepts, namely, the conditions (rules) under which it is possible to apply them in the world or use them to make judgments (Brandom, 2015). Therefore, as Sellars sees it, the transcendental level of discourse is necessary for the descriptive and explanatory function of ordinary (and scientific) empirical discourse about the world, but without being itself descriptive-explanatory (Sellars, 1957, §62, 80-83, 103-108; Brandom, 2015). And this is the key which allows one to acknowledge the indispensability of the transcendental framework for the description and explanation of the world by the empirical sciences, without at the same time reifying the transcendental, for example, by considering it as a non-­ empirical level of being, immune to empirical-scientific explanation (redescription and reconceptualization). Based on this Sellarsian analysis of Kantian categories and the transcendental, we suggested that, in their own distinctive ways, both Meillassoux and his arch enemies, that is, the correlationists (weak and strong alike), construe the irreducibility of the transcendental to the empirical in descriptive-­explanatory (rather than exclusively normative) terms, and as a consequence, they implicitly conceive of the transcendental as characterized by a sui generis mode of existence (e.g. ‘the being of beings’, the existential structure of ‘Dasein’) which cannot be reduced to merely ‘ontic’ empirical existence (for a more detailed exposition of the above argument see Christias, 2016). Now, at first glance, it may seem more natural to direct this kind of objection against the strong correlationist (e.g. of a Heideggerian or Merleau-Pontyan stripe), as the latter is arguably committed to a phenomenological conception of the transcendental, according to which, at this level, being discloses itself to us in a more ‘originary’ way. But on what grounds can it be leveled against Meillassoux’s own positive view? For example, a Meillassouxian may argue that, contra strong correlationism, Meillassoux questions the latter’s claim to the effect that transcendental consciousness is to be understood phenomenologically, e.g. as a bodily point of view of the world (as is the case in Merleau-Ponty, e.g.). Now, it is indeed correct that Meillassoux does not construe the transcendental in phenomenological terms. Ηowever, he does not also seem to want to put into question another, related, but more general view about the transcendental, according to which the latter should be conceived as something that has some kind of distinctive existence (not necessarily understood in

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phenomenological terms) over and above empirical existence and is constitutively irreducible to the latter. To see this, notice, for example, that Meillassoux believes that conceptual thought is qualitative in nature and that it is a qualitative emergent worldly property irreducible to sensory and affective experience (Meillassoux, 2011a, 187, 209-212). Most importantly, as we shall shortly see, he builds his own positive account about our means of access to the in-itself on the notion of ‘intellectual intuition’, which (1) clearly does not belong to the ‘ontic’ level and (2) has clear ontological overtones, justified precisely by Meillassoux conviction that, by having the ability to think the absolute/eternal (or the possibility of its own non-being), thought introduces novel qualities in the world, which make possible all kinds of distinctively human cultural practices and are clearly irreducible to the qualities of sensory and affective experience (Meillassoux, 2011a, 187, 209-212; 2008, 59). I take it that if the above account is correct, it explains why although Meillassoux does not think of himself as a ‘transcendental’ philosopher, he nonetheless uses the related Heideggerian ‘ontic-ontological’ distinction to argue that it is only at the latter ‘ontological’ level—the level of the ‘being of beings’—that the essential (modal) nature of the real order (i.e. the necessary contingency of everything and the untotalizable transfinite character of the real) is revealed to ‘intellectual intuition’. By contrast, according to Meillassoux, actually existing entities that (contingently) populate the world belong to the ‘ontic’ level and are of no concern to philosophy (Brassier et al., 2007, 392). Moreover, if our construal of Meillassoux’s conception of the transcendental is on the right track, it also explains why Meillassoux does not find the (nowadays mostly discredited) notion of ‘intellectual intuition’ at all problematic. As was mentioned above, Meillassoux attempts to rehabilitate thought’s access to the ‘absolute’ in the form of an allegedly non-­ metaphysical variety of ‘intellectual intuition’ which provides us direct access to the realm of pure possibility. As he puts it: “we must project unreason [i.e. the denial of the principle of sufficient reason] into things themselves, and discover in our grasp of facticity the veritable intellectual intuition of the absolute [whose ‘purely intelligible’ - but at the same time ‘worldly’ - content is that everything is necessarily contingent]. ‘Intuition’, since it is actually in what is that we discover a contingency with no limit other than itself; ‘intellectual’, since this contingency is neither visible not perceptible in things: only thought is capable of accessing it as it accesses the Chaos that underlies the apparent continuity of the phenomena”

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(Meillassoux, 2008, 82). According to this line of thought, intellectual intuition makes it possible for pure thought to have transparent access to the essential features of the in-itself (the necessary contingency of its entities, their essential ‘facticity’) in complete independence from sensory, ‘receptive’ faculties or from empirical, ‘ontic’, inquiry (in the widest sense of the term) into the nature of reality. This intellectual intuition is exactly the ‘place’ where the logical powers of the faculty of reason and the categorial structure of the world at its most fundamental level (what is essential in any possible world) make immediate epistemic contact in a transparent, rationally demonstrable manner. It seems therefore that the Meillassouxian world is transcendentally structured so as to be ‘always already’ populated with a domain of ‘pure possibilities’ and ‘real necessities’ which, having the same (transcendental) categorial form with thought, are patiently ‘waiting’ to be discovered by human thought (though, at the empirical level, this discovery is a purely contingent fact, as is thought itself considered as an actual process of thinking which comes and goes out of existence). And this kind of philosophical view makes perfect match with the conception of the transcendental that we attributed above to Meillassoux, that is, a view according to which the transcendental, construed as the essential categorial structure common to world and thought, should be conceived as something that has some kind of distinctive existence—here understood in rationalistic, non-phenomenological, yet still ontological terms—over and above empirical existence and is constitutively irreducible to the latter. At this point, a Meillassouxian could retort that this ‘logical space’ or ‘realm’ of possibility is essentially untotalizable, and hence, not ‘always already’ there ‘waiting’ to be recovered by thought, since, as we know from Cantor, the infinity of the possible cannot be equated with its exhaustion (i.e. every infinite set has a determinate cardinality, which another infinity is always capable of exceeding) (Meillassoux, 2011b: 231). However, from this anti-metaphysical Meillassouxian conception of the realm of possibility, it does not at all follow that he can escape falling victim to the above Sellarsian critique. Meillassoux is vulnerable to the latter because, according to him, the human mind can have full—that is, epistemically ‘diaphanous’—access to the non-totalizable nature of the logical space of possibility, independently of any kind of ‘ontic’ (empirical or scientific) investigation. This Meillassouxian philosophical picture of an epistemically transparent ‘realm of necessity’, which is completely impervious to scientific investigation (i.e. to explanatory reconceptualization with the

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use of the scientific image’s conceptual tools), being as it is a particularly strong version of modal realism, is what would be deemed objectionable from a Sellarsian point of view.

4  How Does Sellars Escape the Correlationist Circle? The Transcendental as a Necessary Route for Capturing the ‘in-itself’ As I see it, according to Sellars, the key error of all forms of correlationism as well as of Meillassoux’s (putatively non-correlationist) rationalistic speculative realism is that they conceive the irreducibility of the transcendental (‘ontological’) to the empirical (‘ontic’) level in terms that do not distinguish between a normative and a descriptive-explanatory dimension of the irreducibility in question. Moreover, I take it that the failure to draw this distinction implicitly and indirectly shapes Meillassoux’s own understanding of where the essential problem lies with correlationism (not in the correlationist circle alone, but rather in accounting for the possibility of understanding the ‘facticity’ of the correlation between thought and being) and of how it should be positively overcome (by a ‘dialectical’ Aufhebung of strong correlationism, through the absolutization of the facticity of the correlation—in other words, by the objectionable conversion of the logical possibility that everything could be otherwise into the nomological possibility that everything could become otherwise (Wolfendale, 2015)). Now, Sellars’ own philosophical project is structurally similar to Meillassoux’s in that it can also be understood as an attempt to combine Kantian transcendentalism with a robust scientific realism in a way that enables us to gain a non-metaphysical access to the ‘in-itself’ while avoiding all kinds of spurious ‘correlationisms’. Of course, this is not the place for giving a detailed account of Sellars’ intricate and sophisticated metaphysical and epistemological views. However, we shall attempt to provide a sketch of certain key Sellarsian moves for rendering his unique blend of Kantian transcendentalism and scientific naturalism a coherent non-metaphysical and non-correlationist vision of man-in-the-world. As was mentioned in Sect. 3, Sellars’ key move for reconciling the irreducibility of the normative level, in which all distinctively human phenomena belong, with a robust scientific realist naturalistic picture of the world

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according to which the normative is explanatorily reducible to non-­ normative processes, is to distinguish between the prescriptive-expressive function of normative vocabulary and the explanatory role of descriptive vocabulary (which alone is ontologically committal and provides us with provisional ‘categorial knowledge’, always amenable to recategorization on the basis of empirical-scientific inquiry). In this way, Sellars is in a position to insist on the semantic irreducibility of the normative domain (‘the logical space of reasons’), while simultaneously acknowledging the possibility of its causal explanatory reducibility to a norm-free natural order. By the same token, Sellars can hold that the transcendental is conceptually or semantically irreducible to the causal order (norm-free nature) while at the same time insisting that his theory can (in principle) account for the empirical conditions of the emergence of the ‘transcendental correlation’ itself (which, for Sellars, takes the form of a categorial system, the manifest image, built around the object-property categorial framework, in terms of which we encounter the world and ourselves in everyday experience). As we saw in Chap. 5, Sellars thinks that the explanation (from the standpoint of the scientific image) of the emergence of the manifest image itself essentially involves accounting for the fact that the latter represents itself as a group phenomenon, and he contends that this phenomenon will turn out to have an evolutionary explanation (Sellars, 1963: 17-18). 4.1   The Transcendental as a Necessary Route for Capturing the ‘in-itself’ Although Sellars does not explicitly put it this way, I take it that the conceptual irreducibility of the transcendental to the causal order is shown, among other things, by the fact that, for Sellars, the conditions under which our thought can have empirical content or objective purport are the proper subject of a transcendental investigation. Indeed, as we shall shortly see, it is only by way of this kind of transcendental investigation that we can reach non-metaphysical, non-dogmatic and non-correlationist results about the structure of the ‘in-itself’. How exactly can this be shown? Recall, first, that, according to Sellars, the world ‘as it is in itself’ is conceived in purely episodic terms, that is, as lacking logical, causal and modal structure and as populated by subjectless and objectless absolute processes, endowed with an intrinsic (qualitative) character, occurrently existing, dynamically evolving and ceaselessly interacting with other such processes. It is a picture of the world in which the

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primary ‘objects’ are no longer substances (things) that endure through change, belong to kinds and have conditional (e.g. causal/dispositional) properties. I contend that one route from which Sellars arrives at his (seemingly idiosyncratic) conception of the ‘in-itself’ is precisely through transcendental considerations and more specifically through a transcendental investigation of the conditions under which alone our categorially structured ‘everyday’ experience and thinking can have empirical content (objective purport). The categorially structured framework in terms of which we experience, think about and act on the world of which we are part can have empirical content (objective purport) only if it can be directed toward (be about) an independently existing world, that is, only if it can be externally constrained by what is objectively the case, what really exists, as opposed to what seems to be the case. Yet, recall that, according to Sellars, we are bereft of intellectual intuition and the categorial structure of the world or of our minds themselves does not imprint itself on our minds as a seal imprints itself on wax. That is, the way in which we are affected by the world—or by our own minds—is not something about which we can have transparent categorial knowledge. While our minds are embedded in the ‘in-itself’, they do not categorially ‘mirror’ the latter. The above suggest, among other things, that knowledge of the world and knowledge of our conceptually/categorially structured means of accessing the world are on the same footing, advance hand in hand and are essentially fallible, where importantly, this fallibility does not show up exclusively at the level of individual beliefs within a categorial framework (itself beyond question) but can also characterize, in a different sense, the categorial framework itself.10 And, in such a case, our access to the ‘in-itself’ could prove problematic in a more substantial and inconspicuous manner, namely, due to systematic structural ‘dysfunctions’ lying at the heart of our means of

10  From this point of view, the main difference between the fallibility of individual beliefs within a given categorial framework and the fallibility of the framework itself lies in the fact that revisability in the former case (e.g. in the case of a belief about the color of a particular physical object) can be a piecemeal affair, whereas this is not the case with the revisability of the categorial framework itself (e.g. the framework principle that physical objects are colored): to say that the basic categories of the common sense framework are fallible and revisable is to say that its descriptive and explanatory resources can be rejected as a whole (not piecemeal) in favor of another descriptive-explanatory framework built around different, if not unrelated, categories (Sellars, 1997: §42; 1963c: 97).

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representing the in-itself, that is, in our ‘manifest-image’ categorial concepts themselves.11 Indeed, according to Sellars, we have reasons to believe that the categories through which we conceptually represent the world (and ourselves) are not God-given and did not evolve for the purpose of ontological insight but under selective evolutionary pressures of survival within a largely unpredictable and hostile environment; their raison d’être is practical and their seeming world-directedness ultimately has an evolutionary explanation (see, e.g. Sellars, 1953, 1963). (Recall that, for Sellars, categories, as all abstract entities, are, at bottom, culturally evolving functional roles, transmitted through language from generation to generation.) But this suggests that we ought to be highly suspicious of views according to which the external constraint on our manifest-image categorial framework could only come from a ‘real order’ with the exact same structure or form as that of the latter. It seems that if the ‘external constraint’ in question came exclusively from a reality that were already conceptualized in manifest-­ image ‘lifeworld’ terms, the objective purport of our everyday experiencings, thinkings and actings could no longer be transcendentally secured, as this view would in effect dogmatically presuppose that our existing ‘manifest-­image’ categories have transparent categorial access to the ‘in-­ itself’. Could an ‘external reality’ characterized by the exact same categorial structure as that of the manifest-image conceptual framework exert a properly external constraint on the latter, bereft of a recourse to the myth of the categorial Given? Does it not seem that in such a case ‘external reality’ would always be in agreement with our (parochial) conceptual means of representing it, at least as regards its most general structural features, on the grounds that nothing could feature as ‘externally real’ from the standpoint of our means of representation unless it ‘always already’ shared the structural features of the latter? How could this supposed ontological ‘pre-established harmony’ between the general structural features of our existing categorially structured means of representing the world and the world (or experience) as it is in-itself, be justified independently of a commitment to the categorial Given? I think it is obvious that in such a case, 11  For a related argument based on the Sellarsian (Kant-inspired) notion of ‘transcendental logic’ whose task is to explicate the concept of a mind capable of gaining knowledge of the world of which it is part, see also Brassier, 2016. Sellars also uses the related term ‘transcendental linguistics’ to describe the project of explicating what it is to be a language (categorial framework) that it is about the world in which it is used (Sellars, 1967b).

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our basic categories that govern all lifeworldly (manifest-image) descriptions and explanations of ourselves-in-the-world would be essentially autonomous and self-sufficient (not subject to categorial revision on the basis of scientific postulational/theoretical explanations of ourselves-in-­ the-world) and would thereby be characterized by an unchallengeable categorial authenticity (see also Sellars, 1997: §43). But this is a clear case of the myth of the categorial Given. 4.2   ‘Pure processes’ as Transcendental Guarantors of the Objectivity of Our Manifest-Image Categorial Framework Specifically, I shall argue that we can construe the Sellarsian ontology of pure processes as precisely what is needed—at the very general level of analogical concept formation for strictly philosophical (transcendental) purposes—to provide this properly transcendental constraint on the application of our ‘lifeworldly’ conceptual categories to an independently structured world. How can this claim be justified? Reflection on the basic characteristics of pure processes may be of some help here. For Sellars, pure processes are neither ‘physical’ nor ‘mental’ (i.e. they are beyond the ‘physical-mental’ categorial distinction); they are neither subjective nor objective (beyond the ‘is-seems’ distinction); they are also subjectless and objectless (beyond the ‘subject-object’ distinction), ‘actual’ (beyond the ‘real-illusory’, ‘normal-­abnormal’, ‘necessary-possible’ distinction), nameable and identifiable in terms of ‘typical causes’, yet without themselves having logical, modal or causal structure and endowed with an intrinsic qualitative character (see also Seibt, 2016). Moreover, pure processes are ‘dynamic’—in the sense of also engaged in non-mechanistic causal interactions beyond what Sellars terms the ‘impact paradigm of causation’ (Sellars, 1981). Finally, recall the radical difference of the framework of pure processes from the framework of Kantian categories: pure processes are not substances (things) situated in a public space, enduring through (publicly identifiable) time; they do not have conditional (e.g. causal/dispositional) properties, they do not belong to kinds, nor are they identifiable on the basis of a distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ conditions of their occurrence. Now, notice that pure processes, on the one hand, are clearly more determinate, specifications of the more general ‘transcendental’ terms (in

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the medieval sense)12 ‘item’ or ‘entity’, and in this sense they resemble categorial concepts, while, on the other hand, they are transcategorial, since they are beyond the ‘subject-object’, ‘subjective-objective’, ‘physical-­ mental’, ‘necessary-possible’ and ‘real-illusory’ categorial distinctions, and are also clearly beyond the Kantian (and, for that matter, Aristotelian) categorial framework, since pure processes are not substances (things) that endure through change, belong to kinds and have conditional (causal/ dispositional) properties. In fact, the framework of pure processes represents a radical change of categorial framework from the standpoint of which the Kantian-Aristotelian categorical framework would be reconceived as a realm of appearances (in the Kantian sense, i.e. as belonging to the objective yet ‘phenomenal’ world) of a more fundamental reality of pure processes which explains why Kantian-Aristotelian categories are a framework of appearances and also why they seem to—or, what amounts to the same thing, why for all practical purposes they indeed do—have real worldly purchase. More specifically, from this point of view, it turns out that the (transcendental) correlation between conceptually structured experiences (conceptual ‘intuitions’) and worldly medium-sized objects in public space and time presupposes—for its very existence as an aboutness relation—a correlation at the level of the ‘in-itself’–that is, in the real order, at the level of non-intentional, picturing relations—between non-conceptual sensory and affective processes and micro-physical—or better, non-medium-­ sized—worldly processes (Fig. 6.1). As we saw in Chap. 5, picturing is a non-intentional, material ‘correlation’ between mind, considered as a natural process, and the environment. It can be understood as an emergent, non-linear dynamic regime, implemented in nervous systems, which tracks and ‘translates’ changes in the external and internal environment of an organism and is tied in with motor actions and affective responses that ultimately serve navigational purposes of living organisms, including humans (Seibt, 2016). Picturing relations are structure/information-preserving relations of dynamic mapping 12  ‘Transcendentals’ (in the medieval sense of the term) are the most general terms that can be attributed to beings (Sellars, 1981 III: §90; Sellars, 1967a: 40). Concepts such as ‘actual’, ‘entity’, ‘item’, ‘something’ and ‘somehow’ are ‘transendentals’ since, due to their very lack of specificity, they range across all categories (be they physical or mental) and, thus, are necessary features of any intelligible conceptual scheme. In this sense of ‘transcendental’, the above transcendentally necessary terms are categorially neutral (non-committal), since, as mentioned above, due to their completely schematic nature, they range across all categories.

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Categorized/conceptuali zed intuitions-intentions (conceptual representings)

Categorized/conceptualized reality of medium-sized objects in public space-time Aboutness relation (intentional level, space of reasons intelligibility, substance ontology) Materially reconfigures as natural process the

Productive/subtractive imagination

Non-conceptual sensory-affective processes (non-conceptual representings)

Picturing relation: (non-manifest, non-intentional level, causal-evolutionary explanation, process ontology)

Micro-physical (non-mediumsized) worldly processes

Fig. 6.1  Aboutness relations and picturing relations as different forms of mind-­ world ‘correlations’

(second-order isomorphisms) between two ‘complex physical systems’ one of which pictures the other through a fantastically complex spatially and temporally ‘method of projection’, instantiated by complex dynamic ‘representational’ acts, the complexity of which is ‘matter-of factual’ and ‘pictorial’ (‘nominalistic’) rather than logical (‘universalist’). That is, those acts, unlike general concepts, are not representational in virtue of having discreet and detachable logical parts, arranged in ‘subject-predicate’ propositional form (Sellars, 1967a, 120-125; Rosenberg, 2007, 110-115). For example, those pictorial acts can be realized in a neural network as dynamic attractors that trace various different manifolds of ‘shapes’ through its

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phase space13 (Morgan & Piccinini, 2018, 131). It must be stressed that, for Sellars, the above ‘complex representational events’ can be said to picture something in the environment or map the latter only if they are connected–through inferential patterns that are analogues to our material inferences—to action, that is, to behavioral strategies for finding locations, individual objects and types of objects (Sellars 1981, 336-337; Rosenberg, 2007, 108-110). I contend that it is in this precise sense, namely, as containing a dynamic picturing projective relation to the body and the (physical and social) environment in our nervous systems, that the world or pure processes, the Sellarsian ‘in-itself’, can provide a properly independent external constraint on the application of ‘lifeworldly’ (‘manifest’) conceptual categories to the world, experience and ourselves.

5  Sellars’ ‘determinate negation’ of the Meillassouxian ‘in-itself’: Ontologically Abandoning, Yet Transcendentally Securing, Causality and the Principle of Sufficient Reason We mentioned above that the transcendental correlation between conceptually structured experiences and worldly medium-sized objects in public space and time presupposes—for its very existence as an aboutness relation—a correlation at the level of the ‘in-itself’—that is, at the level of picturing relations—between two different kinds of qualitative processes (sentient and non-sentient ones). This might be called a ‘bottom-up’ 13  Churchland (2007), a former Sellars’ student, also develops a framework, based on theoretical resources drawn from dynamic systems theory, for understanding the mapping/picturing function of the brain. According to Churchland, when a neural network is trained up, orbits whose vectors include a large variety of input states will evolve toward some preferred prototypical point (i.e. they will function as attractors). That is how the network extracts categories from complex data sets. This allows trained up networks to engage in a process that Churchland calls ‘vector completion’: embodying expectations about the organization and category of the input data set which may tend toward a correct assay even when that data set is degraded somehow (Churchland, 2007, 102). Since attractors also reflect a flexible, dynamical response to varying input, they are also potential controllers for an organism’s behavior—with vector completion offering the benefits of graceful degradation in a noisy, glitch-ridden world. Yet, Churchland conceives of this multidimensional mapping, picturing function of the brain as having the form of abstract universals, something that would be unacceptable for Sellars, as it goes against his nominalistic proclivities.

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relation of transcendental presupposition. Yet, as is well known, for Sellars this is only part of the story. The above schema makes full sense only if it is supplemented by a ‘top-down’ relation of transcendental presupposition: the non-conceptual sensory/affective states and the pictured micro-­ physical processes, situated at the level of the ‘in-itself’, epistemologically presuppose—for their very categorial identification as non-conceptual relata of a certain kind related in certain non-conceptual ways—that the Kantian-­ Aristotelian categorial framework is already in place. That is, knowledge of the relata and their (cor)relations at the level of the in-itself presupposes the establishment of an intentional correlation between conceptually structured experiences and worldly medium-sized objects and their properties in public space and time. More importantly, for Sellars, just as the ontology of absolute processes, devoid of logical, modal, deontic or causal structure, is transcendentally necessary for securing the possibility of objective purport of our manifest-­ image categorial framework, it is also the case that those very general structural (broadly Kantian) features of this categorial framework, namely, its logical, causal and deontic modalities, are epistemologically indispensable—and in this sense also transcendentally necessary—for arriving at the picture of the world as pure process. In particular, as we shall see below, the causal modalities are indispensable conceptual tools of our categorial framework which make possible the self-correcting dimension of our descriptive and explanatory practices and epistemically orient this self-­ correcting process of empirical inquiry toward the identification and occasional revision of (our conception of) what is physically necessary, possible or impossible. And this self-correcting process is governed by explanatory ideals (intimately bound up with our use of the causal modalities) the relentless pursuing of which ultimately shows, somewhat paradoxically, that the picture of the world as containing substances (things) that endure through change, belong to kinds and have causal/dispositional properties as criteria for belonging to the latter points beyond itself to a picture of the world as pure episode (process) (Sellars, 1957, 263-64). The reason that we bring this issue up is that, at first glance, the Sellarsian ‘in-itself’ of pure processes bears a striking resemblance to the Meillasouxian ‘hyper-chaotic’ ‘in-itself’ in that both Sellars and Meillassoux reject the ontological/explanatory import of the principle of sufficient reason (according to which for every thing, fact or occurrence there must be a reason or cause why it is thus and so and not otherwise) and take it that processes or occurrences at the level of the in-itself are ultimately

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contingent or groundless and are not governed by any real (teleological or causal) necessity. Both Sellars and Meillassoux, for example, hold that causal necessity, that is, the necessity of the causal laws of nature is not ‘in the world’. What exists at the level of the ‘in-itself’ is, at most, relatively stable regularities (Meillassoux, 2008) or, at best, unrestricted constant conjunctions (Sellars, 1957). Yet this stability does not entail any kind of real necessity: the necessity of the causal laws of nature is, at best (for Sellars), conceptual (the shadow of conceptual norms) not real necessity14 and, at worst (for Meillassoux), something that can actually change at any moment for no reason whatsoever. Stable regularities, even unrestricted constant conjunctions, can well be physically contingent. Yet, at a deeper level, Sellars’ and Meillassoux’s views on these issues are in fact radically different. Interestingly, they are different in a way that enables Sellars to preserve what he takes to be the sound insights of the Meillassouxian ‘in-itself’ (namely, the fact that it is devoid of logical, modal and causal structure), while at the same time avoiding its most problematic features—for example, the Meillassouxian collapsing of the logical and ontological registers with respect to modal concepts (possibility, impossibility, necessity) via a metaphysically inflated notion of the transcendental (see Sect. 3), which ultimately leads to the ontological/ categorial hypostatization of possibility and necessity as expressed in Meillassoux’s principle of ‘unreason’.15 Moreover, as I see it, Sellars attempts to do the above by criticizing (and ultimately rejecting) a certain metaphysically inflated conception of the principle of sufficient reason and of the notion of causally necessary laws, while at the same time accepting—and indeed transcendentally securing—them in another non-­ metaphysical sense.

14  According to Sellars, lawlike statements do have necessity, but this necessity is not real (metaphysical) as these statements are not descriptive: in particular, they are not descriptive ‘all’ statements which are unrestricted in scope, that is, not localized by reference to particular places, times or objects. For Sellars, the counterfactual robustness of lawlike statements is an indication that they actually function normatively as rules which determine what counts as physically necessary, possible or impossible (Sellars, 1957, 299-302). 15  Sellars thereby avoids the pitfall of ending up to a view of the in-itself as something necessarily ‘hyper-chaotic’, whose only constraint is the principle of non-contradiction and in which miraculous events can occur at every moment without reason or cause. For a critique of Meillassoux’s conception of the ‘in-itself’ and his use of modal notions from a Sellarsian standpoint see also Brassier, 2017.

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We can begin to see how Sellars can have his cake and eat it too by focusing on the causal modalities and, more specifically, on the function of what Sellars calls the ‘causal principle’ (‘every change has a cause’) (Sellars, 1957). I take it that by throwing light on the status and function of this principle we can illuminate how Sellars construes the status and function of the venerable principle of sufficient reason.16 Now, for Sellars the causal principle cannot be justified by induction (empiricism) or rational intuition (rationalism). Yet, it is a priori in that it functions as a regulative meta-principle of empirical inquiry. Specifically, along with the logical and deontic modalities, it provides the framework for the thinking by which we reason our way into the making of new commitments and the abandoning of the old. For instance, the proposition ‘there are causal connections which have not yet been discovered’ is not to be understood as a descriptive statement but rather as embodying the idea—and ideal—of the descriptive predicates it will be reasonable to introduce or to discard in our effort to develop and improve our language in accordance with rational explanatory procedures (Sellars, 1957, 302-307). I take it that in the case of the ‘causal principle’ this regulative status finds concrete expression in our practice of revising parts of a conceptual system (e.g. a particular scientific theory or ‘paradigm’) or even the latter as a whole, by offering causal explanations of apparent deviations of hitherto lawlike behavior of observed phenomena, in terms of an underlying reality whose (unobservable) entities, laws and principles explain why the deviations in question are only apparent, thereby restoring the lawful character of reality at the level of the ‘in-itself’ (see also Sellars, 1961). Moreover, it can be argued that the way in which causal laws prove indispensable in this process of revision, or for the self-correcting character of empirical inquiry in 16  It could be objected here that the principle of sufficient reason is concerned with sufficient reasons for understanding why something is thus and so and not otherwise, not with the causes of it being thus and so and not otherwise. However, if we construe the notion of ‘cause’ as essentially involving laws of nature, which, unlike accidentally true generalizations, are counterfactually robust, it seems plausible to think that causes explain phenomena by appeal to real necessity, namely, that of the laws of nature. In this, fairly ordinary, sense, causal explanations, by offering necessitating explanatory reasons why phenomena are thus and so (and not otherwise), can also be understood as expression of the principle of sufficient reason. According to this line of thought, causal explanations differ from more traditional versions of the principle of sufficient reason, in that they offer non-teleological (yet still necessitating) reasons for why things are thus and so. Yet, causal and reasons explanations are the same in their form, and in this sense they can both be—and historically have been—readily subsumed under the principle of sufficient reason.

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general, is by functioning as rules which determine the space of physical necessities, possibilities and impossibilities. To see this note that, as can be seen from a close inspection of our scientific practices, every change in our conception of the form of our fundamental causal explanations of the phenomena effects a corresponding change (and, in a sense, expansion) of the space of physical possibilities and impossibilities, that is, of what inferences we take to be counterfactually robust (i.e. distinguishing lawlike generalizations from merely accidentally true generalizations) (Sellars, 1949, §34-42; Sicha, 1980, Iiii-Iiv, Ixiii-Ixiv). Specifically, by changing the very space of physical necessities, possibilities and impossibilities, explanations of the basis of causal laws ‘convert’ what from the point of view of the preceding framework may have seemed physically impossible into a genuine physical possibility (or even, into a physical necessity), and conversely, seemingly genuine physical possibilities or necessities into physical impossibilities (i.e. possibilities or necessities which turn out to be merely ‘illusory’ ones). Moreover, they thereby make possible the identification of novel phenomena and possibilities which were conceptually ‘invisible’ in the former conceptual framework. Finally, and most importantly, in this way they bring to light and challenge certain fundamental yet tacit/unthematized presuppositions of the predecessor theory/conceptual system, which, precisely due to their centrality in the predecessor theory, were constitutively ‘invisible’ by the system’s own lights.17 In sum, it can be argued that, for Sellars, the ‘causal principle’, its concrete expression in the practice of giving and revising explanations of observed phenomena on the basis of underlying entities, causal laws and properties, as well as the notions of physical necessity and possibility involved are ultimately ‘metalinguistic’ expressive devices whose ultimate function is normative and practical: they enable the user of a conceptual framework to represent to himself (make explicit) the range of available ‘epistemic alternatives’ that are open to him and that demarcate his choices for improving his epistemic position. In this way, they enable the user of a conceptual framework to be consciously self-critical toward his own past, present and future tokenings of propositions licensed by the rules (natural laws) of a given conceptual framework in the face of explanatory anomalies. From this point of view, the causal principle expresses a framework regulative principle which provides empirical inquiry with a general 17  Think, for example, of Newton’s three laws of motion as seen from the standpoint of Einstein’s causal laws which, unlike Newtonian laws, are invariant in all inertial frames.

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epistemic ‘orientation’ toward a very schematic (and only diachronically approximated) ideal of rationality, while the specific (less—yet still—schematic) forms of causal explanations which are paradigmatic and taken for granted in each empirical-scientific theory function in effect as ‘synchronic’ paradigms of rationality, as concrete expressions or momentary crystallizations of what we take a rational procedure to be as regards the discovery of new facts and the explanation of old ones, in a certain cross section of the history of empirical inquiry. If the above are in the right direction, I think that they provide the raw materials for formulating a properly Sellarsian response to Meillassoux’s views on the function of the principle of sufficient reason. As was mentioned above, Meillassoux argues that the principle of sufficient reason can be refuted by reason alone, by showing that reason’s own principles actually entail what he calls the ‘principle of unreason’, according to which necessarily, everything is without reason and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. Yet, this strategy takes for granted that the question which lies at the heart of the formulation of the principle of sufficient reason (‘why are things - including the most general worldly facts and natural laws - as they are and not otherwise?’) is genuinely meaningful as it stands and goes on to argue that the principle of sufficient reason is false (and necessarily so).18 By contrast, Sellars would not accept that the above question has any straightforward ontological/explanatory import, and hence he would, in effect, reject both the principle of sufficient reason (understood in the above ontological/explanatory terms) and its negation, the Meillassouxian ‘principle of unreason’. Yet, he would 18  It must be noted here that although Sellars would ultimately reject Meillassoux’s principle of unreason, he would nevertheless be sympathetic to Meillassoux’s intention of demystifying the aura of fathomless profundity which has been invested to questions such as ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ by strong correlationists. This ‘ultimate’ philosophical question can be understood as an expression of what might be called the ‘meta-principle’ of sufficient reason, as it applies the principle of sufficient reason (‘why are things as they are and not otherwise?’) not to worldly things but to being as a whole. I think that Sellars would absolutely agree with Meillassoux’s claim that by disqualifying traditional metaphysical responses to this question (which invariably evoke the transcendence of a supreme being or a causa sui), the strong correlationist thereby leaves the door open for a more pernicious variety of transcendence: the unobjectifiable transcendence of the ‘infinitely Other’ (Meillassoux, 2008, 63; Brassier, 2007, 73). I also think that Sellars would concur with Meillassoux’s view that the question about the status of the principle of sufficient reason must be resolved, since to claim that it is insoluble or devoid of meaning is still to legitimate the celebration of questions such as ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ or ‘why is anything thus and so and not otherwise?’ (Meillassoux, 2008, 72-73). For a possible Sellarsian response to this ultimate meta-principle of sufficient reason, see Sect. 6.

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simultaneously argue that the principle of sufficient reason, this time understood as having normative, epistemological and practical (yet not directly ontological) import, is not only legitimate, but actually ­indispensable for the self-correcting function of empirical inquiry in general. I contend that this is because, for Sellars, the principle of sufficient reason, in the guise the causal principle (‘every change has a cause’), finds expression in the practice of criticizing and thereby revising fundamental causal laws and principles of a certain framework on the basis of differently formed causal laws, principles and explanations. From this point of view, the principle of sufficient reason, as expressed in the self-correcting practice of offering causal explanations of observed phenomena and revising them in their very form in the face of perceived irregularities (explanatory anomalies) in the behavior of the latter, can be understood as a regulative principle of empirical inquiry. But this is perfectly compatible—and indeed for Sellars goes hand in hand—with the view that at the ‘non-­correlational’ level of ‘things themselves’ there is no reason or cause for why things (processes) are thus and so and not otherwise (recall: pure processes are devoid of logical, modal, causal and deontic structure). Indeed, I think that Sellars would go so far as to say that it is the relentless application of the principle of sufficient reason itself (as expressed in our constructing and revising causal explanatory schemata in our attempt to account for apparent deviations of hitherto lawlike behavior of observed phenomena) that ultimately shows that this principle does not have ontological/explanatory but rather normative/practical/critical import.19 In conclusion, we can, I think, venture to say that from the ideal point of view of the Sellarsian ‘stereoscopic fusion’ of the manifest and the scientific image of man-in-the-world, the process of the synchronic 19  As we shall see in Chap. 9, this is related to the fact that, for Sellars, ordinary causal explanation in terms of thing-kinds (in the context of the Kantian-Aristotelian categorial framework), while enabling us to give satisfactory answers to one family of questions, is such that by its very nature, that is, by the very explanatory ideals that characterize the framework itself, leads us to new questions calling for new answers of a different kind, ultimately leading to an ontology of pure processes, where explanation based on causal laws gives way to purenon-causal and non-‘thingish’- description of exceptionless (strict) regularities understood in terms of ‘lawfully evolving processes’ (Sellars, 1957, 263). Yet, at the same time, I think that Sellars here wants also to show that it is only through the provisional understanding and application of the principle of sufficient reason as having ontological/explanatory purport (i.e. of the causal explanations as ontologically committal) that we can ultimately see it for what it really is, namely, as something that while not being ‘in the world’ has an indispensable practical, normative and critical import.

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establishment and diachronic revision of the forms of causal explanation in the sciences, and, ultimately, even the causal principle itself, would be understood as semantic/epistemic ‘ladders’ (on the model of the Tractarian ‘ladder language’ (Wittgenstein, 1961)) which, though indispensable for the improvement of our very categories in terms of which we understand the world and ourselves, could, in principle, lose their status as reflective/ critical representational tools and be directly integrated (i.e. expressed in embodied form) in the perceptual-inferential-practical habits and skills of our collective pattern-governed behavior. This, I contend, would be the practical cash value of the conception of the world as pure process. And, from this point of view, while there is indeed a (descriptive-explanatory) sense in which the pure processual ‘in-itself’ does not contain natural laws, possibilities, necessities, reasons, causes and, in a sense, not even categories, there is another (normative, practical) sense in which the ‘in-itself’ can be understood as a limit concept pointing toward a never-ending process for the satisfaction of the need-demand for the concrete material realization of the normative ideals expressed in all the above notions.

6   Is the Sellarsian Synoptic Vision Totalizing? I would like to conclude this chapter by raising a very general objection to Sellars’ whole way of thinking and philosophizing from a Meillassouxian standpoint. As we shall see, the above formulation of the ‘in-itself’, among other things, enables Sellarsians to respond to this objection. Specifically, from Meillassoux’s point of view, it can well seem that Sellars’ combination of a resolutely anti-correlationist scientific realism in ontology with a transcendental correlationism in epistemology (reinterpreted as having normative, practical and critical import) in which each level transcendentally secures the other, however unique and interesting it might be in its own right, ultimately succumbs to a totalizing vision of humanity-in-the-world in which a properly self-reflective philosophy aided by an ideally complete science is in a position to offer an ideally unified absolute explanation of reality and our place in it. If this is correct, would it not entail that, for Sellars, being is totalizable in that, for example, everything is connected in a way that can exhaustively described and explained? And has not Meillassoux (and many other continental philosophers) shown us that this kind of ‘totalizing’ thinking objectifies being? But to objectify being would amount to ontologically hypostatizing the latter on the model of abstract entities. That is, it would amount to understanding

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being as a kind of incarnated abstract entity (‘all-ness’, ‘one-ness’), while at the same time losing from view the essentially creative dimension of being as incessant processual becoming. But has not Sellars himself explicitly rejected this kind of move throughout his career, exposing it as a form of the myth of the Given? And isn’t he himself among those few analytic philosophers who explicitly espoused a radically nominalistic process ontology, characterized by a Heraclitean incessant flux? In response, I think that a Sellarsian could—indeed should—concede that being is unobjectifiable and point out that Sellars’ ideal of an ‘absolute’ explanation, far from pointing toward a totalizing world, actually entails that the world is non-totalizable. This is because at the deepest level of explanation, real connections (necessary logical, causal, deontic laws), far from being fundamental ‘unexplained explainers’, prove, on scientific grounds, to be themselves in need of explanation by a-categorial structures that lack modal, logical, causal and deontic properties altogether. Sellarsian becoming remains unsubordinated to fixed essences, forms, causal laws of nature, logical ‘laws of thought/being’ or phenomenological ‘appearances’. Meillassoux avoids objectifying being only by hypostatizing modality— that is, by reifying the logical necessity of contingency (necessarily, everything could be otherwise) into a real-ontological necessity of contingency (necessarily, everything could become otherwise). Of course, Meillassoux would remind us here that his meta-modal realism (‘being is necessarily contingent’) does not objectify being as the modal realm has an untotalizable transfinite structure (Meillassoux, 2011b, 231). We have already seen (Sect. 3) that this Meillasouxian claim falls foul of the categorial Given since we are supposed to have access to this structure through ‘intellectual intuition’ bereft of an essential connection with empirical-‘ontic’ knowledge and inquiry. Another problematic aspect of this view, for Sellars, would be that an ontological commitment to the Cantorian infinite is essentially an idealization incompatible with naturalism and materialism. Sellars, on his part, concurs that being is unobjectifiable (it cannot be ‘exhausted’ or thought as a ‘totality’) but he attempts to make this unobjectifiable character of being compatible with nominalism (there are no causally efficacious abstract entities-properties) and the continuous/qualitative character of processes, by espousing finitism and rejecting ‘quanticism’: the world can well be populated with (non-countable) ‘finite differences’, which can be ‘continuous’ in such a way that any mesh in which we conceptually cut up the world into objects with finite grain can

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in principle be replaced by a still finer mesh (Sellars, 1967a, 147-148). In other words, for Sellars, the untotalizability of being is an illuminating and correct metaphysical view only if is thought through in a resolutely non-­ abstract and non-ideal manner. Moreover, on the issue of the modal status of being as a whole, I take it that the Sellarsian ‘in-itself’ is better described (ontologically) as neither necessary, nor contingent, and admits of no meta-modal characterizations (‘necessarily contingent’, ‘contingently necessary’, etc.). Another way to put this point—which however risks objectifying modality—is that processual being, as totally unconditioned, is without ground, and in this sense, ‘absolutely contingent’, without sufficient reason. But precisely because of its unconditioned status, being can also be said to be ‘absolutely necessary’ in the sense that there is no ground or possibility for it not to be (Hegel’s Science of Logic offers a similar analysis here; see Brown, 2021, 86-89). Yet, I take it that it is ultimately less misleading to describe this unconditional status of being (or better, becoming) that admits of no modal distinctions and contrasts as neither necessary nor contingent, rather than as ‘the identity of absolute contingency and absolute necessity’—as it is difficult to make sense of what modal distinctions really amount to if they lose their contrastive nature.20 Sellars here proves to be at the end of the day a Humean process naturalist and the Sellarsian ‘in-itself’ resembles more the Deleuzian ‘Chaosmos’ rather than the Meillassouxian ‘hyper-chaos’ or the Hegelian ‘immanent movement of the Concept’—although the Hegelian conceptual categories, reinterpreted as having normative-practical (as opposed to explanatory-­ ontological) import, that is, as the normative infrastructure of thought 20  A yet third option (partly inspired by Deleuze (1968)) is to describe Sellarsian becoming as a world in which ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ (properly reconceptualized) are reciprocally implicated in immanently producing actuality. ‘Contingency’, as the inexhaustible ‘power’ of becoming to create novelty without law, and ‘necessity’, understood as the constraint of this creative becoming by the world’s actual causal history, as the latter is retained in each present state of the universe, can be thought of as dynamic evolutionary principles accounting for the immanent production of the actual world. In this way, we avoid reifying modal distinctions not by ontologically eliminating them or by treating them as normative methodological tools, but by making them dynamic morphogenetic principles of becoming. (I am not sure that Sellars would find this view congenial or plausible, but it seems to me an interesting conceptual possibility deserving further investigation.) Note that this latter kind of processual becoming is not correctly described in a Meillassouxian meta-modal manner, as a world in which everything is ‘necessarily contingent’, where miraculous events can occur at any moment without any constraint from the world’s past causal history.

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that makes the self-correcting and regulative dimension of empirical-­ scientific inquiry possible, can prove to be indispensable semantic-epistemic means for arriving at the above radically non-Hegelian picture of the ‘in-­ itself’. In this way, the ‘in-itself’ (both in the descriptive-explanatory and the normative-practical sense of the term) turns out to be ultimately foreclosed to objectification, while at the same time remaining fully intelligible and accessible to knowledge (if only as an infinite task).

References Badiou, A. (2009). Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Continuum. Brandom, R. (2015). From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars. Harvard University Press. Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan. Brassier, R. (2016). Transcendental Logic and True Representings. Glass Bead. http://www.glass-­bead.org/article/transcendental-­logic-­and-­true-­representi ngs/?lang=enview Brassier, R. (2017). Correlation, Speculation and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis. In F. Gironi (Ed.), The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux: Analytic and Continental Kantianism (pp. 67–84). Routledge. Brassier, R., Grant, I.  H., Harman, G., & Meillassoux, Q. (2007). Speculative Realism. Collapse, III, 306–449. Braver, L. (2007). A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-realism. Northwestern University Press. Brown, N. (2021). Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique. Fordham University Press. Christias, D. (2016). Sellars, the Myth of the Categorial Given and Correlationism: A Sellarsian Critique of Correlationism and Meillassoux’ Speculative Materialism. Journal of Philosophical Research, 41, 105–128. Churchland, P. (2007). Neurophilosophy at Work. Cambridge University Press. Crowell, S. (2018). Kant and the Phenomenology of Life. Natur und Freiheit, 1, 159–184. Crowell, S., & Malpas, J. (Eds.). (2007). Transcendental Heidegger. Stanford University Press. Gardner, S. (2007). Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Theory of Perception. https://sas-­space.sas.ac.uk/601/1/S_Gardner_Merleau-­Ponty.pdf Gardner, S., & Grist, M. (Eds.). (2015). The Transcendental Turn. Oxford University Press. Gironi, F. (2015). What Has Kant Ever Done for Us? Speculative Realism and Dynamic Kantianism. In S. De Sanctis & A. Longo (Eds.), Breaking the Spell: Contemporary Realism Under Discussion (pp. 89–113). Mimesis International. Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Penguin.

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Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum. Meillassoux, Q. (2011a). Potentiality and Virtuality. In L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (pp. 224–236). re-press. Meillassoux, Q. (2011b). Excerpts from L’Inexistence Divine. In G.  Harman (Ed.), Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh University Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2012). Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Snalysis of the Meaningless Sign. http://oursecretblog.com/txt/QMpaperApr12.pdf Morgan, A., & Piccinini, G. (2018). Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Intentionality. Minds and Machines, 28, 119–139. O’Shea, J. (2007). Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn. Polity Press. Rosenberg, J. (2007). Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images. Oxford University Press. Seibt, J. (2016). How to Naturalize Sensory Consciousness and Intentionality Within a Normative Gradient: A Reading of Sellars. In J. O’Shea (Ed.), Sellars and His Legacy (pp. 187–221). Oxford University Press. Sellars, W. (1949). Language, Rules and Behavior. In S. Hook (Ed.), John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (pp. 289–315). Dial Press. Sellars, W. (1953). Is There a Synthetic a Priori? Philosophical Studies, 20, 121–138. Sellars, W. (1957). Counterfactuals, Dispositions and the Causal Modalities. In H. Feigl, M. Scriven, & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II (pp. 225–308). University of Minnesota Press. Sellars, W. (1961). The Language of Theories. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science (pp.  57–77). Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Sellars, W. (1963). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1967a). Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1967b). Some Remarks on Kant’s Theory of Experience. Journal of Philosophy, 64(20), 633–647. Sellars, W. (1981). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sellars, W. ([1956] 1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press. Sicha, J. (Ed.). (1980). Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Wittgenstein, L. ([1921] 1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge. Wolfendale, P. (2015). The Necessity of Contingency. In P. Gratton & P. Ennis (Eds.), The Meillassoux Dictionary (pp. 121–124). Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Deleuze and Sellars on Ontology and Normativity

1   Introduction In Chap. 6, it was mentioned, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, that the Sellarsian processual world as it is ‘in itself’, devoid of conceptual (logical, modal, causal) structure, resembles ‘Chaosmos’, Deleuze’s version of ceaseless processual becoming. Another way in which we can show the fertility of Sellars’ philosophy and its relevance for continental philosophy is by putting his views on ontology and normativity in conversation with one of the most important figures of contemporary continental philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, who was perhaps the most systematic and rigorous defender of a unabashedly metaphysical picture of the world as a ceaseless processual becoming (a stance which was generally considered anathema to most French continental philosophers of his age, such as Derrida, Foucault or Lyotard). This picture of the world very much resembles Sellars’ own and is in fact much more developed than the Sellarsian version of process metaphysics. Many central but underdeveloped notions of Sellars’ metaphysics are found in far more developed form in Deleuze. For example, in Sellars’ basic ontological level, just like in Deleuze’s, basic ‘monadic’ particulars are characterized by ‘mere’ or ‘pure’ differences (not connected through negation or prior identities through relations of material incompatibility), they are repeatable without generality, they are particularized perspectives of the whole world (which they confusedly include as a result of their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_7

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actual evolutionary development and interaction with all other relevant worldly processes) and they are not organized around the hierarchical categorial-taxonomic structure of genus-species-individuals. Moreover, the ‘propositions’ and worldly processes of this world are modeled on the verb-adverb structure, rather than the classic subject-predicate structure (that implies a substance-property ontology). Nearly all these notions receive far more systematic treatment in Deleuze’s system. Thus, it is my contention that a Sellarsian metaphysics of process can be made more coherent, determined and consolidated by its confrontation with Deleuze’s univocal process metaphysics. On the other hand, unlike Sellars, Deleuze denounces normativity in all its forms, by considering it as an essentially oppressive kind of experiencing, thinking and acting, which impoverishes the latter by violently subsuming their individuality to the universalizable abstract generality of essentially hierarchical (semantic-linguistic, empirical, metaphysical, moral) laws, deviance from which is to be condemned as ‘abnormal’. In this way, normativity is understood as a tool for constructing obedient subjects of (self) control that are incapable of thinking about the world and themselves in novel, subversive, revolutionary ways. Very roughly, we could say that one of the main differences in Sellars’ and Deleuze’ worldview is that while both agree that, at bottom, the world has a non-conceptual, nominalistic and processual structure, devoid of logical, modal and moral necessities (as Deleuze used to say—and Sellars would wholeheartedly agree—‘abstract entities do not explain but must be themselves explained’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. vii)), Deleuze thinks that this view of the world does not have any room for normativity in any sense, while Sellars believes that not only is normativity compatible with a nominalistic (even materialistic) process metaphysics, but can be actually complementary—or even, mutually reinforcing—with the latter (for more on this see Chap. 8). Here, I think, lies a potentially fruitful dialogue between Sellars and Deleuze that can be beneficial for both. On the one hand, some features of Deleuze’s ‘monistic pluralist’ process metaphysics could put some flesh in the bare bones of Sellarsian process nominalism. On the other hand, the Sellarsian resolutely non-­ representationalist notion of normativity could be used to amend a blind spot of Deleuze’s thought, as it shows that normativity is an indispensable form of thinking and a necessary condition of our individual and collective

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freedom in a way that does not fall foul of what Deleuze calls ‘the image of representational thought’.1

2  Deleuze’s Differential Ontology and Its Relevance for Sellars’ Process Naturalism According to Deleuze (in his classic Difference and Repetition (1968)), at the fundamental level of ontology what really exists is ‘pure’ differences, primitive compatibilities-incompatibilities, that are not internally related through negation (relations of exclusive difference) but co-exist in a virtual plane of ‘multiplicities’ and are related through ‘inclusive disjunctions’ (in the mode in which all colors are ‘folded’ in white light). The morphogenetic realization (‘explication’) of this topological space in the actual world is what produces discreet, extended and exclusively incompatible entities (e.g. colors) and objects as loci of exclusively incompatible properties. Moreover, the individuation of events is based on a notion of ‘re-identification’ (‘repetition’) without generality, or need for an original self-identical entity, and in which every identifying act is simultaneously an act of creation or (non-interchangeable) variation. In other words, to identify and individuate an event is simultaneously to transform it. The ‘virtual’ for Deleuze is not to be confused with the ‘possible’. The virtual (plane of multiplicities) does not inhere in some abstract-logical realm of potentialities waiting to be realized but is rather fully real and acts concretely as an immanent generative force upon the actual—which in turn acts back upon the virtual, changing its immanently expressed potential. It is interesting to explore the extent to which the Deleuzian notion of virtuality could be integrated into a Sellarsian process nominalism which eschews traditional modal notions (possibility-necessity) and is based only on occurrent intrinsic characteristics of processes. At first sight, Sellars’ process ontology seems to be based more on the model of Humean actualist regularism (‘one damn thing after another’) at the bottom level of which lie only occurrently existing and externally related intrinsic ‘monadic’ properties bereft of any modal structure. Thus, it seems that Sellarsian processes do not have any room for the Deleuzian virtual. Yet, for Deleuze, 1  According to Deleuze, the image of representational thought reduces the creative, differential and processual dimension of being to a static, ‘always already’ pre-understood hierarchical conception of the world and ourselves based on the substance-property categorial framework of traditional thought.

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the virtual is not a modal notion in the traditional sense of the term. The virtual differs from the classic modal notion of ‘possibility’ in that it is not a ‘passive’ entity (e.g. a ‘possible’ horse, the ‘form’ of horseness) inhering in some abstract-logical realm of potentialities waiting to be realized and conceived on the model of the actual (actual horses) by abstracting the actual entity’s essential from its accidental properties. The virtual is a real generative power of the actual and explains its infinite heterogeneity of actual forms and structures of things by precisely not resembling with the latter (think, e.g. here of biological evolution that immanently produces the infinite heterogeneity of life-forms without ‘resembling’ to any of them). The explanation here is genetic-productive, not ‘logical’, transcendental or ‘conceptual’. It does not account for the possibility of experience by positing a priori rules or principles (e.g. Kantian Categories) necessary for the constitution of experience, but for the morphogenetic production and development of actual experience. The Deleuzian virtual is a highly idiosyncratic kind of universal as it is not related to particulars thought mediating (logical) relations of generality but is directly related to the singular-individual through real relations of ‘morphogenetic production’. Thus, it is a kind of concrete or ‘particularized’ universal. Interestingly, Sellars himself (1949) develops a version of (nominalistically respectable) particularized universals, in which the latter are in effect non-sharable (non-repeatable) ways of being particulars. This Sellarsian model of universals resembles the Deleuzian one in that the relation between universal and particular (abstract-concrete) is not subsumptive and (conceptually-logically-inferentially) mediated but is direct and unmediated. Yet, it also differs from the Deleuzian virtual in that this direct, unmediated relation between universal and particular does not seem to have any generative, productive or morphogenetic function. This difference is perhaps explained by the fact that Sellars adheres to an ‘actualist’ view of reality at the rock-bottom level, while Deleuze’s goes further and attempts to explain this very mode of appearance of reality by invoking his notion of the virtual. And while it is obvious that Sellars’ did not even consider the viability or explanatory power of such ‘quasi-modal’ notions as the virtual (since it was not, and perhaps could not, be part of his conceptual repertoire), we must ask if such a move can indeed be philosophically illuminating in matters ontological, however ‘orthogonal’ it may appear to Sellarsian concerns, as at first sight it does not seem to be directly incompatible with Sellarsian process ontology.

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2.1   The Deleuzian Virtual as a Supplement to Sellars’ Process Ontology: The Case of ‘τ-dimension’ So how could the Deleuzian non-traditional modal notion of the ‘virtual’ be of help to Sellars non-modal Humean process naturalism? Perhaps an analysis of the Sellarsian scientific-image rendering of the way in which time really exists in sensibility (what Sellars calls ‘τ-dimension’) as an ongoing process in the form of a continuous self-differentiation of ontologically distinct temporal ‘planes’ capturing seemingly successive temporal events in a simultaneous manner (Sellars, 1967) can throw some light on this issue. That is, it might be the case that Sellars’ a-modal ontology needs to be supplemented with a further a-modal (or non-traditionally modal) category equally real with, yet distinct from, occurrent actuality to account for the ongoing differentiation (and continuous ‘creation’) of temporal ‘planes’ in sensation. Recall that Sellars takes it that time at the rock-bottom ontological level is a ‘continuous coming to be and ceasing to be’, the ‘ongoing’ dimension of processes, which however is not to be equated with the mathematical continuity of a continuing series of instantaneous entities or with a process of finite duration (before-while-after) (Sellars, 1981, pp.  59–60). This Sellarsian account of the qualitative continuity of time, which precludes processes from having finite duration, is not incompatible with a Deleuzian intensive account of time as duration. The Sellarsian account precludes the finite duration of processes only in the sense in which duration is to be understood as ‘continuity of existence for a certain stretch of time’. Sellars does not object to continuity as an (ontological) feature of processes, but to the continued existence of the self-same process, of an identical temporal ‘whole’ encompassing different successive states. He instead proposes a view according to which the continued existence of a process is understood as involving different temporal processes (existing in different ‘planes’) capturing (seemingly stretched in time and successive) temporal events in a simultaneous manner, in their intrinsic unfolding as τ-events. See, for example, the suggestive diagram below (Fig. 7.1). In this diagram, which depicts the structure of the ‘specious present’, the large circles (viewed in a perspective) represent instantaneous conceptual states of a person qua having sensory states. The vertical dimension represents (conceptually represented) time (time as a succession of events). The horizontal dimension represents a unique mode of ordering—the τ-dimension—of the (temporally) simultaneous constituents of a

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t4

It Α*ed, then Β*ed, and just now, C*ed

t3

It A*ed, and just now B*ed

t2

It (just now) A*ed

t1

non-conceptual sensory states 0

1

2

conceptual states

τ-dimension

3

: sequence of A*ing’s : sequence of B*ing’s : sequence of C*ing’s

Fig. 7.1  The Specious Present (adapted from Sellars, 1981, p. 63)

non-conceptual sensory state of the subject.2 The diagram shows that the specious present is not, as traditionally conceived, an incoherent combination of literal simultaneity and literal successiveness. Instead, what at the conceptual level is represented as temporal succession (a representation of succession) is actually at the non-conceptual level (τ-dimension) a sequence of different representations each of them representing the ‘flow’ of time in the present in a co-existent, simultaneous manner (a succession of ‘simultaneous’ representations). Sellars’ above account of how time really exists in sensibility (‘τ-dimension’) actually resembles with Deleuze’s conception of sense in which time is ‘continuous’, especially with Deleuze’s conviction that the way of ‘continuing’ something (e.g. one’s life) is to ‘replay itself entirely 2  Merely as existing, the non-conceptual states in question provide the subject with no awareness of C-ings as the kinds of things they are, let alone as having temporal features. Such a sensing may be called an ‘awareness’ or a ‘state’ of consciousness, provided that the latter terms are not being used in a cognitive or epistemic sense.

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on another plane’, that is, with the view that time has an intensive-­ differential nature, being the exemplary process which ‘does not divide without changing in nature’. I suggest that Sellars’ distinct τ-dimensions (existing in different ‘planes’), which simultaneously capture (seemingly stretched in time) temporal events, have features such as (a) continuity without successiveness, (b) non-causal, non-linear relation with preceding or future τ-events, (c) rupture of continuous, ‘stretched’ processes (rejection of the ‘passage’-of-time view according to which the latter does not induce a difference in kind in the process), that make them look very similar to Deleuzian events. (Deleuzian events mark a caesura such that time is interrupted in order to be resumed in another plane, thus being an instant that instead of absorbing past and future into a thick and ‘extended’ present, subdivides each present into past and future.) But it is difficult to see how this conception of time as an ongoing creative process, that is, as a continuous self-differentiation of ontologically distinct temporal planes capturing seemingly successive temporal events in a simultaneous manner, could ‘retain’ past events or project itself to an anticipatory future without a ‘real but not actual’ morphogenetic ‘engine’ capable of continuously producing novelty—including the repetition of the past in novel ways (recall that, for Deleuze, every identifying act is simultaneously an act of non-interchangeable variation; to identify and individuate an event is simultaneously to transform it). And this is precisely what Deleuze’s ‘virtual’ is designed to do. Thus, it seems that the Sellarsian τ-dimension, being in effect a dynamic non-conceptual creatively-cum-disruptively continuous flow of time planes (dimensions), that ‘continuously’ and immanently resume past and future into the present by changing them, needs something like the Deleuzian virtual for making full sense of its dynamic self-differentiating becoming.3 3  Sellars’ own view of ‘events’ are, as usual, highly complicated. In one sense, event-talk (e.g. the event of Caesar crossing the Rubicon) is in some sense derivative from substance-­ talk (Caesar crossed the Rubicon). There are no events taking place in addition to changing substances, that is, things or persons moving or doing this or that while before or after other things because of a dovetailing set of dispositional properties (Sellars, 1949, 1957, 1969). This holds in the context of the substance-property manifest-image categorial framework. However, in another sense, events, reconceptualized as processual becomings in the context of the ideal scientific image, do belong in the furniture of the world (and our sensibility) and are more fundamental than the substance-property framework (Sellars, 1957, pp. 577–595). It is in this latter sense, in which events are understood in terms of unfolding (space-time-­ object) processes and ‘objects’ are understood as ‘world-lines’ in a four (or two)-dimensional continuum, that Sellarsian ‘events’ can be usefully compared to Deleuzian ones.

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2.2   Deleuzian ‘Intensity’ as the Key for a Consistent Sellarsian Process Ontology I will now argue that another important Deleuzian metaphysical notion, namely, that of ‘intensity’, can provide the key for meeting three explanatory demands that Sellars’ process ontology sets for itself but fails to meet successfully. These are the following: (1) Extension and qualia (and also objects and their qualities) mutually presuppose one another in the context of the manifest-image descriptive ontology of everyday life (here Sellars accepts Berkeley’s argument for the inseparability of color and extension in our experience). (2) These two fundamental structural and contentual features of manifest-image objects are not ultimately real. They are not explanatorily fundamental and eventually must be themselves independently explained. (3) These more fundamental explanatory structures that will account for extension, qualia (and linear time) structure cannot just have ‘formal’, mathematical structure, but must have contentual structure, albeit in a way that must not presuppose the respective contentual structure of the explanandum. Thus, the non-mathematical structure in question must have ‘material content’ that is not extensive or qualitative in nature. I contend that Deleuze’ notion of intensity (intensive power) satisfies all these explanatory demands, whereas Sellars’ (significantly less developed) view satisfies them only by making use of a notion of a process which is intrinsically qualitative without being experiential—a notion which, however, it is very hard to make sense of. Let us elaborate on these points. First, recall that Sellars essentially agrees with Whitehead’s view that the content of the world must be qualitative all the way down. Τhe notion of ‘structure (mathematical, formal, metrical) properties’ without ‘content (qualitative) properties’ makes no sense. So, for Sellars, all ‘really real’ processes are to be understood as having an intrinsic character, homogeneous and qualitative in nature (Sellars, 1963b, pp.  446–447, 1965, p. 190). That includes both sensory-affective processes, such as ‘reddings’, ‘buzzings’, ‘itchings’ and ‘languagings’, and micro-physical processes, such as ‘electronings’ and ‘quarkings’. Yet Sellars, unlike Whitehead, is not panexperientialist, and his way of avoiding this controversial view is to hold that the qualitative structure of micro-physical processes is not intrinsically experiential (although he merely hints at this view rather than developing it in some detail). Every process, even rocks and mountains,

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differentially responds to features of the external environment and incorporates part of the latter into itself. But this does not amount to saying that these processes have qualitative experiences. They might well be analogous to Leibnizian monads in that they can perhaps be considered as particularized perspectives of the whole world, but again their perspectival nature and differentially responsive behavior, in the absence of sense-­ organs, does not justify calling this viewpoint ‘experiential’, though it is the unfolding of an intrinsic qualitative character. Only if we reach the level of sentient organisms it starts to seem plausible to equate qualitative and experiential structure, always bearing in mind that it is an emergent structure, built on, yet ontologically irreducible to, micro-physical qualitative processes (Sellars & Meehl, 1956). Note that the emergence in question does not involve any mysterious leap from ‘quantity to quality’ or from ‘structure properties to content properties’, as both emergent structures and the micro-physical processes from which they emerge are qualitative in character. However, it can be objected here that Sellars’ preferred way of avoiding Whitehead’s panexperientialism seems somewhat implausible as it is difficult to see how the intrinsic qualitative dimension of a process can be such as to involve no subjective and experiential dimension. Think, for example, of the notion of ‘qualia’ which paradigmatically combines those dimensions. How could a process have intrinsic qualitative character without at the same time being a (however minimally) perspectivally experienced quale? It seems that Sellars faces a real problem here, but, to my knowledge, he does not properly address it. The only thing that Sellars says regarding this issue is that “it would be odd if the only qualitative dimensions of the world were those which are, in the last analysis, tied to the sensory centres of the human brain” (Sellars, 1963b, p. 78). And he seems willing to allow for a non-metrical and qualitative dimension of the world which is not tied to sensory systems at all. But, nowhere, to my knowledge, does he address the oddness and difficulty that his own suggestion entails, namely, the existence of intrinsic qualities without qualia. It is precisely at this stage that Deleuze’s notion of ‘intensity’ might be used for giving at least the form of a solution to that problem, a ‘friendly amendment’ to Sellars’ otherwise praiseworthily non-anthropocentric view of processes. This is because Deleuzian ‘intensity’, among other things, provides a way of preserving the core Sellarsian (and Whiteheadian) thought to the effect that the in-itself cannot just have mathematical-­formal-­metrical

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structure, yet without construing the contentual dimension of the in-itself in proto-experiential terms (Whitehead’s ‘prehensions’) or non-experiential yet qualitative terms (Sellars’ ‘monadic’ qualitative particulars). Deleuze’s notion of intensity explains the extensive and qualitative properties of manifest-image objects, without itself having extension or qualitative structure. But the structure of intensive fields is not formal-­mathematical either. They have a contentual aspect: they are essentially continuous, non-linear, nonmetrical and cannot be divided without changing in kind.4 But note that this aspect is not (necessarily) experiential or qualitative in character. In Deleuze’s ontology, intensive processes provide an alternative explanation of the existence and structure of extensive and qualitative dimension of manifest-image objects and sensations, and they do this by satisfying all three explanatory demands to which Sellars is also committed, without necessarily construing the intrinsic character of monadic processes as experiential or qualitative in nature. Thus, I find this Deleuzian concept extremely interesting and important for Sellars and Sellarsians on this very difficult and highly speculative territory. However, a well-known controversial and highly problematic feature of Deleuzian ontology is that it does not seem to have any conceptual resources to explain why the intensive structures (powers-fields) that unfold in what we call ‘sentient beings’ are such that they are expressed in their nervous systems as qualia, whereas the intensive powers that unfold in ‘non-sentient’ beings are not intrinsically expressed in the latter as experienced qualia. Sellars does not face any such problem, as he clearly recognizes this difference and accounts for it in terms of emergence, that is, of the creative coming to be of a novel level of reality with novel causal-­ qualitative powers (sensa, sense fields) that do not exist in that form at the level of non-sentient beings (what we find there is just intensive-­differential fields as intrinsic monadic properties, yet not intrinsically structured in qualia-like form). Also recall that emergence, for Sellars, is placed within a 4  Note that the important property of intensity is not that it is indivisible, but that it is a property that cannot be divided without involving a change in kind. The temperature of a volume of water, for instance, can be ‘divided’ by heating the container from below, causing a temperature difference between the top and the bottom. In so doing, however, we change the system qualitatively; moreover, if the temperature differences reach a certain threshold (if they attain a certain ‘intensity’), the system will undergo a ‘phase transition’, losing symmetry and changing its dynamics, entering into a periodic pattern of motion—convection— which displays extensive properties of size: X centimeters of length and breadth. Drawing on these kinds of analyses, Deleuze will assign an ontological/morphogenetic status to the intensive: intensive differences (differences in potential) constitute the genetic condition of extensive space (of objects with extension and qualities) (see also Smith et al., 2022).

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monistic process metaphysics, that exactly like Deleuze’s own, is strictly ‘immanent’ at the ‘ontological’ level (and ‘pluralist’ at the ‘ontic’ level). Emergence does not by itself violate an ontology that aspires to be resolutely immanent, as the fundamental ontological explanatory principles that account for the emergence of emergence need not themselves ‘emerge’ or be ‘transcendent/al’ in form (God, Platonic forms, Aristotelian essences, transcendental principles of constitution, etc.). Novel processes emerge in the context of other processes by way of familiar evolutionary principles (see Chap. 5). Here we see how the confrontation between Sellars and Deleuze can prove beneficial for both philosophers: Sellars can mobilize Deleuze for tackling with problems and difficulties of his process ontology and vice versa. And they can do so in a way that makes the resulting process ontology more comprehensive and explanatorily powerful. 2.3   Deleuze’s Virtual as the Key for a Comprehensive Process Materialism Moreover, I take it that the Deleuzian virtual can be of great help to a proper and comprehensive process naturalism, not only for accounting for the latter’s dynamic conception of time (Sellarsian τ-dimension), but also, at a more basic level, for satisfying two fundamental metaphysical commitments about creativity and change that I think any materialism worthy of the name (including Sellarsian process naturalism) must come to terms with. These are (a) that the notion of creation ex nihilo (creation of ‘something from nothing’, e.g. the creation of the universe as a whole from nothingness) is unacceptable and does not make any sense, and (b) a plausible materialist ontology must account for the creative nature of becoming in a resolutely immanent manner—and without presupposing ‘ready-made’ unchangeable fundamental actual entities (which explain change in terms of combinations of unchangeable parts). Sellars does not address these issues, and perhaps he would not have agreed with the second requirement described above,5 but I think that a minimally plausible 5  For example, Sellars says that at heart he is a logical atomist (in his ontology, not his epistemology). But he immediately qualifies this remark by saying that he is a logical atomist until he goes on to develop a more accurate account of his Heraclitean process ontology (Sellars, 2018). Recall, also, that the Sellarsian rock-bottom ontological plane of ‘finite differences’ is indefinitely multi-layered (‘any mesh in which we conceptually cut up the world into objects with finite grain can in principle be replaced by a still finer mesh’) (Sellars, 1967, pp. 147–148) and, presumably, any change in level in this multi-layered structure is a change in kind (of the very objects themselves) and not just a change in degree (e.g. in fineness of grain of the self-same objects).

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materialistic process naturalism must (a) account for change and novelty and (b) do so in a resolutely immanent manner, and the most worked-out and comprehensive view about how to do just that is the Deleuzian one. These explanatory demands are justified in the sense that both creation of ‘something from nothing’ and the (contrary) view that the world is composed of ‘ready-made’ basic objects that combine with one another thereby accounting for change cannot explain novelty in an immanent, non-mysterious manner. Creation ex nihilo makes the existence of novelty simply magical, an ultimate mystery on the verge of incoherence, while the postulation of ‘eternal’ ready-made objects with extension and qualitative properties (a) can scarcely be considered as explanatorily fundamental (their extension and properties must be themselves explained) and (b) it cannot account for creativity and novelty, as what changes in this ‘atomistic’ world is only the combination of ready-made basic objects while the fundamental structure of the latter remains eternally the same. The concept of the virtual enables us to account for novelty in a resolutely immanent manner. Regarding the second point (immanence) the virtual explains why it cannot be the case that something (an actual entity) is created from nothing: every actual entity becomes so by being the actualization of an ‘always already’ operative metastable virtual files of multiplicities, whose ‘tensions’ (differences of potential), when ‘released’, activate a morphogenetic process culminating in the formation of actual entities (with extension and qualities). At the same time, the virtual entails—and hence accounts for—the constant production of novelty in the actual world (creation of structures and possibilities that do not pre-­ exist as such). Thus, in this way we have a uniform explanation of why novelty is constantly operative in nature as its immanent way of being and not as something that ‘breaks it course’ or intrudes in it from outside. As was mentioned above, Sellars does not delve on these deep metaphysical issues, although this is demanded by the (however skeletal) structure of his own process ontology. Recall that although Sellars did not explicitly do so, it is open for him to adopt an evolutionary-processual model of explanation whose picture of reality is what might be called ‘ontological mutabilist’: any and every worldly process can change as an adaptive response to changes in other corresponding processes in the environment (see Chap. 5). The notion of a ‘permanent adaptation’ does not make sense in this context, and the same goes even for ‘laws of nature’. There are no eternal, immutable, necessary structures in the universe, and this is a direct consequence of the evolutionary-processual way of thinking

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about the world as a whole. But here one might ask how ontological mutabilism, as the way of the very being of the world, is itself to be accounted for. Is it just a brute fact of ‘being as being’, an unexplained explainer, an ultimate feature of any and every factual entity? Do we not need something like the Deleuzian virtual to even begin to understand the essential ‘ontological mutability’ of being as such? In this case, the ontological mutability in question would be understood as an expression of the productive power of the virtual (its ability to produce novelty, to change the very field of possibilities). Now, a Sellarsian might counter at this point that Sellars’ conception of processual bottom-level entities (whether they be some kind of ‘matter’ of a form of ‘force-fields’) is essentially active. Processual entities are not passive receptacles of ‘forms’ or ‘essences’ and are not constrained by supposedly eternal, necessary, unsurpassable laws of nature. On the contrary, processual ‘matter’ is essentially productive, that is, it can immanently produce emergent novel structures, processes and laws (such as sentience and qualia). But here again the Deleuzian virtual seems to provide an ontological explanation for those productive, creative powers of processual matter. And even if a Sellarsian invokes here the basic principles of evolution as capable of immanently explaining the very emergence of novel structures in the world (see Chap. 5), there would still be a question about the metaphysical status of these fundamental evolutionary principles: are they not paradigmatic cases of a virtual function, as opposed to actualized forms or structures? (see n. 85). Yet an important clarification is here in order. In the above I have used the Deleuzian term ‘virtual’ as if it is ontologically self-sufficient, capable of existing independently of the level of the actual. It is, of course, well known that in Deleuze’s ontology the virtual interacts with the actual in that the structure of virtual multiplicities that can create novel worldly structures or possibilities is constrained at every moment by the configuration of the actual, that is, by the actual causal history of interacting worldly entities. Yet, it still seems that in the context of its interaction with the actual, the virtual retains an ontological-productive-morphogenetic priority over the actual in the sense that, for example, the initial actual structures-­ entities of the universe do not seem to be self-sufficient ontologically but have been morphogenetically produced by the actualization of an (always operative, metastable) plane of virtual multiplicities. And the problem is that in the context of a resolutely immanent ontology, based on the univocity of being, it is not easy to see how there can exist a deep ontological asymmetry between the unconditionally existing virtual and the

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conditionally existing actual. The actual and the virtual must be interrelated, interconnected and mutually presupposing levels of existence. If this were not the case, it seems to me that they would be converted into traditional metaphysical categories (hierarchical ontological divisions within being) thereby compromising the fundamental feature of being according to Deleuze, namely, its univocity and immanence. The conception of the virtual as ontologically self-sufficient is reinforced by its very definition as ‘real without being actual’. Obviously, the level of the actual cannot exist without being actualized by something else that is real in another sense, namely, the virtual. And this seems to make the virtual ontologically independent and prior to the actual. How can this ontological asymmetry be mitigated? One way of answering this question is by appeal to the concept of intensity (that accounts for progressive morphogenesis) and by wondering whether it belongs to the virtual (Williams, 2003), the actual (Roffe, 2012) or to an ontologically distinct region ‘between’ the virtual and the actual (DeLanda, 2005). Virtual multiplicities constrain and guide intensive processes which in turn by progressively determining (differentiating) the former yield-specific actual entities (DeLanda, 2011). More specifically, according to Deleuze, differential relations and singularities making up a virtual multiplicity structure intensive morphogenetic processes by marking system thresholds, transforming the ‘undetermined’ differential multiplicity into a ‘determinable’ field of intensive morphogenetic processes, which, in turn, becomes ‘determinate’ by (spatiotemporal-causal-objectual) integration (compression, stabilization, simplification) and resolution (scale, granularity, accuracy) of dynamic processual informational input in the form of actual things with extension and qualities. My own suggestion about the relation between the virtual, the intensive and the actual is that while the domain of virtual multiplicities is indeed prior to that of intensive morphogenetic processes and the latter is, in turn, prior to actual things with extension and properties, the ontological priorities in question make full sense and really function as such only in the context of the ontological explanatory framework as a whole and not as isolable parts that could supposedly have ontological self-sufficiently completely independently of all the others. A useful analogy here is the function and explanatory work of quarks within the context of a proton: quarks are distinct parts of protons, but they cannot do their ontological explanatory work independently of the whole (proton) of which they are ‘parts’. If we think of a quark in abstraction from the relations in which it stands

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to other quarks within the context of a proton, it ceases to be the quark in question and simply becomes unrecognizable. The same goes, I contend, with the Deleuzian ontological explanatory structure: virtual multiplicities → intensive morphogenetic processes → actual things (with extension-­ qualities) → (alteration of plane of) virtual multiplicities. I think that this way of understanding the virtual as distinguishable, asymmetric yet inseparable from the actual makes it a promising explanatory tool for understanding the creative nature of becoming in a resolutely immanent manner, a requirement that any materialistic process naturalism (including Sellars’ own version of it) must meet if it is to increase its explanatory power and scope.6 Finally, it must be reminded that a nominalist cannot object to the Deleuzian notion of the virtual on the grounds that it attributes causal-­ productive power to an abstraction. It is true that the virtual, in a sense, functions as a universal and Deleuze explicitly admits this much. But, as we saw, Deleuze uses the notion of the ‘universal’ in a highly idiosyncratic manner, in which universals are not generals: according to him, the notion of the universal must be completely disentangled from its traditional connection to particulars and must be thought as directly or immediately connected to the singular or individual, that is, with something resolutely non-general. As Deleuze puts it, to the ‘generality of the particular’—for example, the difference between particulars and lawlike generals governing them—the virtual opposes a ‘universality of the singular’ (Deleuze, [1968] 1994, p. 1). In this sense, Deleuze’s ontological commitment to the virtual is compatible to his nominalist view to the effect that ‘the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained’, because the virtual exerts its power in the world not as a generality exemplified in a particular but as a resolutely non-general, not logically mediated, force that is 6  What is the consequence of this view for the issue of the (immanent) creation of the actual universe? A first tentative suggestion here might be that since the virtual-intensive-­ actual are, at bottom, ‘moments’ of an immanent processual whole (becoming), the question of the creation of actuality as a mode of existence, just as that of virtuality, makes no sense— although the creation of any specific actual universe (e.g. out of the ‘brane multiverse’) might indeed make sense. Note that the creation in question can be understood in terms of quantum fluctuations (emergence of pairs of virtual particles and anti-particles), which do not violate the conservation of energy—at least in the expanded sense of ‘time averaged’ energy. As the time averaged over is linked to the energy uncertainty by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, vacuum fluctuations are more an expansion than a violation of the principle of conservation of energy.

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immediately morphogenetically actualized at the level of the singular-­ individual.7 Thus, Deleuze’s novel conception of the universal can escape the traditional nominalist critique to the ontological reification of universals and can even be seen as putting forward an alternative non-traditional conception of nominalism itself, besides Sellars’ version of nominalism.

3  Deleuze’s Blind Spot: Normativity, Oppression and Freedom It is no secret that a certain theme, central to German Idealism, pragmatism and many strands of recent analytic philosophy (Sellars, McDowell, Brandom), is conspicuously absent from Deleuze’s philosophy: normativity, and its key role in understanding meaning, thought, action and freedom. Normativity is not one of Deleuze’s words, and this is no accident. Deleuze was deeply suspicious of—and at times outright hostile to—normativity and thought that its use for philosophical purposes was at best misleading and at worst dangerous and potentially oppressive. 3.1   Normativity and Freedom To see why normativity would be considered an ultimate problematic concept from Deleuze’s viewpoint, we must recall his critique on what he terms ‘representational thinking’. In Deleuze’s view, representational thinking pervades vast regions of classical metaphysical philosophy (philosophia perennis) and has even been internalized into our common-­sensical view of ourselves-in-the-world in the context of the everyday lifeworld. According to this conception, which finds philosophical expression in such otherwise different philosophical systems as those of Aristotle, Kant, ordinary language philosophers and even Hegel, we can only understand the world and ourselves only in the context of the fundamental categories of identity, essence, object (substance), its essential and accidental properties, as the latter as represented by a unified subject of experiences in a world governed by laws (natural or ethical). Representational thinking understands difference as always mediated by (and hence as essentially subordinate to) a prior identity, analogy, contrariety, resemblance and—most 7  Indeed, I take it that the basic principles of evolution by natural selection can provide a useful illustration about how the virtual might function as a ‘concrete universal’ immediately (i.e. morphogenetically) expressed in the actual (see also Chap. 5).

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importantly—negation (in the sense of the Hegelian ‘determinate negation’). As was mentioned above, Deleuze would have considered the notion of normativity as a paradigmatic expression of representational thinking or, in other words, as a problematically ‘transcendent’ (i.e. non-immanent) concept. More specifically, normativity, understood as the rule-based bindingness of our perceiving-thinking-acting behavior, would be considered by Deleuze as something ‘oppressive’ or ‘totalizing’, namely, as something that suppresses the heterogeneity, pure differential nature of being (and of perceiving, thinking and acting), favoring instead a procrustean, ‘identitarian’ conception of the latter, which conceives the world and ourselves as always already ‘pre-understood’ with regard to their basic categorial structure, thereby making us and our thinking blind to radically surprising encounters with categorially unsubsumable events (which alone can force our thought to reorient itself in novel ways). Now, I agree with Deleuze that an understanding of ourselves-in-the-­ world in normative terms could be indeed theoretically (and practically) ‘oppressive’ and ‘totalizing’ and would reduce in a procrustean manner difference to identity, the individuality of beings to the generality of universal categories, principles or laws if normativity were understood as having an exclusively representational function, that is, if normative discourse were construed as an ontological description or explanation of ‘how things are’. In this case, normatively described phenomena would derive their normative necessity and force by their very ontological nature or essence, namely, from how they ought to function based on the natural kind to which they belong in the order of being. And Deleuze would have been right to find this conception of normativity deeply problematic (and, as we have seen, the same goes for Sellars). If, however, normativity is construed as non-representational (non-descriptive, non-explanatory), as having an expressive, prescriptive, metalinguistic and, at bottom, pragmatic, function, which is not ontologically committal, then Deleuze’s blanket dismissal of normativity seems unjustified. But, if normative force is not to be accounted for in terms of our conformity to the dictates of metaphysical essences or ‘natural oughts’, and is instead understood non-representationally, what is its mode of existence? Why not just consider it in terms of error-theory, as an ideologically ingrained necessary illusion for giving a semblance of meaning, purpose and orientation to our lives?

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We can quickly dismiss the error-theoretical view of normativity (which is actually Deleuze’s own view) by noting that it presupposes that normative discourse has a representational (descriptive-explanatory) function, a view that we have found ample reasons to reject. Instead, we can put forward a non-representational account of normativity—which does not seem to be considered even as an option to be rejected by Deleuze—along the following lines: normativity and values (as well as the fundamental Deleuzian ‘representational’ concepts of identity, analogy, contrariety, incompatibility and negation, on the basis of which we construct the categories through which we represent ourselves-in-the-world) should not be understood as phenomena that are imposed on us by an independently authoritative (‘transcendent’) realm (God, Platonic Forms, Aristotelian essences, human nature, the ‘dialectical’ laws of history) that dictates what we ought to do and to which we must ‘submit’ in order to successfully navigate and flourish in our environment. Normative phenomena are in essence functional classifications of our behavioral patterns and their raison d’e ̑tre is the regulation of our behavior at the level of the community—in other words the shaping of collective ways of responding, thinking and acting. And they do this by differentially evaluating these behavioral patterns on the basis of criteria about their proper empirical realization (Sellars, 1963a). By ascribing normative force to worldly things and to our behavioral patterns what we essentially do is intervening (at a collective level) to the world and to our behavioral (perceptual-inferential-volitional) patterns, making certain of those patterns salient, privileged and standards of relevance and importance, while considering others as irrelevant, unimportant or mere ‘noise’. This is precisely what our concepts do if they are understood normatively, as rules for organizing and regulating perceptual, inferential and volitional behavioral patterns. In this way, the ultimate raison d’e ̑tre of normativity is to change the world and our behavioral patterns so as to better satisfy fundamental needs and interests for our collective survival and flourishing. According to this analysis, normative phenomena in general—both theoretical (truth, knowledge, justification, objectivity) and practical (moral values, freedom, autonomy)—are conceived in terms of collective self-determination (attribution, acknowledgment and updating of commitments and entitlements) which orients us toward those perceiving-inferential-volitional behavioral patterns that we judge (always defeasibly and subject to self-correction) to be conductive to the satisfaction of needs, interests and purposes that maximize our collective welfare.

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As was mentioned above, Deleuze does not discuss or thematize this expressive, metalinguistic, social-collective dimension of normativity. However, in his 1000 Plateaus (1980), written in collaboration with Felix Guattari, he seems to be endorsing the view that the normativity of language has an essential non-representational function. Specifically, he explicitly says that normativity—or something very much like it—intervenes as an ‘incorporeal transformation’ at the level of—and between— causally interacting bodies “not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different way” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p.  86). Yet, Deleuze does not take up the issue of the expressive and potentially critical-emancipatory dimension of this non-representational function except only in a hand-waving manner, as expressive of potential ‘lines of flight’ that diverge from and exceed the ‘static’ world of representation. However, it is difficult to see how these potentially critical and emancipatory ‘lines of flight’ from representational thinking can be drawn in an effective—i.e. non-accidental, systematic and enduring—manner, in the absence of collectively coordinated normative regulations of our behavioral patterns. Obviously, there is no such problem for the above-sketched non-metaphysical Sellarsian way of understanding normative force in terms of collective self-determination. Moreover, it also opens the possibility for novel forms of freedom, namely, positive freedom—not freedom from constraint (negative freedom), but freedom to do something one could not do before or could not even conceive as something that he could intend to do. An interesting example of positive freedom made possible by committing oneself to collectively binding norms (what Brandom calls ‘freedom as constraint by norms’ (1979)) are the creation of novel conceptual contents (meanings), purposes, interests and even needs, as a result of normative linguistic constraints, namely, our collective commitment to bind ourselves to rules for the correct use of language. Absent such collective commitment to rules that function as standards or relevance and correctness of language use, our negative freedom could be said to typically ‘increase’ albeit only at the expense of demolishing the network of social (linguistic, political) institutions that make meaning, social cooperation and positive freedom possible. Think, for example, how many individual and collective purposes, interests, needs, in short, novel forms of expression and freedom, presuppose the existence of institutions such as money, education, democracy, law—which in turn presupposes the

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existence of language. Of course, all this is compatible with the view that normative constraints that are necessary for the creation of novel forms of positive freedom also make possible many novel forms of oppression or alienation (masterfully analyzed by Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno and others) that would not otherwise exist as such. 3.2   Normative Totalization at the Epistemic Level: Explanatory Closure Now, Deleuze could object to the above model of freedom as constraint by norms (inspired by Kant and Hegel) on several counts. First, he could argue that this model of freedom is not necessary for explaining the novelty of language or the creation of novel human interests and purposes. Deleuze would not deny that the creation of novelty presupposes some sort of constraint; it is just that the constraints in question would not be understood as normative in nature. For Deleuze, what acts as a constraint to pure novelty (pure difference) is repetition. According to Deleuze, each throw (repetition) of the ‘cosmic dice’ retains the past as a whole in each present moment while simultaneously changing the rules, the very field of possibilities that can be actualized. In this way, the world is understood as something that can constantly produce novelty which is yet constrained by the retaining of past as a whole in each present moment. This retention constrains the (constantly variable) field of novel future possibilities, as the latter can be actualized only if they are compossible with the virtual past that is contained in a compressed form in each present moment (Deleuze, [1968] 1994). Second, he could observe that the model of freedom as constraint by norms is a deeply misleading one since it conceals the fact that the novelty that is created as a result of normative constraints is still dependent on a more primitive identity, repetition of the same, for example, of the form ‘everything changes so as to remain essentially the same’—a good example here being perhaps the Marxist notion of ‘capital’. Finally, he could argue that this model of normative freedom presupposes a highly problematic conception of responsibility and commitment, which are presumably remnants of despotic states with a correspondingly despotic understanding of language and semantics. These notions of responsibility and commitment, incorporated in language and semantics, and based on what Deleuze calls a ‘despotic signifier’ (Deleuze & Guattari [1972] 2009, 1980), turn out to be exemplary expressions of collective

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affective attitudes of guilt and resentment—i.e. of Nietzschean ‘reactive forces’ or Spinozistic ‘sad passions’ (Deleuze, [1968] 1994, p.  110; Deleuze & Guattari, [1972] 2009, pp. 218–251). However, here Deleuze seems to conflate—or at least not properly distinguish—the moral or affective dimension of responsibility and commitment8 and the more neutral epistemic dimension of upholding responsibility and undertaking a commitment, which, as we saw above, is necessary for making possible the exercising of positive freedom in the form of novel meanings, contents, purposes and social institutions. Yet, presumably Deleuze would respond that this supposedly ethically neutral epistemic dimension of responsibility and commitment that constitutes us as normative beings is not really neutral and bequeaths to the semantic-epistemic level all the problems of the affectively reactionary concept of commitment. Now, I agree that this might be true (and indeed has been historically true) of a metaphysical conception of normativity. But what about an explicitly non-metaphysical conception of normativity like the one we developed above? In what sense can Deleuze hold that even a resolutely non-metaphysical conception of normativity necessarily has epistemically reactionary consequences? Deleuze could argue here that this is because no conception of normativity, be it metaphysical or not, can avoid being internally connected to a hierarchically superior and privileged ‘prime (‘despotic’, ‘transcendent’) signifier’ that only conserves existing (epistemic, ethical, aesthetic) values and does not create novel ones. Deleuze does not argue for this connection between normativity and the ‘despotic signifier’ explicitly or directly, but this is a way to reconstruct and extend a recognizably Deleuzian way of thinking about identity, representation and common sense that pervades his 1000 Plateaus (1980). One of the major defects of all these traditional metaphysical and lifeworldly concepts that belong to the nexus of ‘representation’ is that they only preserve and circulate existing values, be they ethical, aesthetic or epistemic, and cannot create genuinely novel ones. One way in which the above Deleuzian critique of normativity could find application in our however resolutely non-metaphysical conception of 8  “They [philosophers] have a terrifying taste for responsibility, as though one could affirm only by expiating, as though it was necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to say yes” … “to affirm is to bear, to assume or to shoulder a burden” (Deleuze, [1968] 1994, p. 67). “‘To ‘think’ and to take a matter ‘seriously,’ ‘arduously’—that is one and the same thing to them; such only has been their experience” (Nietzsche, [1885] 2019, pp. 211–213).

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normativity might be the following. It could be argued that the critical and emancipatory dimension of our above-sketched Sellarsian conception of normativity is tacitly guided by a ‘despotic signifier’ that leads to a certain explanatory closure of our epistemic practices as a whole in the sense that its descriptions and explanations, however diversified they may seem, are in essence variations of the same general theme—for example, the total explanatory unification at the ideal end of inquiry. Now, a (neo-Sellarsian) response to this possible Deleuzian objection could be that our normatively articulated epistemic practices (the space of reasons, in which one ought to justify one’s beliefs in the face of criticism and demand a corresponding justification from others) is an essentially self-correcting process which does not march toward some predetermined end or converge toward a predetermined limit. Our epistemic practices rationally transform themselves through the course of their historical development according to immanent criteria of correctness internal to the practice—themselves revisable in content in the course of time. The criteria in question are concrete expressions or momentary crystallizations of what we take a rational procedure to be as regards the discovery of new facts and the explanation of old ones, in a certain cross section of the history of empirical inquiry (see also Chap. 6). In this sense, our epistemic practices, far from converging toward a certain (pre-established) limit in the future, are more perspicuously conceived as moving away or distancing themselves from epistemically problematic past conceptual schemes and worldviews. Also, while it is true that in one sense, our Sellarsian conception of normativity, does involve the ideal of global explanatory unification as a regulative ideal in our empirical-scientific practices, the ambition of arriving at a total explanation of ‘everything’ proves misleading from a more penetrating metaphilosophical point of view. Recall, for example, that, according to Sellars, “philosophical method consists of a diastole of confronting the infinite complexity of discourse with contrived models which we understand because we have made them, in the hope of seeing likenesses, and a systole of grasping at these likenesses and reshaping our models to take their unlikenesses into account” (Sellars, 1967, p. 158). It is evident from this that philosophy, however comprehensive in scope, and indeed precisely because of its very ambition of comprehensiveness, does not

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aspire to arrive at a static globally closed system and may in fact entail a resolutely non-identitarian philosophical methodology.9 Recall here that Deleuze himself is not opposed to systematic philosophy, but only to a certain characterization of ‘system’. Traditionally, systematic philosophy has relied upon building up a complete, totalized explanation of the world from a more basic set of principles (e.g. clear and distinct ideas, constitutive rules). However, according to Deleuze, philosophical concepts—and systems—form a powerful ‘whole’ which, while remaining open, is not fragmented. This, among other things, means that the non-fragmented system in question that forms a powerful whole is sensitive to potential changes in certain very general background (grammatico-­empirical) assumptions that can be such as to demand not only novel answers to given philosophical questions, but a change in the very content of philosophical questions themselves. And, as we saw above, we can also find something very like the above non-identitarian Deleuzian metaphilosophical attitude in Sellars. Indeed, in Sellars, a further source of this essential openness of an otherwise highly systematic, comprehensive and non-fragmented philosophical system is related to the fact that, for Sellars, all concepts, empirical and philosophical alike, are provisional and hypothetical: their truth is not judged by some kind of intellectual intuition or ‘the natural light of reason’ but from explanatory coherence considerations (fruitfulness, scope, relevance in the long run). As Sellars himself puts in his own (and indeed anyone’s) philosophical concepts “since they do not have the authority of the natural light of reason, they are to be

9  The following impressive passage makes essentially the same point: “[In philosophy] one begins by constructing simple models—which are understood because we have constructed them- of fragments of the multidimensional framework in terms of which we suffer, think and act. These initial models are inevitably over-simple and largely, false. … The real danger of oversimplified models is not that they are over-simple, but that we may be satisfied with them, and fail to compare them with regions of experience other than those which suggested them. And, indeed, the ultimate justification for system building in philosophy is the fact that no model for any region of discourse—perceptual, discursive, practical—can be ultimately satisfying unless its connection with each of the others is itself modeled” (Sellars, 1975, p. 297).

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tested or ‘proved’ by the illumination they provide and the coherence of the story they make possible” (Sellars, 1967, p. 1).10 3.3   Normative Constraints and Novelty Moreover, while it is true that various normative constraints that exist in the context of our actual epistemic practices do have an ‘identitarian’ dimension or a ‘homogenizing’ function (they do indeed sacrifice the unique, non-repeatable dimension of particulars for the sake of the general, repeatable, ‘essential’ characteristics of the universal to which they can be subsumed), it is also the case that this homogenizing function can—and must—be understood non-metaphysically, as having a deeper pragmatic function, namely, as an indispensable stabilizing semantic infrastructure of our conceptual systems, as an axis of coordination that alone makes possible the construction and evaluation not only of ordinary linguistic claims but, crucially, of novel claims or concepts when this is pragmatically demanded by the circumstances—that is, in the case of ‘recalcitrant experience’, of the emergence of systemic anomalies in the system. This point is intimately connected to Kuhn’s well-known view to the effect that creativity and novelty presupposes the recognition of anomalies within a conceptual system (i.e. a violation of our expectations as the latter are projected by the ‘rules’ of the system), which, in turn, presuppose normalcy—what Kuhn calls ‘normal science’, where scientists by following the explicit and implicit rules of the scientific Paradigm expand it to new regions and make it more determinate and specific in its claims. This kind of conformity to the rules of the Paradigm is necessary for the formulation 10  This is related to the denial of what might be called ‘the myth of the philosophical Given’ (Christias, 2018). Since we are bereft of intellectual intuition (‘the natural light of reason’), the categorial structure of the world or of the way in which we reason about the world do not imprint themselves on our minds as a seal imprints itself on wax. Hence, we do not have transparent epistemic access to (or knowledge of) the categorial structure of reality or of the mind (thought, reason). Knowledge of the world and knowledge of our categorially structured means of accessing the world (mind/thought/reason) are on the same footing, advance hand in hand and are subject to historical development through a critically controlled process of mutual self-correction (Brassier, 2016). The power of reason and the tools of argumentation that mankind now possesses, and philosophy makes explicit, are not given to it by ‘the natural light of reason’ but have—and can—only been acquired through centuries of effort, through the cultural inheritance and occasional revision of the categorial structure of language (including philosophical language) from generation to generation.

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of determinate expectations about what the behavior of the phenomena that the Paradigm examines. This is necessary for recognizing a phenomenon as problematic, as an anomaly, as a situation in which something ‘has gone wrong’, and this recognition, in turn, is necessary for motivating the thinking process that creates novelty, that thinks ‘out of the box’. As Kuhn himself puts this point: “Novelty emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 65). To the extent that this is correct, it shows why ‘identitarian’ thinking is necessary and positively productive, at least in the ‘order of knowledge’: we cannot even recognize a situation or phenomenon as problematic, as a situation in which something has gone wrong, as a problem in need of a solution, unless we have a determinate enough understanding of what we must expect (otherwise, we could not even register the failure of that expectation). Moreover, only in this way do we have the resources to understand more precisely what kind of thing the encountered anomalous phenomenon is and for what reasons and in what sense are we frustrated with it. And absent those categorial-­ normative specifications, it is difficult to see how we could construct novel concepts with the features that are needed (specification, determinacy, explanatory scope, fertility, relevance) to overcome this anomaly. Moreover, in this process of constructing novel concepts for tacking with the anomalies of our conceptual systems nothing is sacred or immune to revision. Even the most central metaphysical categories (e.g. substance, causality, essence, accident) on the basis of which our (everyday and scientific) conceptual frameworks formulate their first-order empirical concepts and claims are potentially revisable. According to this view of language and norms, that Brandom succinctly summarizes in discussing Rorty’s conception of language, norms and creativity, the distinctive feature of language as a tool is its essential self-­ transcendence as a system of norms that maintains itself only by the generation of novelty that transforms it. The inferential norms of language function precisely as a stabilizing semantic infrastructure for the formulation and assessment of novel claims: as Brandom puts it: “the inferential norms that govern the use of concepts are not handed down to us on tablets from above; they are not guaranteed in advance to be complete or coherent with each other. They are at best constraints that aim us in a direction when assessing novel claims. They neither determine the resultant vector of their interaction, nor are they themselves immune from alteration as a result of the collision of competing claims or inferential

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commitments that have never before been confronted with one another” (Brandom, 2000, p. 176). I conclude from the above that there is no compelling reason for saying that our self-correcting conception of normativity can be accused as expressing a ‘despotic signifier’ which just preserves existing (semantic-­ epistemic-­ethical) values and prevents the creation of genuine (semantic-­ epistemic-­practical) novelty.

4  Thought, Novelty and Normativity Α further important issue that, in my opinion, has not been adequately addressed by Deleuze, concerns his (otherwise extremely interesting and original) conception of thinking. For Deleuze, as expected, thinking is completely devoid of normativity. Thought is understood as thoroughly non-normative and non-general, in terms of a virtual force-field of (audio-­ visual-­ neural-environmental) affective intensive powers that ‘resonate’ with one another within a singular context or situation. In this sense, contra Frege, the content of thinking cannot be completely disentangled from the act of thinking and the singular context of the force-field in which it is embedded. Recall here that according to Deleuze, genuine— creative and simultaneously critical—thinking is an exemplary expression of an event, that shutters the structures of common sense and ‘good sense’ (ordinary ‘ready-made’ categories on the basis of which we perceive, think, judge and act in the face of worldly situations) and is sensitive to the presence and creation of non-exchangeable and non-interchangeable singularities (Deleuze, [1969] 1990). However, this extremely interesting conception of thought that is motivated by worldly encounters without any mediation from representational categories is nevertheless problematic in that it is not clear how it can function critically at a reasonably collective level in practice, that is, how it can successfully mobilize and coordinate in a collaborative manner sufficiently large numbers of people who do not already know each other. In other words, it is not clear how this intrinsically non-universalizable thinking could create intensities that can resonate at a reasonably collective level (we could call them ‘collectively resonating joyful passions’) and that are stable enough as to be capable of creating and maintaining sustainable institutions, that is, forms of social cooperation that have the collective power to critically resist the present status quo while at the same time cultivating joyful passions and inhibiting sad passions.

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Now, according to a philosophical tradition that begins with Kant and Hegel, continues with American pragmatism (Peirce, Dewey, Mead) and finds expression in present-day analytic philosophy in the works of Sellars, Brandom and McDowell, thinking is conceived as having an essentially social character in the sense that “there is no thinking apart from common standards of correctness and relevance that relate what I do think to what anyone ought to think” (Sellars, 1963a, pp.  16–17). Most probably, Deleuze would not find such a conception of thinking deep enough to explain ‘genuine’ thinking (that breaks with common-sense structures, attitudes, beliefs and presuppositions). But does that mean that he would not consider his own views on the nature of thinking as positions that anyone ought to have about what genuine thinking really is? Would he hold that such a social-rational conception of thinking is essentially an expression of a representational way of thinking about thinking that succumbs to the sirens of ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’, thereby ending up reproducing banalities characteristic of the dominant ideology? It is very probable that he would indeed criticize the above conception of thinking along these lines, but in such a case he would be expected to supplement his own novel conception of thinking with a novel account of the way in which it is communicated to others, and more specifically, the way in which it exists in social space as a collective critical and creative activity, such that it can overcome and replace the representational conception of common sense about what it is to share genuine (= critical and creative) thoughts at the level of the community. Perhaps one way in which Deleuze could respond to this is by objecting not to the normativity, shareability and social character of thought as such, but to a specific construal of the former in terms of fixed common-sensical linguistic-semantic structures that conform to—and reproduce—what ‘everyone’ does (Heidegger’s das Man) without any genuine creativity or originality. Moreover, he could perhaps transpose Kant’s conception of the ‘artistic genius’ into the semantic-epistemic domain and argue that genuine (creative, novel) thinking overcomes fixed social-normative semantic standards of correctness and relevance (that is, it does not conform to semantic-epistemic standards ‘that everyone understands’), but it does so by creating novel rules and standards (the role of genius in Kant), which accordingly lay a claim to intersubjective validity and communicability. If this is so, it follows that the creator of those novel rules and anyone else that adheres to them thereby undertakes a commitment to create a ‘nomadic’ collective subject that joyfully affirms life and does not succumb

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to ‘sad passions’. If Deleuzian thought does not imply such an intersubjective, potentially shared commitment, and, for example, amounts to a mere wish or ‘hope’ for an ever-increasing collective resonance of the ‘right’ normative attitudes (cultivation of joyful passions), then it is not clear how Deleuze’s account of thought avoids being essentially idiosyncratic, an expression of the subjective traits, circumstances and temperamental features of its author. Moreover, absent a cogent alternative view about the way in which non-representational, non-normative, non-conceptually articulated Deleuzian ‘thoughts’ can be shared by the community and can bring about successful collective coordination of the intentions and actions they inspire, it is very probable that the adoption and incorporation of a Deleuzian account of thinking might, unintentionally, impede or stand in the way of our collective (theoretical and practical) emancipation, even if, for the sake of the argument, we concede that it could have certain emancipatory potential (cultivation of joyful passions) at the level of the individual.

5  Conclusion The aim of the above critique is not to discredit Deleuze’s philosophy, but to point out a certain blind spot in his thought as regards the creative and liberating potential of the normativity of thought. Our critical remarks aim to complement and not to replace in a wholesale manner the Deleuzian account of thought. For example, I take it that a conception of positive freedom in normative terms, as collective self-determination, while correct so far as it goes, is incomplete unless it is supplemented with a corresponding non-normative, naturalistic account, in which it will be understood in terms of joyful passions (as an expression of non-moral goods (see Chap. 12)), that is in terms of an increase of the power to act (pouvoir), and in opposition to the ‘power to dominate’ (pouissance).11 Indeed, it can be argued that, from a resolutely naturalistic viewpoint, the very raison d’e ̑tre of freedom conceived normatively as collective self-determination is an 11  Deleuze and Guattari (1980) distinguish between ‘power’ as puissance, that is, as the empowerment of an individual or collective potentialities of action (power to create something) and ‘power’ as pouvoir, that is, as the power to dominate over others—in which others are viewed as matter to be formed by the command of a superior. Only the first form of empowerment is an expression of joyful passions; the second is ultimately tied to sad passions, to Nietzschean ressentiment, and does not empower one or the whole in the puissance sense.

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increase in our individual and collective power of action (in the sense of pouvoir) or, in other words, the empowerment of our Conatus (see also Christias, 2017). In this sense, our critical remarks above aim to put Deleuze’s unprecedentedly systematic naturalistic process ontology in dialogue with analytic philosophers such as Sellars, who stress both the normativity of perception, thinking and action and its ultimate naturalistic explanation in terms of a non-normative, process ontology. It is our contention that both parties could benefit from this exchange, by formulating a way of understanding the world and our place in it that can be resolutely immanent, dynamic and naturalistic, without reifying abstract entities or generalities of any sort through ‘identitarian’ thinking, but also without sacrificing normativity—and the creative, liberating potential it alone can make possible.

References Brandom, R. (1979). Freedom as Constraint by Norms. American Philosophical Quarterly, 16(3), 187–196. Brandom, R. (2000). Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism. In R.  Brandom (Ed.), Rorty and His Critics (pp.  156–182). Blackwell. Brassier, R. (2016). Transcendental Logic and True Representings. Glass Bead. http://www.glass-­bead.org/article/transcendental-­logic-­and-­true-­representi ngs/?lang=enview Christias, D. (2017). Sellarsian Picturing in Light of Spinoza’s Intuitive Knowledge. Philosophia, 45, 1039–1062. Christias, D. (2018). Thinking with Sellars and Beyond Sellars on the Relations Between Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. In A. Nunziante & L. Corti (Eds.), Sellars and the History of Modern Philosophy (pp. 257–276). Routledge. DeLanda, M. (2005). Space: Extensive and Intensive, Actual and Virtual. In I. Buchanan & G. Lambert (Eds.), Deleuze and Space (pp. 80–89). Edinburgh University Press. DeLanda, M. (2011). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze G. ([1969] 1990). The Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. ([1968] 1994). Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. ([1972] 2009). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Penguin.

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Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Continuum. Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, F. ([1885] 2019). Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885–Spring 1886): Volume 16 (The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche). Stanford University Press. Roffe, J. (2012). Badiou’s Deleuze. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Sellars, W. (1949). On the Logic of Complex Particulars. Mind, 58(231), 306–338. Sellars, W. (1957). Counterfactuals, Dispositions and the Causal Modalities. In H. Feigl, M. Scriven, & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II (pp. 225–308). University of Minnesota Press. Sellars, W. (1963a). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1963b). Theoretical Explanation. In Philosophy of Science: The Delaware Seminar (Vol. II, pp. 61–78). John Wiley. Sellars, W. (1965). Scientific Realism Or Irenic Instrumentalism: A Critique of Nagel and Feyerabend on Theoretical Explanation. In R. Cohen & M. Wartofski (Eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (pp. 171–204). Humanities Press. Sellars, W. (1967). Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1969). Metaphysics and the Concept of a Person. In K. Lambert (Ed.), The Logical Way of Doing Things (pp. 219–252). Yale University Press. Sellars, W. (1975). The Structure of Knowledge. In H.  N. Castaneda (Ed.), Action, Knowledge and Reality (pp. 295–347). Bobbs-Merrill. Sellars, W. (1981). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sellars, W. (2018). Wilfrid Sellars Notre Dame Lectures 1969–1986 (P. V. Amaral, Ed.). Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W., & Meehl, P. (1956). The Concept of Emergence. In H.  Feigl & M.  Scriven (Eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol I (pp. 239–252). University of Minnesota Press. Smith, D., Protevi, J., & Voss, D. (2022). Gilles Deleuze, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2022/entries/deleuze/ Williams, J. (2003). Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press.

PART III

Unifying the Manifest and the Scientific Images

CHAPTER 8

Sellars’ Synoptic Vision: Unifying the Images at the Level of the Lifeworld

In this part of the book, I shall attempt to provide a novel interpretation and articulate in some detail Sellars’ central but cryptic and elusive notion of the stereoscopic fusion between the manifest and the scientific image at the level of experience itself. It will be argued that the stereoscopic fusion of the images can be understood in terms of the concrete realization of our practical ability for absorbed skillful coping within an ever-expanding range of (linguistic and non-linguistic) environments. It will also be suggested that in this envisaged situation of the fusion of the images in the concrete context of the lifeworld, the latter will radically change not only in its specific content but also in its categorial form. The contents and kinds of affordances and solicitations that constitute our perceptual-­ practical awareness of the world would be transformed by the direct incorporation into them of scientific knowledge about the world’s (and the human organism’s) causal contribution in their phenomenological structure, and corresponding transformation would also take place in the very categories through which we conceive and perceive ourselves-inthe-environment.

1   Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to examine Sellars’ notoriously obscure concept of the envisaged stereoscopic fusion between the manifest and the scientific image in regard to the central issue of the being of the normative © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_8

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within a radically disenchanted (i.e. non-normatively described) world. It will be argued that although it is in a sense possible to ease the seeming tension between manifest-image normativity and a scientifically described non-normative world by construing the former as normatively characterized functional roles and the latter as the non-normatively material realizers of those roles described and explained from the standpoint of the scientific image, this ‘compatibilist’ solution cannot be acceptable to Sellarsians as it stands, let alone account for the possibility of the stereoscopic fusion between the images. I shall further propose that the best way to make full sense of the notion of the Sellarsian ‘stereoscopic fusion’ is to hold both that (1) one of the core functions of normativity is to point toward something that does not exist, but ought to exist, namely, a regulative ideal and that (2) the raison d’être of normatively constituted objects is that they be materially embodied and lose their reflective character. On this view, the normative level can well be ‘eliminated’ in principle (‘reduced’ to non-normative processes) albeit only if is thereby concretely realized in properly ‘embodied’ material processes.1 Its material realization in reality would be precisely what explains why—and the precise way in which—the normative level itself would no longer need to exist as a regulative ideal, that is, as something that does not in fact exist, but ought to exist, because its ultimate raison d’être would be finally concretely realized in the world, in the form of what Sellars calls ‘embodied generalizations’ (Sellars, 1949a, pp. 123–24). In this connection, it will be suggested that the semantic/conceptual irreducibility and simultaneous explanatory reducibility of normative phenomena to non-normative objects and processes—a distinction, which, according to Sellars, illuminates the sense in which normativity can be irreducible while at the same time, in another sense, be reducible to non-­ normative properties—is actually an expression of the ‘way of being’ of the normative as a regulative ideal. That is to say, this ‘dual dimension’ of normative phenomena is an expression of—and, at the same time, the means of transcending—the discrepancy between what a normatively characterized ‘object’ (e.g. that of a person) ought to be and what it actually is (what it actually comes down to) in our current cognitive-epistemic situation—as the latter is synchronically determined (and diachronically 1  This use of the notion of ‘elimination’ is meant to be distinguished from a more common use of the term according to which the eliminated entities do not only not exist, but cannot also be said to be capable of being realized in material or embodied mediums in any sense.

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revised) by our descriptive/explanatory practices. I will suggest that this discrepancy, by opening a conceptual space in which both the recognition of explanatory anomalies (e.g. in our understanding of what persons are) and the means of their explanatory accommodation is made possible, provides the framework for the thinking “by which we reason our way (in a manner appropriate to the specific subject matter) into the making of new commitments and the abandoning of old” in our descriptive-explanatory practices (Sellars, 1957, pp. 302–303). In this way, by gradually revising the descriptive-explanatory dimension of their meaning, by means of a dynamic self-correcting process of conceptual change or recategorization, normatively individuated ‘objects’, such as persons, artifacts or social institutions, become capable of transforming their conception of themselves regarding that which ‘optimally’ materially realizes them so as to satisfy the regulative ideal inherent in their very (i.e. normative) ‘way of being’. Moreover, I will propose that the concrete material realization of the normative level in Sellars’ ‘synoptic vision’ can be best understood (whether Sellars actually intended to do so or not) in terms of the concrete realization of our ability for (what, after Dreyfus, we might call) absorbed skillful coping within our—and indeed in any—environment (including the social environment). In attempting to show this, I shall develop a position that goes beyond Dreyfus’ and Rouse’s views on embodied absorbed coping, while at the same time retaining, in a transposed form, essential elements of both views. Finally, I will offer some hints about what the envisaged stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image might really come down to at the level of experience, that is, in the concrete context of the lifeworld. It will be shown that the latter will radically change not only in its specific content but also in its very categorial form. The world would be directly ‘manifest’ to us in scientific-image terms: we, as persons, would understand ourselves as complex physical systems directly ‘open’ to other such complex systems and processes, but the form of ‘openness’ would itself radically change. The social and environmental world would not anymore be open to us in a reified sense, as external-alien forces, but would be directly perceived as a product of our own instituting activity (social world) and our own evolutionarily developed sensory-motor-affective activity (the organism-environment system).

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2  The ‘Received View’ on the Reconciliation of the Manifest and the Scientific Image As is well known, Sellars throughout his career held that it is possible, even if only in principle, to ‘stereoscopically fuse’ our two most fundamental categorial frameworks in terms of which we understand the world and our place in it, namely, the manifest image and the scientific image (Sellars, 1963a, pp. 4–5). Yet, it is not obvious how this stereoscopic fusion—that is, the integration of those two different perspectives of the world in one coherent experience—is to be achieved all the more because those frameworks are in conflict with one another with respect to their categorial concepts and explanatory principles. However, Sellars also believes that, at the end of the day, there is a way in which those two radically different categorial images of humanity-in-the-world can be reconciled, not only in the sense of not being in conflict with one another (e.g. of being ‘separate but equal’), but in the more radical sense of being stereoscopically synthesized or fused in one single complex picture of the world and our place in it. Now, the ‘received Sellarsian view’ about the way in which this reconciliation between the two images might be effected as regards the issue of accommodating the normativity of persons within an ultimately non-­ normative structured world can be described as follows: the first move is to identify the paradigmatic ‘phenomena’ which are described and explained by the basic categorial concepts of the manifest-image framework. These ‘phenomena’ form the central core of our sense of ‘personhood’ and include such basic activities—characteristic of our ‘form of life’—as perceptual and affective experience, conceptual thinking and action performed on the basis of reasons. Sellars’ key move here is to construe all the above basic human activities not as merely descriptive (they are, of course, at least that), but as essentially normative, that is, as specifying certain functions or roles that various empirical items play, which serve as standards for assessing their actual ‘behavior’. Yet, as is well known, Sellars also contends that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what it is that it is, and of what it is not that it is not” (Sellars, 1997, p. 83). And, since, according to Sellars, the (always developing and self-correcting) descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image point toward a radically non-­ normative picture of ourselves and the world, it seems that the only way in which normative phenomena could be preserved in our worldview is by

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being understood as not being in the business of describing the world (except perhaps in a non-empirical and non-ontologically-committal sense of the term). Rather, normative discourse specifies certain functions or roles that various empirical (linguistic or non-linguistic) items play, which serve as standards for assessing their actual behavior. And what one is doing when one functionally classifies certain items does not (only) amount to describing or explaining the latter; by functionally classifying certain empirical items, normative discourse prescribes and evaluates the ‘behavior’ of the latter (including human behavior) according to standards about their proper ‘empirical realization’. And, in this precise (non-­ descriptive, non-explanatory) sense, normative ‘phenomena’ can indeed be considered as real, objective and not reducible to the scientific image. However, this is compatible with the view that normative phenomena can be adequately explained only from the standpoint of the scientific image— that is, a framework according to which the world and our place in it must be understood in resolutely non-normative terms (see also O’Shea, 2010, pp. 459–70; Christias, 2015a).

3  A Critique of Sellars from a Sellarsian Standpoint I will now argue that while the above account can indeed be adequate for explaining the possibility of reconciling the manifest and the scientific image as ‘separate but equal’ regions of reality or ways of understanding the world (regarding the issue of accommodating the normativity of persons within an ultimately non-normative structured world), it can do so only by rejecting the explanatory reducibility of manifest-image normativity to scientific-image non-normative processes. Thus, obviously, it cannot be satisfactory in the even more demanding task of providing the explanation of the possibility of the stereoscopic fusion of the two images in this respect. Recall, to begin with, that the above-discussed reconciliation of the manifest and the scientific image (Sect. 2) is based on the idea that there is a sense in which normative facts are real, objective and irreducible to scientific-image non-normative facts and another (explanatory) sense in which the former are reducible to the latter. However, there is a serious ambiguity here about whether and in what precise sense normative

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(personal-level, reason-involving) phenomena are (irreducibly) ‘real’, that is, ‘really exist’ ‘in the world’. Sellars himself tries to resolve this ambiguity by distinguishing between existence in the narrow sense and existence in the broad sense of the term (Sellars, 1962b, p. 7). In this terminology, while normative phenomena do not exist in the narrow sense, according to which only what appears in the descriptions and explanations of the ideal scientific image really exists, they do exist in the broad sense, according to which whatever has what we termed ‘practical reality’—that is, is an expression of intentions that are intersubjectively reasonable and universally applicable—does exist ‘in the world’ (deVries, 2005, p. 272). Another way to put the same point is to say that while normative phenomena do not really exist in the world (as the latter is described and explained from the ideal scientific image), they do exist in the world from the participant’s perspective. But while this may be adequate for resolving the apparent conflict between the mode of existence of normative phenomena and that of non-­ normative phenomena, it only does that by radically distinguishing their respective ways of being in a way that leaves open the possibility that normative phenomena, being as they are conceptually irreducible to non-­ normative phenomena, are expressions of a certain way of understanding the world and our place in it that is incommensurable with the scientific, non-normative stance of understanding the world and our place in it. Yet, this means that the manifest and the scientific image can be reconciled only at the cost of rejecting the explanatory reducibility of manifest-image normativity to scientific-image non-normative processes. Moreover, it is evident that the ‘reconciliation’ in question does not at all amount to— and hence cannot solve the problem of—the stereoscopic integration of normative phenomena into a radically non-normatively structured world. The mere fact that normative phenomena exist in the world in a way (‘in the broad sense’, ‘from the participant’s perspective’, in a ‘practical’ sense) that is different from and (conceptually) irreducible to the way in which non-normative phenomena exist in the world does not suffice for explaining the possibility of the stereoscopic fusion of the former with the latter since it implies the existence of a radical incommensurability of their respective ways of expressing our being-in-the-world. But why does the above ‘reconciliationist’ thesis ultimately entail the rejection of the possibility of the explanatory reducibility of manifest-­ image normativity to scientific-image non-normative processes, that is, of a claim integral to the specifically (and ultimately stronger) Sellarsian

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reconciliationist thesis described in Sect. 2? This is because according to this ‘incommensurabilist reconciliationist’ view, an explanatory reduction of the normative to the non-normative is conceptually impossible since it simply ‘changes the subject’. What is actually explained in this case in terms of non-normative phenomena is not normative phenomena as such, but rather, at most, their non-normative correlates.2 And this kind of explanandum is essentially such (e.g. non-normatively described neurophysiological states, biological adaptations, habits of action) that it does not even make room for distinctions essential to the very being of the phenomenon to be explained. For example, in case the explanandum is that of intentional action, the very distinction between intentional action performed on the basis of reasons (potentially in conflict with one’s subjective desires and impulses) and unintentional, impulsive, reflex or otherwise purposeless bodily movements is construed, at best, as a distinction which is ‘subjectively imposed on reality’ and is therefore essentially lost from view as a potentially objective distinction, if the content of the explanans is non-normative. Now, a first Sellarsian response to this objection could be that it overlooks the fact that, in Sellars’ more nuanced view, developed in Sect. 2, when one attempts to understand the relations between the normative and the non-normative level, the conditions of identity and individuation of the former do not disappear from view, even if it is considered as capable of being explanatorily reduced to the latter. The conditions of identity and individuation of the normative remain absolutely intact and objective, provided that this special, sui generis, ‘normative’ mode of understanding ourselves and the world is conceived not in descriptive or explanatory terms, but rather in prescriptive and evaluative terms which aim at regulating (not describing or explaining) our thought and action (see, e.g. Christias, 2015a). However, I think that this response, which just reiterates the fact that the conceptual irreducibility of the normative to the non-­ normative is compatible with the simultaneous explanatory reducibility of the former to the latter due to the essentially different and distinguishable functional roles of the irreducibility and the reducibility in question in our practices, cannot, at the end of the day, be fully satisfactory, since it does 2  Another way of formulating this ‘change of subject’ objection is to say that what is explained in this case in terms of non-normative phenomena are the enabling conditions of normative phenomena, rather than that which constitutes them as the normative phenomena they are (see, e.g. McDowell, 1999).

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nothing to remove the radical incommensurability between the normative and the non-normative level. How, in light of this radical incommensurability, can we hold that what is explained by non-normative processes is normativity as such, as opposed to its non-normative ‘correlates’? Even if the conditions of identity and individuation of the normative remain absolutely intact and objective in the process of its attempted explanatory reductions to the non-normative, more needs to be said as to how those conditions of identity and individuation of the normative are so much as semantically related to those of the resulting explanatory reductions conducted in non-normative terms. Absent some further specification of what that relation might amount to, the ‘change of subject’ objection against Sellars’ attempt to explain normativity in non-normative terms seems rather plausible. I submit that in order to give plausibility to the claim that the conditions of identity and individuation of the normative do not disappear from view even if the latter is at the same time considered as capable of being explanatorily reduced to the non-normative level, it does not suffice to stress the essential distinguishability of the functional roles that the conceptual irreducibility and explanatory reducibility (of the normative to the non-normative) play in our practices. It is also necessary to give an account of their essential inseparability. For it is only if these two dimensions of the function of normative terms, even if distinguishable, cannot be thought independently of one another,3 that we can plausibly claim that (1) it is possible for a non-normative explanation to be about normativity (rather than something entirely non-normative, situated at a sub-personal—e.g. neurophysiological—or ‘pre-personal’—e.g. habitual—level) and (2) while a normative phenomenon is explanatorily reduced to non-normative phenomena, the conditions of identity and individuation of this very normative phenomenon remain firmly in view. To this end, in the next section, I will suggest that the relation between the semantic/conceptual irreducibility and the explanatory reducibility of the normative to the non-­ normative should be understood not merely as one of compatibility but as a dynamic, ‘dialectical’ relation of mutual presupposition and reinforcement. 3  The connection here need not be a priori; it can well be one that is established and warranted empirically, in the sense that it proves explanatorily fruitful to develop a theory according to which the intentional level is realized in non-normatively characterized material mediums.

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Thus, it seems that even if the irreducible difference of normative facts from non-normative facts is not to be understood in terms of irreducibly different modes of existence at all, but rather in terms of irreducibly different modes of functional role (of expressions about them within our epistemic practices), as described in Sect. 2, we are not thereby in a better position to see how the normative level can be so much as explanatorily related to the non-normative level, let alone understand the possibility of the stereoscopic fusion of manifest-image normativity with a scientific-­ image picture of ourselves as radically disenchanted beings within a radically disenchanted world. How is it possible to stereoscopically fuse those two irreducibly different realms of understanding the world and our place in it without any further specification of how a conception of the world as containing meaning, values, freedom, purpose (the latter being expressions of the essential feature of personhood, namely, norm-governed self-­ determination) can somehow cohere, become ‘commensurable’ and even (ideally) be integrated with what seems to be in fact its exact opposite, namely, a radically disenchanted picture of ourselves and the world as provided by the scientia mensura principle? It seems that if our objective is to stereoscopically fuse the manifest and the scientific image with regard to the central issue of the being of the normative (meaning, value, purpose) within a radically disenchanted world, it will not do merely to insist that all we have to do is to add or ‘join’ ‘the language of community and individual intentions’ (which constitutes what we might call the ‘pure form’ of the normative framework of persons (manifest-image)) to the radically non-normative ‘contents’ of the scientific image (Sellars, 1963a, p.  40). The crucial notion of ‘joining’ does not seem to provide an illuminating solution to our problem. How is it that normative facts, by being ‘joined’ to a radically disenchanted scientific image, which alone has ultimate authority over what exists, manage to preserve their normative form or force (objectivity, universal applicability, truth-evaluability) while at the same time being completely extinguished (altogether eliminated) in the scientific-image picture of ourselves and the world? And how are we to understand ourselves as persons having intentions and performing actions whose content is such as to be devoid of goal-directedness and indeed of all intentional directedness? For example, on this latter issue, we could, in a first approximation, provide the following very rough sketch of how we might reconcile the teleological orientation of our ‘ready-to-hand’ experience—that is, the network of its ‘in-order-to’ relations—with the radically non-normative

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scientific ‘content’ they are supposed to have in the envisaged integration of the images. It can be argued that in the context of a stereoscopic fusion of the images, the goal-directedness of our ‘ready-to-hand’ experience would be perceived as a stabilizing practical tool, instituted by our collective activity, for regulating the flows of (non-normatively, scientifically understood) desiring affective processes to which we would now conceive ourselves as directly open (and whose ultimate ‘criterion’ of fulfillment would not be any specific ‘end-in-view’ but rather the enhancement of non-normatively described ‘joyful passions’ and diminishment of ‘sad passions’) (see Christias, 2017). While this form of solution to the issue of understanding the forming of intentions with a radically non-normative content still seems to me to be on the right track, I think that more work is needed to make it plausible. For example, we must be able to understand how, in this model, intentions retain their purposive form, that is, how they can be literally taken as being formed with an end-in-view, while at the same time understanding this end-in-view as ‘just’ a collective social artifact (rule) for the regulation of desiring affective processes that do not have any normative content whatsoever and do not themselves dictate any normatively laden end-in-view. While I do not see this as an unsurpassable obstacle for my view, this challenge can best be met by further scrutinizing and elaborating it. As we shall see (Sects. 7 and 8), the key to further illumination lies in understanding the reflective dimension of normative discourse, including the case of the forming of an intention with an end-in-view, as a matter of higher level practical skillful linguistic coping, whose reflective status is lost when its ‘job’ (regulation of desiring flows) is smoothly done in concrete practice. This is because, in such a case the end-in-view of the intention in question, while not reflectively existing as such, would now be non-reflectively expressed in the structure and patterning of the desiring flows it was meant to regulate (with this situation being experienced, in turn, in terms of the free exercising of sensory and intellectual powers as joyful ends-in-themselves).

4  How Is a Stereoscopic Fusion Possible? A ‘Dialectical’ Approach I contend that the key move for the solution of the very general problem of the fusion of the images that lies at the heart of Sellars’ philosophical system as a whole is to hold that (1) one of the core functions of

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normativity is to point toward something that does not actually exist, but can and ought to exist, namely, a regulative ideal (this is the semantically/ conceptually irreducible core of normativity) and that (2) the raison d’être of normatively constituted objects/events is their envisaged material realization at the level of embodied skillful behavior. I take it that this view has the single merit of being plausible even within a context in which existence claims are construed in the narrow terms of the scientia mensura principle, provided that (the possibility of) the material realization of normativity at the level of embodied coping is understood as the losing of the latter’s ‘ideal’ status (which, remember, is the raison d’être of normatively constituted objects/events). In other words, on this view, the ideal-reflective dimension of normativity can indeed be ‘eliminated’ albeit only to the extent to which it is thereby concretely expressed in (properly ‘embodied’) material processes. Its material realization in reality would be precisely what explains why the normative level itself would no longer need to exist: it would no longer need to exist as something that points toward a regulative ideal because its functions would be directly expressed in the world in the form of what Sellars calls ‘embodied generalizations’ (Sellars, 1949a, pp.  123–24). This, interestingly, means that the reflective and critical dimension of the normative level, embodying as it does a regulative ideal, points beyond itself, namely, beyond its status as an ideal, to its material realization in certain empirical/factual—yet, at the same time, essentially embodied—generalizations. Another essential feature of this way of understanding normativity (and the way it can be stereoscopically synthesized with a radically non-­ normative understanding of the world and ourselves) is that it construes the relation between the semantic/conceptual irreducibility and the explanatory reducibility of the normative to the non-normative not merely as one of compatibility but as a dynamic, ‘dialectical’ relation of mutual presupposition and reinforcement. More specifically, from our point of view, both the semantic/conceptual irreducibility and the explanatory reducibility of the normative to the non-normative level are understood as expressing ways of understanding the world and ourselves whose dialectical interplay is indispensable for the achievement of the ultimate raison d’être of what Sellars calls ‘the framework of persons’, namely, that of the optimal material realization of the abilities and capacities—and, in general, of the functional social role—of personhood. In order to understand why and in what sense this is so we must first describe what I take to be the proximal function of the above

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characteristics of normativity. It can be argued that this dual dimension of normativity, namely, its semantic irreducibility and simultaneous explanatory reducibility to non-normative objects and processes, is actually the expression of its ‘way of being’ as a regulative ideal. That is to say, this dual dimension of normativity is an expression of—and, at the same time, the means of transcending—the discrepancy between what the content of a normatively constituted ‘object’ (e.g. a person) ought to be, expressed in the form of an ‘ideal’ regularity (e.g. ‘people reciprocally recognize one another’) and what it actually is (i.e. what it actually comes down to) in our current cognitive-epistemic-practical situation, as the latter is synchronically determined (and diachronically revised) by our descriptive/ explanatory practices. And this discrepancy, by opening a conceptual space in which both the recognition of explanatory anomalies (in our understanding of what persons are) and the means of their explanatory accommodation is made possible,4 provides the framework for the thinking “by which we reason our way (in a manner appropriate to the specific subject matter) into the making of new commitments and the abandoning of old” in our descriptive-explanatory practices (Sellars, 1957, pp. 302–303). In this way, by the gradual and piecemeal revision of the descriptive/explanatory dimension of their meaning, by means of a dynamic self-correcting process of conceptual change or recategorization, normatively individuated ‘objects’, such as persons and related ‘things’ thereof such as artifacts and social institutions, become capable of transforming (their conception of) themselves regarding that which ‘optimally’ materially

4  As we saw in Chap. 9, in order for a certain event to be recognized as an anomaly in need of removal in practice as well as in theory (as opposed to something to which we have an attitude of indifference), it has to be placed within a normative and goal-directed context of significance, that is, a context of (however schematic) already established practical and theoretical goals (‘oughts’), the divergence from which is to be noted and avoided or, at least, considered as a problem in need of a solution. Likewise, in order for any kind of differential response toward this recalcitrant experience to count as a cognitive-epistemic means for its explanatory accommodation, it has to be placed within a context in which certain (however schematic) norms of explanation are already operative, the divergence from which is to be noted and avoided or, at least, considered as an urgent problem in need of a solution. Indeed, if there were no discrepancy between the expected behavior of a certain phenomenon (as determined by epistemic and practical norms) and its actual behavior, we would not be in a position to even recognize a change in its behavior as an anomaly, nor would we have any reason to create practical and epistemic tools in order to account for it.

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realizes them, so as to satisfy the regulative ideal inherent in their very (i.e. normative) ‘way of being’.5 Consider, for example, the case of persons. According to Sellars, as I understand him, this normative term has a prescriptive-functional dimension according to which persons are to be understood in terms of the prescriptively individuated functional social roles that organisms of a certain complexity play in certain material mediums or processes, and a descriptive-explanatory dimension in which it is attempted, through empirical inquiry in the broadest sense of the term, to best describe and explain what it is that optimally materially realizes in the world the functional social role of persons. We mentioned above that the first dimension expresses the essential (semantical/conceptual) irreducibility of the normative to the non-normative (in this case, the irreducibility of persons to bundles of scientifically described processes relating nervous systems, bodies and environments), while the second dimension permits—and even, according to Sellars, necessitates—the (explanatory) reducibility of the normatively individuated functional roles of ‘persons’ to non-normatively described ‘bundles’ of (psychological, historical, social) processes relating nervous systems with bodies and features of the (physical and social) environment. We saw that, due to their essentially different and distinguishable functional role in our normative practices, those two dimensions of the meaning of normative terms can be understood as not being in tension, that is, as compatible, with one another. Yet, at the same time, we argued that this dual dimension, essential to the meaning of normative terms, cannot be properly understood unless we consider those dimensions not only as distinguishable but also, at the same time, as inseparable and as mutually supportive. But how exactly can we construe those two dimensions, constitutive of the very meaning of the term ‘person’ in particular and of normative terms in general, as inseparable, that is, as somehow internally related with one another? Ι suggest that those two dimensions of the meaning of normative terms (in this case, of the term ‘person’) are actually internally—indeed ‘dialectically’—related as follows: the causal-explanatory reducibility of persons to 5  Importantly, this suggests that the way in which normatively individuated objects are characterized can thereby change the way we understand how they can be concretely realized in worldly practices and thus can ultimately change their very concrete being-in-the-world (as normative ‘objects’ exist in the mode of practical collective we-attitudes). We shall see below that this feature enables the radical transformation of our very (normative) way of being as persons, but precludes its elimination by causal reduction.

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non-normative (neurophysiological, evolutionary, psychological, historical, social) structures and processes is, at bottom, the expression of a dynamic process of conceptual change which effectively transforms our conception and deepens our understanding of the domain of counterfactually possible material realizers of the functional role of ‘personhood’, thereby expanding the space of genuine/concrete practical possibilities (which could serve as raw materials for deliberating about the desired or required course of action) for (the complex physical systems that play the functional social role of) persons. That is to say, the causal-explanatory reducibility of persons to non-normative structures or processes, being in effect the expression of a self-correcting dynamic and diachronic process of conceptual change through analogical modeling, in which ‘successor’ scientific-image conceptions of the material realizers of personhood are construed as analogical counterparts of the ‘predecessor’ manifest-image conceptions of persons, transforms and expands our conception of the optimal material realizations of the normatively individuated functional social role of ‘personhood’. At the same time, it can be argued that the semantic/conceptual irreducibility of persons to non-normative processes functions in a complementary way, namely, as a framework condition or constraint which, by preserving a ‘skeletal’ notion of personhood at a suitably abstract and schematic level, provides the conceptual space needed for it to be possible to recognize the ‘inadequacies’ (explanatory anomalies) and accordingly effect a change in our determinate concept of person (through the abovementioned broadening of the space of the counterfactually possible material realizers of personhood) without thereby changing the subject. That is to say, we can construe the conceptual irreducibility of personhood to non-normative processes as a framework condition or constraint which, by ‘fixing’ the conditions of identity and individuation of (normatively characterized ‘objects’ such as) ‘persons’ at a suitably schematic level, renders possible the above (sometimes radical) change in the determinate conception of personhood—and hence makes possible the improvement of our understanding of the optimal material realizers of personhood. However, it must be pointed out that, according to the view proposed here, the ‘irreducible’ core of personhood does not remain completely unaffected by the changes in our determinate conception of personhood (at the descriptive-explanatory level). It accordingly revises part of its own (determinate-‘synchronic’) conception of what persons ought to be—that is, of the content of ‘oughts’ (functional social roles) that we take to optimally express personhood at a given historical time.

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In this self-correcting process, the explanatory reduction of reasons (for believing and acting) to causes (a-rational desires, power relations) brings to light the de facto, ‘ideological’ elements in the function of ‘space of reasons’ concepts, by showing the divergence between how certain space of reasons concepts (e.g. person) actually operate (how reasons actually contribute to our ‘here and now’ behavioral patterns) as opposed to how they ought to operate (in accordance with the normative standards built into it). Thus, the explanatory reduction of reasons to causes, far from eliminating the space of reasons, actually performs the vital function of criticizing not only particular beliefs within the space of reasons framework but the adequacy of the (descriptive-explanatory function of the) very concepts used in the framework for expressing these beliefs. Let me here briefly sketch the way in which the ‘explanatory reducibility’ of the normativity of persons can transform and expand our determinate ‘space of reasons’ conception of personhood. Consider, for example, cases in which a person believes that it is good to help and assist fellow human beings in need and, for this reason, s/he is engaged in intensive charity work. Suppose now that from a social scientist’s (or a genealogist’s) point of view, this, and a host of other, kind of behavior is not best explained by the above consciously held beliefs, intentions and reasons for doing p under circumstances q, but is in fact best explained, for example, as something that ultimately contributes to the sustenance and reproduction of a dominant social ideology (which is itself the expression of certain power relations that sustain and reproduce an unjust society). Or consider cases in which the actual behavior of a person is not adequately accounted for on the basis of his own first-personal ‘space of reasons’ explanations of the content of his beliefs/intentions/desires but is rather best explained as the expression of his unconscious ‘repressed’ desires/intentions. Think also of styles of social background comportment such as the (unconscious, non-rational) adoption of gender roles or racial stereotypes (Dreyfus, 2013; Bourdieu, 1977) which can explain what one really experiences or does despite one’s often protestations to the contrary. In those cases, our actions embody an ‘unconscious habitual logic’ which can, in principle, be accounted for in scientific-image evolutionary-functional terms, that is, as kinds of adaptive habits that have occurred under specific functional pressures in particular environments through evolution-by-­ selection (where the learning process needed for the transmission of these

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skills to others can itself be understood in terms of the evolution-by-­ selection of a population of habits).6 Lastly, to take an example of a different kind, suppose that future technoscientific developments enable us to artificially (digitally) enhance our memory to such an extent that we can retrieve past important facts that shaped our lives with increased reliability—in which case our very sense of who we are and how we became what we currently are would be deeply affected, as certain forms of lying to ourselves and others would be eliminated.7 In all those cases—even in the last, more extreme one—the envisaged explanatory reduction of ‘space of reasons’ personhood involves the contents that one takes to be constitutive of being a person. 8 Yet, those reductions do not eliminate personhood as such, but, on the contrary, by being incorporated (as new ‘space of causes’ theoretical/scientific knowledge and technological know-how) into our worldview, they effectively 6  Note that in all the above cases we have a bifurcation between what we might call the ‘I as subject’ and the ‘I as object’ which captures the divergence between what we actually do and what we understand or experience ourselves as doing. 7  Chiang’s short novel The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (2019) describes such a technological innovation that enables us to accurately retrieve every moment of our past life. Chiang shows that while this would probably shatter our self-esteem and our relations to important others (since we would no longer be able to forgive others by gradually forgetting what they once did to us, and, much more seriously, we would not be able to reduce our cognitive dissonance through selectively remembering—or completely distorting—past events in our lives that did not match with the kind of person we think we are). Yet, on the other hand, by reminding us of uncomfortable facts of our past life that do not fit with our moral self-conception it would force us to eventually accept them and gradually understand how the moral appraisal of ourselves and others is a much more complicated issue that we hitherto thought. And that would most probably lead to a novel and deeper way of understanding, accepting and forgiving ourselves and others: we would do so as a consequence of a much more nuanced understanding or the complexity of human behavior under a variety of circumstances and not as a result of the triggering of defense mechanisms, for example, in the form of unconscious rationalizations of our past behavior so that it matches with how we want to appear to ourselves. Of course, this techno-scientific innovation would not mark the end of the unconscious rationalization of our behavior. Novel forms of such rationalization would surely emerge. But the point is that our moral self-identity, and our related concepts of forgiving, praising, blaming and so on, would not be extinguished as a result of this new knowledge of the causal presuppositions of self-knowledge but would ‘just’ change in content and orientation. 8  Note that some of these (challenged and revised) contents, for example, the view that certain features of our subjective lives and sense of self (e.g. its unconscious desires, its material grounding in biologically based memory) are beyond our control, can at present serve as background assumptions governing the very meaning of the concept of person. This shows that the explanatory reduction of ‘space of reasons’ concepts, far from eliminating them, performs the crucial function of criticizing their adequacy as concepts.

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transform and expand our conception of the content of our capacities/ abilities of persons, of our rights and duties, of what is right or wrong to believe and do in a certain circumstance, of our sense of self and so on9 (see also Chap. 12). At the most general level we might venture to describe the preceding view as involving an essentially dialectical process which preserves throughout, if only at a schematic level, the irreducibility of the ‘ought’ to the ‘is’ (e.g. of what the capacities, abilities and functional social role of persons ought to be as contrasted with the manner in which these capacities, abilities and functional social contribute to the description and explanation of our actual behavior) while at the same time constantly changing—and even, revolutionizing—our determinate conception (the cash value) of what those capacities, abilities and functional social role ‘ought’ to be and of the manner in which they contribute to the description and explanation of our actual behavior. And this dialectical process of the preservation, at a suitably schematic level, of the normative ideals of personhood (the ‘diachronically irreducible’ part) through the simultaneous radical change in our determinate conceptions of what persons actually are (the ‘reducible’ part), and in our determinate conception of what persons ought to be (the ‘synchronically irreducible’ part), must be understood as an infinite self-­ correcting task which constantly challenges, revises and creates novel ways of articulating our conception of ourselves-in-the world, while simultaneously having as its focus imaginarius the point in which there is no discrepancy between our determinate conception of what persons ought to be and our determinate conception of what persons ‘really are’. 10 9  This is a process that is long underway: note, for example, that our contemporary sense of self is also based on ‘artificially’ enhanced memory, through writing technologies, and while this radically altered our conception of personhood, it obviously did not eliminate it. 10  Of course, the abovementioned dialectical entanglement of the descriptive-explanatory and prescriptive-normative dimensions of space of reasons concepts is itself an idealization. There are no dialectical laws of nature or history that can guarantee the proper function of this self-correcting process. Moreover, it can be argued that this proper function is distorted, and perhaps systematically so, by social practices and processes (e.g. the colonization of the lifeworld by capitalism, power relations) that tend to favor the imposition of certain forms of instrumental rationality which are at odds with the categorially reasonable forms of cooperative theoretical and practical rationality characteristic of the Sellarsian conception of the space of reasons (see Chaps. 11 and 12). Yet, it can also be argued that the ‘dialectical movement’ of the space of reasons described above is at least relatively autonomous in relation to the instrumentally rational social practices and processes that attempt to colonize it, in the sense that the needs and interests that inform the former (liberation from theoretical and practical obstacles to our collective well-being) are different from those that inform the latter (increase of social status of an individual through control of power-structures) and equally deep-seated ones (see Chap. 12).

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5   Is Our Proposal Sellarsian in Spirit? Now, we claimed above that the key move for the solution of a very general problem which lies at the heart of Sellars’ philosophy as a whole, namely, the possibility of the stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image (with regard to the issue of the being of the normative within a radically disenchanted world), is to hold that the raison d’être of normatively constituted ‘objects’ is to point beyond themselves, that is, beyond their ‘irreducibly ideal’ nature, to their concrete material realization in certain embodied empirical/factual generalizations. For, armed with this conception of normativity, one could hold both that this ideal dimension could conceivably be eliminated from our ‘form of life’ (or, better, rendered dispensable, optional) and that it could be eliminated only in the sense of having lost its ‘ideal’ status precisely because of its concrete material expression in reality—and not because of its having altogether disappeared from existence. But does the above view of ours have anything to do with Sellars’ own conception of normativity or is it just a view that, however helpful it may prove in rendering his ‘synoptic vision’ more coherent, would nevertheless be only an external addendum to Sellars’ philosophical conceptual apparatus? In other words, does our view of normativity find any textual support in Sellars’ own writings? We mentioned above (Sect. 3) that Sellars’ official view of the integration of normativity within a radically disenchanted scientific image of the world and our place in it, demanding as it does no more than the ‘joining’ of ‘the language of community and individual intentions’ to the radically non-normative ‘contents’ of the scientific image, does not seem to throw much light on how exactly the required stereoscopic fusion between the manifest and the scientific image in that respect is to be effected. However, if we focus our attention on Sellars’ view of normativity in his early works, and especially in his article “Language, Rules and Behavior” (1949a) we shall be convinced that Sellars had indeed anticipated—at least in broad outline—the view developed here. In this article (123–24), Sellars explicitly states that despite the fact that rules are to be distinguished from empirical generalizations in that rulegoverned behavior is behavior that occurs because of the rule as opposed to behavior described by empirical generalizations which, at best, merely conform to rules, there is also a sense in which a rule is not something completely other than a generalization. As Sellars characteristically puts it: “The mode of existence of a rule is as a generalization written in flesh and

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blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than in pen and ink” (123). What distinguishes rules from empirical generalizations is that the propositions that are expressions of rules contain certain special terms such as ‘correct’, ‘proper’ and ‘right’. And these special features in the formulation of rules give expression to the fact that the rule is an embodied generalization which tends to make itself true (123). More specifically, by containing these terms, the ‘embodied generalizations’ in question tend to inhibit the occurrence of the events that would falsify those generalizations. In this connection, Sellars makes the extremely interesting suggestion that at the core of the formulation of rules (and, I would suggest, of the phenomenon of normativity in general) lie factually false empirical generalizations which express in factual language how the world should ideally be in certain respects. For instance, the core-generalization on which the moral rule ‘one ought to tell the truth’ is built is ‘people always say what they believe’ which is, of course, false (123–24), while the role of the rule is precisely to inhibit the occurrence of events that would falsify this generalization. And this shows that the ultimate raison d’être of rules (or of the normative level in general) lies in transforming the world and in shaping our habits of action in such a way that an initially false empirical generalization, which lies at the core of the formulation of the rule, be gradually turned into the respectively true empirical generalization, or, in other words, so as to bring it about, by shaping the ‘right’ habits of action, that what the rule prescribes be concretely realized in the world in the form of embodied generalizations. In this way, the ideal aim of inquiry would be to ‘know our way around’ with respect to our multifarious (scientific, ordinary, religious, aesthetic, moral) practices and modes of experiencing the world at the level of what we might call ‘living rules’ or ‘lived commitments’. I think it is by now evident that the view of normativity that was developed in Sect. 4 is heavily influenced, to say the least, by this early Sellarsian conception of the way of being of rules.

6  The Notion of ‘Absorbed Skillful Coping’ But what gives us the right to take the picture of an envisaged ‘direct integration’ of the ‘external’ world into our embodied relations and transactions to the environment, in a manner that liberates and expresses our capacities and abilities, so much as coherent? I suggest that this utopian picture can be made at least coherent if we try to reach a better understanding of what Sellars might be up to when he claims that the mode of

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existence of a rule is as an embodied generalization (i.e. a generalization written in flesh and blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than in pen and ink) which tends to make itself true and which ceases to exist as a regulative ideal precisely at the moment of its concrete realization in reality. To this end, I propose that the effected elimination of the reflective-ideal dimension of the normative level in the Sellarsian ‘synoptic vision’ is to be understood in terms of the concrete realization of our ability for (what, after Dreyfus (2014), we might call) absorbed skillful coping within an ever-­ increasing range of physical and social environments. More specifically, the sense in which the reflective dimension of the normative level is eliminated because of its material expression in reality is to be construed in terms of an ever-expanding ability for absorbed skillful coping—in an ever-­ expanding context of—physical and social environments. As I have already noted, this chimes with Sellars’ somewhat dark claim to the effect that “the mode of existence of a rule is as a generalization written in flesh and blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than in pen and ink” or, “the rule is an embodied generalization which tends to make itself true” (Sellars, 1949a, p.  123). Put in these terms, the ultimate raison d’être of the normative level as a whole is to serve as an indispensable means for achieving this kind of an ever-expanding range of skillful coping—that is, a kind of an ever-expanding increase of the range of ‘practical attunement’ between human organisms and their environment, which is itself the expression of their having attained ‘expert knowledge’ in an ever-expanding range of fields of expertise. Note that none of this implies that the capacity for skillful coping could be generalized to every possible context of action. The idea of such an ideal generalizability is incompatible with the very idea of skillful coping. However expanding in its range, skillful coping is always tied to singular, situation-specific (i.e. not universally generalizable), contexts of action. Put in these terms, the ideal of an ever-expanding increase of the range of practical attunement between human organisms and the environment can be understood as the capacity for skillful coping in any given context of action, though not to all contexts at once.11 This is, presumably, because the capacity for skillful coping in a given singular context of action requires that certain other such contexts operate as background enabling

11  For a similar idea regarding the concept of ‘ideally adequate picturing’ see also Sellars (1967a, 142).

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conditions of the latter, thus precluding the synchronic thematization and manipulation of this background enabling context. It should also be mentioned here that this idealized process of an ever-­ expanding range of practical attunement of human organisms with the environment is to be understood as a dynamic process of continuous adaptation of our habits to the ‘habits’ of the environment, rather than as an essentially static, permanent state. In evolutionary terms, the envisaged situation in this ideal case can be understood as constituting a dynamic (organism-environment) habitat to which we all collectively adapt and must continuously do so, by developing adaptive habits apt for successful coping with the contingencies of the environment, in order for this habitat to be preserved as such. Yet, there is no guarantee that this collectively sustained (organism-environment) adaptive equilibrium will be permanently self-reproduced. No adaptation is final since the environment that the organism is adapting to may itself change—indeed must change in response to other adaptations.12

7  Absorbed Skillful Coping, Phenomenology and the Space of Reasons We mentioned earlier that the notion of ‘absorbed skillful coping’ was introduced by Dreyfus as an account of expert knowledge. Yet, since absorbed coping is understood by Dreyfus as a kind of non-conceptual practical, ‘expert’—and, in this sense, one might say, ‘intuitive’—knowledge (of how to act within a particular context),13 we must be very careful 12  This picture of reality, inspired by evolutionary theory, and which Brandom—here following Peirce—has called ‘ontological mutabilism’ (2011, pp. 37–38), would, I think, be congenial to Sellars. See also Chap. 5. 13  Merleau-Ponty gives the following perspicuous example of the world of absorbed skillful coping: “For the player in action the soccer field is not an ‘object’. It is pervaded by lines of force … and is articulated into sectors (for example, the ‘openings’ between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action. The field itself is not given; … the player becomes one with it. … At this moment consciousness is nothing but the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field” (Merleau-Ponty, 1966, pp. 168–69). But see below where (a) it is stressed that our notion of absorbed skillful coping is not meant to be a phenomenological description of this phenomenon in the context of our lifeworld as it stands, and (b) certain worries are raised as to whether this description of absorbed skillful coping by Dreyfus and other phenomenologists falls prey to a version of the myth of the Given.

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here not to saddle our conception of the Sellarsian stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image with a specifically phenomenological version of the myth of the Given. For, absent any further analysis and clarification, the construal of ‘absorbed skillful coping’ in terms of non-­ conceptual ‘intuitive’ knowledge smacks of the myth of the Given—even if the notion of intuitive knowledge is understood in practical terms, that is, as ‘expert’ knowledge. More specifically, it seems to be a version of what might be called phenomenological foundationalism, according to which careful phenomenological reflection discloses a stratum of experience (the ‘ground-floor’ level of the ‘space of motivations’ 14) which, however richly structured, can nevertheless be described independently of the (‘upper-­ storey’, ‘space of reasons’) level in which our rational powers are at work.15 In what follows, I shall attempt to avoid falling prey to the specifically Dreyfusian version of the myth of the Given in my understanding of Sellars’ synoptic vision. Contra Dreyfus, I agree with McDowell—and I interpret Sellars as also conceding—that conceptual capacities, properly exercised in judgments and reflective action at the ‘space of reasons’ level, are actualized even at the level of perceptual experience and our unreflective practical engagement with our environment (see also Christias, 2015b). This means that, according to this McDowellian (and Sellarsian) view, even perceptual experience and unreflective practical engagement with things in the ‘lifeworld’ are caught up within the network of capacities that are essentially exercised in ‘the domain of responsible freedom’ (space of reasons proper). Yet, here, I shall further attempt, contra Dreyfus and McDowell, to reconcile the above McDowellian view on the issue of ‘skillful coping’ that I consider to be overall more plausible than Dreyfus’ own view (and consistent with what would be Sellars’ own take on the matter), with another 14  The ‘space of motivations’ is the logical space of absorbed skillful coping. In this space agents are (directly, non-inferentially) motivated to act in a certain way in virtue of perceiving context-bound, situation-specific environmental affordances. I do not object to the fundamentality of this space for understanding ourselves-in-the-world, but to its supposed complete semantic and epistemic independence from the space of reasons. This becomes particularly clear if, as we shall see later, we conceive the space of reasons itself as a modified and specialized kind of embodied skillful coping (Rouse, 2015) and realize that the conceptual-­rational tools of the former can change the very orientation and understanding of the structure and content of the latter. 15  Dreyfus, arguably, falls prey to this version of the myth of the Given (see Sachs, 2014, pp. 96–98).

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basic Sellarsian view, which at first sight seems to be in serious tension with the former, namely, the (radically materialist and nominalist) view to the effect that at the level of existence proper—of what is ‘really’ real, really causally efficacious—only the strictly non-conceptual and non-intentional dimension of human existence and behavior (including ‘absorbed skillful coping’) can be said to really make a difference in the world—that is, really have ‘the power to act and to be acted upon’. I take it that this is perhaps the only way in which the Sellarsian vision of the stereoscopic fusion of the images can be made coherent, while at the same time avoiding a not easily discernible version of the myth of the Given16 (to which, to my mind, even McDowell succumbs) and remaining faithful to the naturalistic, materialistic and nominalistic orientation that stands at the very core of Sellarsian thought—as expressed, for example, in the scientia mensura principle. However, the difficulty here lies in reconciling a sense in which the normative (conceptual, intentional) level retains some kind of real existence—for example, some kind of ‘phenomenological presence’—in the behavior of embodied beings like us, even in the limiting case in which normativity is wholly and concretely realized and expressed in our skillful coping with the environment,17 with the claim that, at the level of existence proper (existence ‘in the narrow sense’), this ‘phenomenological presence’ of normativity in embodied behavior should be non-intentional and non-world-directed.18 To this end, in my attempt at this reconciliatory move, I shall make use of two ideas, one deriving from Dreyfus and the other from Rouse (2015). 16  According to this (non-Sellarsian, yet essentially McDowellian) view, our basic point of contact with the world is understood in terms of a direct intentional relation which holds between our experience and the world and directly connects them at the conceptual level (see, e.g. McDowell, 1994). The problem with this view is that it makes it difficult to see how the categorial framework in terms of which we establish a direct intentional relation between our perception/thinking/action and the world (namely, the Sellarsian manifest image) could itself be challenged and undergo revision with respect to its basic categorial structure (see also Christias, 2015b). 17  This is needed because, absent any kind of a ‘phenomenological presence’ of (perceptual-­ linguistic-­practical-ethical) normativity in the behavior of embodied beings, it would be extremely difficult to understand the sense in which these beings would be even remotely ‘like us’ or, more radically, how they could count as ‘embodied’ at all. 18  Notice that this—admittedly counterintuitive—claim amounts to the rejection of what is probably the central insight of the whole phenomenological tradition—and of some more ‘analytically minded’ phenomenology-friendly philosophers such as McDowell, Taylor and Dreyfus.

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The first is the Dreyfusian concept of ‘total absorption’ (‘absorbed coping’, ‘being in the flow’), which I find useful mainly because it preserves the notion of our experiential openness to the world, understood now in terms of our abandonment to our absorption in it, without at the same time internally connecting it with intentional directedness. However, the notion of ‘total absorption’ will be understood in a way that radically departs from Dreyfus’ own—and, for that matter, McDowell’s—use of the term. The second idea comes from Rouse’s construal of the space of reasons itself (its discursive-linguistic-inferential structure) as a modified and specialized kind of absorbed skillful coping (Rouse, 2015). Yet, contra Rouse, I do not take this to entail that ‘human reality’ is thereby ontologically transformed to include normative facts or responsiveness to worldly reasons in its basic structure, but rather as pointing to the possibility of transforming the very contents and kinds of affordances and solicitations that constitute our perceptual-practical awareness of the world by directly incorporating into them scientific knowledge about the world’s causal contribution in their phenomenological structure. Let me begin by pointing out the most important differences of my conception of absorbed skillful coping from Dreyfus’ own view. A first crucial difference is that our concept, denoting as it does an ever-­expanding form of ‘absorbed skillful coping’ to be approximated only at the level of the stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image, is not offered as a phenomenological description of the phenomenon of expert knowledge or skillful coping in the context of our lifeworld as it stands, but as a regulative ideal of our normative practices and of action in general (at the individual as well as the social level), which, for the time being, can be envisaged only in imagination. Second, although it is crucial for my argument—and in this I would agree with Dreyfus, or with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for that matter—that the level of absorbed coping is, in a sense, phenomenologically accessible, rather than something which is situated outside of consciousness altogether (e.g. at the level of the enabling conditions of the latter (brain states) studied by cognitive science), I understand the notion of phenomenological accessibility in a radically different sense than that used in the phenomenological tradition. More specifically, our notion of ‘phenomenological accessibility’ does not entail that the accessibility in question is ‘transcendentally’ or ‘categorially’ transparent. That is to say, contra phenomenology, the application of our notion of ‘phenomenological accessibility’ is not restricted only to experiences whose categorial structure or

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‘unity’ can be revealed by the sole use of a non-empirical transcendental investigation (e.g. through careful phenomenological analysis), which supposedly discloses the essential categorial structure of our experience or our ‘being-in-the-world’ in complete independence from the results of the self-correcting enterprise of empirical inquiry (in the broadest sense of the term) or from philosophical hypothetical theory-construction.19 Third, as was mentioned above—and again in contrast to the classical phenomenological construal of the term—our notion of ‘absorbed coping’, while denoting a certain (perceptual and affective) kind of direct experiential ‘openness’ of ourselves to the world, must be understood as referring to a decidedly non-intentional and non-world-directed kind of experience. This is the only way in which we can avoid falling prey to the myth of the categorial Given and remain Sellarsians in spirit—which is surely necessary given that our goal is precisely to illuminate the most crucial (and dark) part of Sellars’ philosophy as a whole, namely, his underdeveloped notion of the stereoscopic fusion between the images. For, recall that, according to Sellars, a construal of our ‘openness’ to the world in terms of a direct intentional relation which holds between our experience (or thought, language) and the world, and directly connects them at the conceptual level, would be a paradigm case of the myth of the categorial Given. However, it must be admitted that the notion of an experience which is supposed to be phenomenologically accessible while at the same time deprived of intentional structure and world-directedness seems, at first sight, counterintuitive. This counterintuitive character of our notion of ‘absorbed skillful coping’ might be exacerbated if, fourth, contra Dreyfus and following Rouse (2015), we understand the space of reasons itself (its discursive-linguisticinferential structure) as a modified and specialized kind of absorbed skillful coping. Specifically, the space of reasons, its very discursive-inferential structure, which constitutes our conceptual understanding and finds expression in our linguistic competence, can be construed as a complex system of perceptual-practical-affective skills for discriminating the relevant circumstantial and phonemic similarities-­differences that are crucial for the correct use of words in particular contexts and for correlating utterances with external circumstances (including other utterances). Thus, the pragmatic statuses of commitments and entitlements whereby we track 19  This move is needed if we are to avoid falling prey to the pernicious Sellarsian myth of the categorial Given (Sellars, 1981a).

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propositional contents can themselves be understood as affordances and solicitations. We recognize when a point raised by someone solicits an objection or when a criticism affords reconsideration of what we thought we were saying (see also Sachs, 2017). The resultant new form of embodied skillful coping ‘with signs’ that constitutes the space of reasons is a modified and specialized kind of skillful coping in that, by contrast to other kinds of perceptual-practical skillful coping, it is ‘from the start’ collectively oriented (attuned to other’s utterances) and ‘symbolically displaced’: it amounts to an ability to recognize expressive activities, including one’s own utterances or other performances as having significance and accountability beyond their immediate surrounding circumstances (thereby making possible the crucial distinction between how things really are and how we—or I or you—take them to be) (Rouse, 2015, p.  157). Interestingly, this model can accommodate even theoretical understanding, the very paradigm of detached reflection. The latter is ‘activated’ as a response to breakdowns of skillful linguistic coping, of the practice of giving and asking for reasons (see also Chap. 5). And the expressive tools of the latter (abstract universals, metalinguistic, logical vocabulary) are developed precisely as devices for making aspects of our discursive practices explicit and critically reconfiguring them so as to enable the recommencement of their smooth function. Note also that the smooth function of the practice of giving and asking for reasons does not imply that its critical tools do not exist as such, but that they are expressed in a non-reflective manner as immediate responses to the concrete situations that demand them. Now, how can the above notion of a phenomenologically accessible ‘absorbed skillful coping’ which encompasses even linguistic and collective ‘space-of-reasons’ structures, but which is also non-intentionally structured and non-world-directed, be made somewhat less counterintuitive? Perhaps, this might be done if the following three points are taken into consideration: 1. Its content, while non-conceptual in character, can be said to have dynamic, figure-ground and perspectival (spatial and temporal) structure, thereby legitimizing a sense in which even non-intentional and non-world-directed experiential contents can nonetheless be said to make something—namely, ‘external objects’ of sensory experience or ‘internal objects’ of affective experience—‘open’ or ‘present’ to one, at a pre-reflective level—for example, in the mode of

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affordances and solicitations to act. Note also that, since absorbed coping is utterance-involving, linguistic acts or happenings conceived as ‘non-conceptual representings’ (Sellars, 1967a) will be an essential part of those experiential contents. At this level, propositions will not be conceived as expressing contents referring to objects, properties and relations, as constituents of facts (with the latter conceived as truth-makers of these propositions). Rather, they would be understood as ‘languagings’, as particular repeatable happenings (not objects), identifiable in terms of the difference they make among other linguistic doings (de facto precluding or mandating them in linguistic practice). This nominalistic language would be ‘about’ the world in the sense of picturing it, not in the intentional sense in which a propositional content semantically represents a fact (Sellars, 1967a). Propositions in this language would function as pictorially (i.e. not logically) complex ‘languagings’ and the adequacy of picturing would be a function of the adequacy of the whole ‘method of projection’, that is, of the whole system of patternings of linguistic doings/happenings of which they are part. The latter sort of holistic (yet non-normative) adequacy would in turn ultimately depend on the practical success of this system in orienting ourselves in (or maintaining dynamic homeostatic equilibrium with) the surrounding environment. Again, it must be emphasized that while this kind of collective embodied (linguistic and non-linguistic) coping—instantiated in patterned picturing processes between brains, bodies and the environment—can well be characterized by a peculiar kind of ‘perspectival openness’ or ‘presence’, those latter notions should not, strictly speaking, be understood as involving an openness to an already existing subject of experiences standing over against an ­independently thematized external world. Perspectival openness does not necessarily imply intentional directedness in this latter sense. Compare here the Sellarsian notion of a (family of) ‘perspectival sense image-models’ of external objects and of the perceiver’s body (i.e. of oneself-in-one’s-environment) constructed by the ‘productive imagination’ (Sellars, 1978). These perspectival sense (and ‘affect’) image-models, to the extent to which they lack intentional and categorial structure, are expressions of patterned picturing processes. Notice, importantly, that the perspectival aspect of sense image-models is not restricted to our point of view at a particular moment in time, but can be said to represent objects from multiple

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perspectives—which is not to say that it represents them as aperspectival as is the case in conceptual representation. This is because the defining feature of sense image-models is that they can represent proper and common sensible properties of objects as having actual presence (as ‘bodily present’ in the experience), although those properties are not strictly speaking sensed as such by sense-impressions. And since those non-sensed properties are available to other perspectives, we could also say that the image-­model represents an object—that is, the latter is ‘bodily present’—from multiple perspectives. This feature of the productive imagination is also implicated in perceiving visual, oral or sensory impressions as signs, that is, in our ability to represent to ourselves (self-picture) the occurrence of particular (visual, oral, tactile) sensory impressions, affects and images as iconic schemata (bodily present functional roles) for differentially arranging and making salient particular sensory and affective (vocal, written, gestural) patterns in our respective manifolds—thus enabling us to see in what it ‘is’ something ‘other’ than it. In this way, it makes possible the distinction between ‘types’ and ‘tokens’, which, in turn, gives rise to conceptual self-consciousness (see Chap. 10). Now, it can be suggested that Sellarsian dynamic sense image-­ models of oneself-in-the-environment and the phenomenon of ‘absorbed skillful coping’ are complementary aspects of one and the same phenomenon. At the very least, these phenomena bear close resemblance to each other in that (a) in both of them, action is at work in perception itself, through the intimate coordination of sensing and moving, (b) they are both characterized by bodily—that is, more than sensory—presence, figure-ground and perspectival structure (recall, e.g. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘lines of force’), and (c) while being clearly non-intentional and non-world-directed, they are the embodied realizers of space of reasons structures, now ­reconceived concretely and dynamically as pictorially complex patterned processes of linguistic doings. 2. Furthermore, ‘absorbed skillful coping’ is, among other things, essentially a way of affectively or emotionally responding to the world. In this sense, it is not at all implausible to say that it is a process characterized by distinctive phenomenological qualities to which we may, in principle, have access. This way of emotionally responding to the world (that is intimately bound up with the state

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of ‘absorbed skillful coping’) as well as the attitudinal states which are thereby expressed can be understood on the model of Sellarsian non-conceptual/non-intentional sensory and affective states (impulses, drives, feelings, emotions)—as the latter are ‘augmented’ by the productive imagination and turned to (again non-­conceptual) perspectival sense (and affect) image-models of (‘inner’ and ‘outer’) objects and the perceiver’s body, that is, of oneself-in-one’s environment. Here we must stress the pivotal role of non-conceptual affective processes or what we might call ‘collective affect-image-models’ (expressed in corresponding skillful coping behaviors) in embodying a wide range of we-attitudes, which constitute the concrete material cash value of normative force in general. We-attitudes are impersonally described group-attitudes, embodied in human collective pattern-governed utterance-involving behavioral dispositions and habits, which make both individual persons (with full-blown normative behavior) and social institutions (language, money, ownership) possible, gradually stabilizing them as functional social roles by an (evolutionarily developed and culturally inherited and refined) complex system of sanctions and rewards.20 Thus, interestingly, those evolutionarily developed group-attitudes, being situated at the non-conceptual level, do not presuppose for their being operative in collective skillful coping the presence (and categories) of a 20  As we saw in Chap. 5, the ability of forming collective non-discursive ‘we-attitudes’ can be naturalistically grounded in our ability to picture the world from the standpoint of others in the community (‘shared picturing’). For a detailed analysis of the evolutionary anthropological underpinnings of normativity from a broadly Sellarsian perspective, see Stovall (2022), and especially his notions of ‘shared practical picturing’ (a physiological capacity for environment-­responsive sensorimotor attunement between humans involved in transperspectival planning), and its variant, ‘deontic picturing’ (involving the transperspectival exercise of non-discursive emotional and reactive attitudes). See also, relatedly, Sachs’ discussion of ‘shared’ or ‘collective’ picturing (2019). Further, it can be suggested that shared picturing is directly implicated in the fundamental social phenomenon of being attuned to what ‘everyone’ is supposed to do under certain circumstances (Heidegger’s anonymous das Man). It is also implicated in what I take to be an equally important dimension of picturing, namely, its ‘sign-making’ function discussed above (see also Chap. 10). Note that the transperspectival element of this ‘we’-mode of picturing need not be understood as intentional in the rich phenomenological or categorial sense discussed above which presupposes an understanding of the objective-subjective, appearance-reality, intensional-extensional (meaning-reference) distinction. For example, a grasp of the perspective of others in the we-picturing mode need not be understood as a grasp of the other’s internal subjective standpoint; instead, the other’s perspective can well be construed as an externally observable feature of the other.

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fully formed self (person) capable of sharply distinguishing between oneself and a community of other persons of which one is part. 21 3. On the other hand, it should be constantly borne in mind that Sellarsian non-conceptual sensory-affective states (augmented by the productive imagination) and the therein embodied and skillfully employed linguistic ‘representings’ can serve as models for illuminating the sensory, affective and linguistic dimension of this collective form of absorbed skillful coping only if they are construed from the standpoint of the integration of the manifest and the scientific image. That is, they can do so only if their ‘non-conceptual’, ‘non-­ intentional’ character—and their respective material-sensuous-­ affective content provided by the productive imagination—is understood in terms of a self-correcting process of gradual transformation of our conception of ‘what this content really is in the order of being’, effected again by the productive imagination, considered now in its reflective dimension, that is, as essentially operating by constructing novel ‘space-of-reasons’ semantic-epistemic resources which provide new rules (concepts) for schematizing our ‘ready-to-­ hand’ categories, as the latter find expression in ordinary experience, sustained by unreflective we-attitudes.22 It is only if we conceive of 21  This collective yet non-conceptual dimension of we-attitudes (what, after Castoriadis ([1975] 1987), we might call the ‘anonymous social imaginary’), among other things, explains the fact that human practices generate social forms that they do not intend, that is, forms that are opaque to the practices that generate them. It is the task of (social) science to de-reify these ‘objectively’ existing social forms and bring them to intersubjective self-consciousness, where they may be subjected to critical scrutiny. 22  This line of thought aims to accommodate the fact that for Sellars—whο follows here Kant quite closely—the production of sequences of sense image-models from the productive imagination is guided by a rule-governed process, that is, by a ‘concept-schema’. A current paradigmatic instance of this process, in its most self-conscious form, is theoretical science, whose conceptual structures, in Sellars’ words, ‘give us new ways of schematizing categories’ (Sellars, 1967a, p. 49). However, in the context of the envisaged stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and scientific image, this full-blown theoretical, reflective operation of the productive imagination could well cease to be absolutely necessary. The production of sequences of sense and affect image-models could be handed exclusively to the non-theoretical level, that is, without the need of concepts functioning as explicit rules for the production of a family of sense image-models (schema). In such a case, the productive imagination could alone provide these schemata, without a rule, by the spontaneous activation on the part of the organism of those (previously cultivated) kinds of habitual behavior that are dynamically attuned to the ‘habits of the environment’.

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this direct integration of the two dimensions (reflective-­theoretical— unreflective-­practical) of embodied skillful coping as the infinite task of a self-correcting process (expressive of a ‘dialectical interplay’ between these two dimensions) which constantly challenges, revises and creates novel ways of articulating our conception and experience of the content and structure of our embodied skillful coping in the ‘order of being’, that we can safely avoid the myth of the categorial Given.23 What the above imply, among other things, is that, contra phenomenology, the non-conceptual affective states and images that find expression in current manifestations of absorbed skillful coping behavior might well be phenomenologically opaque. Yet, they are capable, in principle, of being phenomenologically accessible, on the proviso that they be reconceptualized and eventually recategorized in their descriptive and explanatory dimension, in the process of the gradual replacement of the (descriptive and explanatory part of the) manifest image from the scientific image.

23  This self-correcting process finds expression in empirical-scientific inquiry, and we can see why the latter is essentially—and not just accidentally—an infinite task if we take into account the fact that (a) it is a step-by-step exchange of query and response that produces sequences within which the answers to our questions ordinarily open up yet further questions and that (b) certain questions cannot even be posed until others have already been resolved because the resolution of these others is presupposed in their very articulation. From this point of view, progress in inquiry is best conceived in terms of the increasing clarity (less confused way) of formulating questions through conceptual innovations and radical changes of the ‘space of possibilities’, rather just than in terms of successfully answering taken-for-­ granted questions (see also Sellars, 1948a, pp. §1, 2). And, palpably, progress in this sense cannot be coherently conceived as reaching a final ‘static’ state.

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8  The Stereoscopic Fusion of the Images at the level of Lifeworldly Experience 8.1   Toward a Different Kind of Openness to the World and Ourselves What would our lifeworld experience be like if our manifest-image conception of the phenomenology of perception, inference and action were to be fused with our scientific-image conception of their material realizers? In this envisaged situation, the very contents and kinds of affordances and solicitations that constitute our perceptual-practical awareness of the world would be transformed by the direct incorporation into them of scientific knowledge about the world’s (and the human organism’s) causal contribution in their phenomenological structure. In other words, our conception and experience of the (outer or inner) environmental affordances and of the circumstances in which the latter motivate us to act in a certain way in the presence of them—that is, our very ready-to-hand experience of the world and ourselves—would be schematized by scientific-­ image concepts. Α corresponding transformation would take place also in the very categories through which we conceive and perceive ourselves-in-the-­ environment. In a scientifically perceived reality envisaged at the Sellarsian stereoscopic fusion of the images, the world would be directly ‘manifest’ to us in scientific-image terms: we, as persons, would understand ourselves as complex physical systems directly ‘open’ to other such complex systems and processes, but the form of ‘openness’ would itself radically change. For example, while the ‘openness’ in question would still have a perspectival or even ‘horizonal’ form, it would not be characterized by intentional directedness to ordinary external objects as categorized by the manifest image. And while, just like Husserlian ‘horizonal’ openness, it would not be characterized by absolute exactness, its ‘indeterminacy’ and unobjectifiable character would be of a different kind from the indeterminacy (horizonal vagueness) of current lifeworld terms, since, as we shall see in Chap. 9, it would not be defined on the basis of the dispositional properties of objects (contrast between enabling-inhibiting factors) or a distinction between the objects’ normal (expected) and ‘deviant’ (unexpected) behavior, but rather in terms of monadic occurrent processual

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becoming.24 Moreover, the social and environmental world would not anymore be open to us in a reified sense, as external-alien forces, but would be directly perceived as a product of our own instituting activity (social world) and our own evolutionarily developed sensory-motor-affective activity (the organism-environment system). Regarding this latter issue, as a result of a scientifically informed non-intentional, non-world directed, perspectival openness of ourselves to environmental affordances, we would no longer conceive organisms (including ourselves) as categorial unities, as ‘centers of reference’ directed to environmental affordances, where the latter are understood as categorially distinct and ‘external’ to the organism in question. Instead, both organisms and environments would be conceived as co-selected processes standing in a mutually symbiotic relationship and ultimately as constitutive sub-patterns of a larger selfsustaining (life) process that incorporates, sustains, selects and reproduces both of them. Relatedly, our sensory and motor surfaces would not be understood as doors or windows through which we are ‘directed’ to environmental affordances, but as functional points that, in their interaction, organizationally close us as sensorimotor systems through the environment. From this point of view, our environmental niche itself would be a 24  As we shall see in Chap. 9, in the scientific-image process framework, ordinary, manifest-­ image counterfactual propositions about the dispositional properties of objects would be replaced by propositions expressing uniformities in the co-occurrences of particular actual processes ‘enveloped’ in the object (those that are—synchronically or diachronically—implicated in its occurrent dynamic ‘force field’). The manifest-image categorial framework of objects whose ‘natures’, by accounting for their dispositional properties, distinguishes them from their actual causal history, would be replaced by a process framework where objects would be reconceived as loci of bundles of (micro-macro-physical) co-present overlapping processes whose ‘natures’ would be such as to make these dynamic processual ‘objects’ identical to their (synchronically ‘retained’) actual causal histories. But, one might ask, how could the ‘wealth’ of our dispositionally infused experience of objects be retained if it were reconceived as an experience of an object construed as a bundle of enveloped co-occurring processes, without any dispositional features whatsoever? The short answer here is that the dispositionally rich part of our experience of the object would be informationally ‘contained’ in a transposed form in its occurrent dynamic unfolding, which would be now experienced as directly and occurrently expressing its ‘power to affect and to be affected’. But, again, how can this notion of ‘power’—and our experience of it—be conceived in the context of a resolutely a-modal ontology like Sellars’ own? Sellars is embarrassingly silent on this issue, but, based on the discussion in Chap. 7, I think that he could benefit much from introducing Deleuze’s concept of the ‘virtual’ here as a successor scientific-image conception that replaces our manifest-image concept—and associated experience—of possibility (as well as the related notions of disposition, capacity, tendency, etc.).

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functional component of our sensorimotor system, rather than something external to it, to which we may be ‘intentionally directed’. We would still conceive of the world as including external ‘objects’ or processes (physical systems independent of our normative or sensory activity) but the sense of ‘external’ would now be transformed to include only physical environments and processes in different time-space scales, which, though not directly perceived as such, can be non-inferentially accessed through thought.25 Last but not least, the teleological orientation of our ‘ready-tohand’ experience—that is, the network of its ‘in-order-to’ relations— would be now conceived—and eventually even perceived—as a stabilizing practical tool, instituted by our collective activity, for regulating the flows of desiring processes to which we would now conceive ourselves as directly open—and whose ultimate ‘criterion’ of fulfillment would not be any specific ‘end-in-view’ but rather, their contribution to the free exercise of our sensory and intellectual powers as joyful ends-in-themselves (the enhancement of ‘joyful passions’ and diminishment of ‘sad passions’ (Spinoza)). In this sense, the manifest image would be abandoned, as its central categorial forms of direct openness to the world would be radically transformed. The normative implications of the core categorial forms of the manifest-image framework would be purged of their ontologically reificatory dimension and would now be seen for what they are: an expression of a pragmatically indispensable self-correcting expressive-metalinguistic tool (the game of ‘giving and asking for reasons’), created by our own collective instituting activity, for regulating collaborative action, whose ultimate raison d’être is to promote the general welfare of the community (in the most inclusive sense of the term). Would this envisaged embodied coping and the ensuing scientifically informed direct experience, thinking and action of ours have conceptual 25  Of course, the sense in which we are non-inferentially open through thought to physical reality in different space-time scales is not the same as that in which we are open through our senses to features of the environment. The former sense of ‘openness’ of non-inferential access to the physical systems in question is not directly perceptual. But note that even this distinction is ontologically mutable: through technological advances made possible by scientific knowledge (characterized by non-perceptual openness to the world) we are, in principle, able to shift the (evolutionarily developed) boundaries between perceptual and non-­ perceptual ‘openness’ by altering the qualitative and geometrical structure and properties of our very sensory-affective-motor systems and creating novel kinds of intuitional concrete experiences that incorporate into their phenomenological structure scientific knowledge about the world’s causal contribution to these structures.

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or non-conceptual form? I think the issue here is partly terminological. In this envisaged situation, we could be said to have language, be sensitive to reasons and communicate with propositions which would be ‘about’ worldly and social affordances (hence here the term ‘conceptual’ seems to get a foothold), but this aboutness should be understood in terms of complex picturing processes, not in the intentional sense in which a propositional content represents a fact (here the term ‘non-conceptual’ seems more appropriate)26 (see also Chap. 9). Note that, in Sellars and throughout this work, the term ‘non-conceptual’ is used as just a name we give to ontological-categorial phenomena that cannot be understood by manifest-image categorial concepts but only through the theoretical-explanatory apparatus of the scientific image. It is thus an essentially negative epistemological characterization, not a positive ontological one. Contra McDowell, Brandom and other adherents of philosophia perennis, the term ‘non-conceptual’ does not refer to a hierarchically lower, more primitive level of ‘being’ or understanding on the basis of which our ‘higher’ rational capacities are built as a ‘superstructure’. The view that the ‘really real’ world has non-conceptual (non-­logical/categorial) form is essentially the denial of the (e.g. Hegelian, Aristotelian, McDowellian) view that the world has logical or categorial structure. At 26  Here we must recall that, according to Sellars, the replacement of the descriptive-­ explanatory language of the manifest image from the scientific has, as one its major consequences, the replacement of the language of proper sensibles in language-entry reports. And one might think that this would be a problem for the joining of the framework of persons to the ideal scientific image because it might seem essential to the framework of persons that persons see colors and hear sounds out there in the world (McDowell, 1994, 2009). But, according to Sellars, the ideal scientific image would not eliminate sensible qualities; it would just construe them as features of the central nervous system of sentient beings (as opposed to properties of objects out there in the world). Thus, the real issue here is whether it is essential for the framework of persons that what persons see and hear (and to which their actions are directed) be necessarily features of external objects. Sellars does not seem to consider this an essential feature of the framework of persons—whereas, for example, McDowell thinks that without it, persons could not be said meaningfully to be perceptually ‘open’ or ‘directed’ to a world outside them, and this for McDowell would amount to our losing our grip on what makes us distinctively human (rational) animals (McDowell, 1994). However, according to Sellars, the framework of persons could survive, even if perception and action (construed in manifest-image terms) were reinterpreted as belonging to the ‘phenomenal’ world. Of course, if perception and action are construed in scientific-image terms, then their direct contact with the ‘really real’ world can be reestablished, albeit not in the sense of intentional directedness or openness, but in the picturing sense of those terms (directedness as qualitative ‘resonance’ between sensory and environmental processes).

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most, the term ‘non-conceptual’ points toward another non-­logical/noncategorial structure but does not positively characterize it. For this the construction of an alternative ontology is needed, along the lines of Sellars’ process ontology (see Chaps. 7 and 9). And, from the point of view of such a positive ontology, conceptual form can be said to be embodied or enveloped in non-conceptually characterized processes. 8.2   The Stereoscopic Fusion of the Images as a Self-Conscious Skillful Allostatic Process We can conclude this chapter by pointing out the distinguishable yet inseparable status of the conceptual (signifying) and the non-conceptual (picturing) level of representing the world in Sellars. As we saw in Sect. 6, the conceptual evolution that leads from manifest-image kinds/objects to scientific-image ‘counterpart’ kinds/objects can be understood as a dialectical process, where the scientific ‘postulational’ image arises out of the manifest image itself as a response to systemic explanatory anomalies of the latter and where the radical change of the meaning of manifest-image kind terms (and their objects of reference) turns out to be necessary for the very preservation of the epistemic ideal of the very descriptive and explanatory practices in which manifest-image kind terms are themselves embedded. It is now time to stress that (contra Hegel) Sellars would argue that this dialectical process of conceptual change is itself part of the normative infrastructure of thought which must be resolutely purged of its ontological-explanatory implications. The dialectical development of our concepts and conceptual frameworks is not a process that takes place in the world itself; it is an expression of a regulative ideal of Reason and (again contra Hegel) leads to a radically non-normative and non-teleological picture of the world and ourselves. However, at the same time, this very dialectical process toward ‘more adequate’ scientific-image renderings of the world and our place in it ultimately shows that a counterpart—non-­ conceptual, non-normative, non-teleological—developmental process does occur in the world itself. For it shows that increasingly adequate conceptual systems are connected, as material structures with matter-of-factual properties, to the world, in an ever-increasingly adequate way, with the adequacy in question now construed in terms of Sellars’ notion of picturing. And I take it that Sellarsian picturing can in turn be thought of as a result of a historically evolving dynamic process of homeostatic equilibrium

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between the organism, understood as a recursively self-maintaining metabolic system, and its external and internal environment, while the adequacy of picturing can be cashed out in terms of the optimality of the homeostatic equilibrium in question (see also Christias, 2019). This optimality can, in turn, be understood in terms of conduciveness to survival and flourishing of a certain group or species of organisms within a certain environment, as the latter are determined by the ideal scientific image (i.e. in non-normative and non-teleological language). 27 From this resolutely non-normative ‘engineering’ point of view, the tensions or anomalies (material incompatibilities) in the conceptual order would be thought of as certain kinds of responses, expressed in conceptual, ‘space-of-reasons’ form, to ‘counterpart’ non-conceptually articulated disruptions/disturbances of the homeostatic equilibrium in the organism-environment system. And, in these terms, an ‘adequate’ conceptual response to such disruptions would amount to the abandonment of a certain (materially incompatible) set of conceptual connections and the forging of a novel such set, such that its material expression in our embodied behavior would result in collectively coordinating ourselves more effectively with respect to those regularities and irregularities in the natural and social environment on which our fundamental needs and interests conducive to individual and general survival and welfare ultimately depend. This draws a picture of the world in which the conceptual dialectic from the manifest to the scientific image would ultimately be revealed as an expression of a regulative idea of Reason (thus, not as a feature of the world itself), while its culmination would be conceived as the concrete material realization of normative structures and ideals in bodily and environmental (physical or social) processes, characterized by an ever-expanding range of homeostatic equilibrium. 27  To see the generality of this point, note that even socially laden human activities such as ‘labor’ can be understood in terms of homeostasis. Recall, for example, that Marx defined labor as “man’s metabolism with nature” in whose process “nature’s material is adapted by a change of form to the wants of man” so that “labor has incorporated itself with its subject” (Marx, 1906, p. 201). From this point of view, even social activities such as labor and consumption are but two stages of the recurring cycle of biological life. Even more generally, the very history of our civilization as a whole can be seen as a cybernetic process of expanding the range of homeostasis (which is another way of defining humanity’s transformation of its environment) over several thousand years. For an examination of human civilization from this ‘engineering’ viewpoint, see Lem (2013).

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Let me end with final note about the notion of an ‘ever-expanding range of homeostatic equilibrium’. As I understand it, it is essentially a form of a metastable equilibrium (Simondon, 2020), which implies the need for a constant change of the equilibrium points, as the driving force of the whole process is precisely the constant tension or disequilibrium of the fundamental physical and cultural processes intertwined with ‘human complex physical systems’. The notion of a ‘permanent adaptation’ does not make sense in a Sellarsian world of pure becoming. Thus, the striving for ‘an ever-expanding range of homeostatic equilibrium’ always occurs in a context of an evolutionarily developed physical and social world composed of interconnected processes in constant flux. The latter, by being precisely not eternal, immutable or necessary structures of the universe, precludes states of achieved or perfected homeostatic equilibria. Moreover, in this process of expanding the range of homeostasis (which is the driving force of civilization as a whole), the expansion in question does not only concern our capacities of action, but also the expansion and transformation of the space of possibilities of perceiving, thinking and acting, thus creating entirely new such capacities in the process (and, hence, novel purposes, interests, needs or desires). The only immovable goal in this allostatic process of achieving ‘stability through change’ is the overcoming of socio-political, psychological, biological and physical constraints that can potentially hinder our capacities of action (‘we never know what a physical or sociotechnical body can do’). Again, the ‘goal’ of this process is not that of achieving a state of complete serenity, harmony or resolution of all conflict (with nature, society, others or oneself). Neither is it to achieve complete transparency or the ‘end of heteronomy in all its forms’. Indeed, as we shall see in Chap. 12, the semi-heteronomous status of certain social institutions might well be pragmatically indispensable for enabling novel forms of freedom at the level of the individual and in this sense is not necessarily incompatible with the existence of a free and autonomous we-community of rational beings. Moreover, even an autonomous society or a sovereign self cannot be guaranteed to be conflict-free zones. Nothing in our manifest or envisaged scientific conception of humanity-in-the-world entails such an absolute elimination of all conflict; that, among other things, would presuppose an impossible total fusion, synchronically and at the collective level, between our instituting activity and the instituted social structures in which we have

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our social being. But when conflicts do arise in such an ‘enlightened’ society or self, they will reflect the reality of the situation and will be experienced as such—rather than in some—ideologically imbued or psychically repressed—disguise. And this would amount to an increase in self-­ knowledge, as in such circumstances, in mastering the practical skill of coming to a decision on how to deal with this conflict, we would thereby master the practical skill of genuinely speaking for ourselves, individually or collectively, by learning to be responsive to—and taking responsibility for—ourselves (in the ‘I’ or ‘we’ mode) in ways that eluded us before (due to ideological distortions or psychical repressive defense mechanisms). Relatedly, a community of ‘skillful copers’ in things ethical and political should not be conceived as entertaining a permanent (a-political) state of harmonious existence, but as a community that is skillful in the development and use of proper (i.e. inclusive, sustainable, dynamic, revisable, updated) institutional means of conflict resolution when faced with novel ‘external’ or ‘internal’ challenges to collective well-being. To my mind, such is the proper meaning of (theoretical and practical) ‘utopia’ (be it Sellarsian, Marxist, Neo-Hegelian or what have you) and not the quasi-­ theological and static one of a completely transparent and serene state of collective living.

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Sellars, W. (1978). The Role of Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience. In H.  W. Johnstone Jr. (Ed.), Categories: A Colloquium (pp.  231–245). Pennsylvania State University Press. Sellars, W. (1981a). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sellars, W. ([1956] 1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press. Simondon, G. ([1964] 2020). Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. University of Minnesota Press. Stovall, P. (2022). The Single-Minded Animal: Shared Intentionality, Normativity, and the Foundations of Discursive Cognition. Routledge.

PART IV

Persons, Free Will and Processes

CHAPTER 9

Persons as Normative Functions in a Nominalistic Process World

In this chapter, building on the discussion about the Sellarsian process ontology in Chaps. 6 and 7, I shall provide the beginnings of an account about how Sellars’ process-oriented (as opposed to a substance-property) ontology can function as a metaphysical model that overcomes and critically delimits Aristotelian (and neo-Hegelian) substance ‘manifest-image’ ontologies. Process metaphysics in this sense (in line with our discussion in Chap. 5) can be seen as a non-representationalist ontology from the point of view of which, at one stroke, we can understand ‘how things really are’ without succumbing to the metaphysical and epistemological impasses of a representational ‘substance-property’ ontology. In this connection, I also attempt to fill another important gap in Sellars’ process ontology, by sketching a response to another objection that challenges the very possibility of the latter, by holding that we cannot make full sense of how processual entities can have determinate identity and individuation conditions. Moreover, I consider the manner in which persons, conceived as loci of normative authority and responsibility, can be integrated in such a radically nominalistic world. It is argued that persons can be so integrated in the sense that although a nominalistic process world does not admit persons in its ontology, persons do exist in such a world to the extent to which certain organisms, through the ‘activation’ of recognitive we-attitudes of authority, responsibility and trust, bootstrap themselves into (normative) existence, the latter being thus always precarious and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_9

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dependent on the sustenance and constant reproduction of those we-attitudes.

1   The Manifest-Image ‘Object-Property’ Categorial Framework As is well known, Sellars takes it that a key problematic feature in our experience of ourselves-in-the-world from modernity onward, reflected in numerous philosophical puzzles, is that it is bifurcated into two mutually incompatible ways of understanding the world: we conceive of the world and ourselves in terms of the lifeworld ‘existential’ categories of the manifest image and in terms of the impersonal ‘objectifying’ and ‘third-­ personal’ categories of the scientific image. But while those two images of ourselves-in-the-world seem equally indispensable, they do not seem to fit together into an integrated picture. In Chap. 8, I presented my take about how we might envisage the possibility of integrating the two images. Here, I will examine the fundamental categorial concepts of these frameworks, and I will show that the categorial differences involved at the fundamental level are far more radical than usually supposed. Indeed, the differences are so deep and pervasive that from a manifest-image point of view, the categories of the scientific image (as ideally envisaged) can seem not just overly restrictive, ‘objectifying’ or unjustified, but lacking determinate meaning altogether. To see why this might be so we must recall that the fundamental categorial framework of the Sellarsian manifest image (as well as that of many sciences) is the ‘object-property’ framework, while the categorial framework of the (ideal) scientific image—still in the making—is the ‘process’ framework. Now, Brandom (2015) has argued, based on a Sellars-inspired view, the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality, that the very determinacy of fundamental descriptive predicates of the manifest image and of many sciences depends on their being conceived as essentially belonging to the object-­ property framework. If this is correct, it leads to the view that a framework constructed along very different principles, such as one based on the notion of ‘process’ would leave basic descriptive terms and predicates essentially indeterminate. Thus, the Sellarsian regulative ideal of a scientific image based on the category of process would turn out to be not just implausible but devoid of sense altogether. I shall briefly explore if this is

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indeed the case. Can a process framework provide determinate conditions of identity and individuation for its basic empirical predicates? As Brandom has forcefully argued (2015), along with Sellars (1949b), the basic categorial structure of the Sellarsian manifest image is essentially Aristotelian. Its basic categories are that of objects, construed as substances (in a generic sense that can include persons as well as inanimate objects) endowed with (essential and accidental) properties. The object-­ property framework is based on the distinction between mere or ‘indifferent’ difference (e.g. red and spherical) and exclusive difference (red and green). In this framework, a property is the property it is because of its location in a ‘space’ of compatible determinable families (shape-­properties, color-properties) of incompatible determinate properties (‘spherical-­ cubical’, ‘red-green’). These incompatibilities between properties (their standing in the relation of ‘determinate negation’) are essential to the individuation of the basic particulars of the framework, namely, objects, since objects (particulars) are units of account for incompatibilities of properties (universals). Thus, to be an object just is to exclude incompatible properties (a table is red, as opposed to green, rectangular, as opposed to triangular1). Recall, moreover, that Aristotelian properties are such (expressing capacities, abilities, dispositions) as to make the objects that have them belong to certain kinds, characteristic of their nature: Socrates, being a human being, can run, think and sleep; gold, being a metal, is a good conductor of heat and electricity. This expresses the central role in ordinary discourse of identifying things as belonging to kinds, which identification carries with it a knowledge of causal—and in general, modal— properties (Sellars, 1949b, p. 117). Now, as Brandom has argued (2015), a broadly Aristotelian metaphysical understanding of objects and properties has important consequences about modality. The exclusions essential to the determinate identity of Aristotelian properties (as well as the determinate identity of the respective objects) are subjunctively robust exclusions. Possession of any and every descriptive property in this world or situation has consequences and presuppositions concerning what is possible in other worlds or situations. In this way, the object-property framework is the categorially articulated 1  A corollary of this is the structural asymmetry between objects and properties observed by Aristotle: properties can have converses (non-red is the converse of red) but objects cannot (the converse of a red object would be an object colored with the whole chromatic spectrum except red, which is impossible).

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expression of what Brandom calls the ‘Kant-Sellars’ thesis about modality, namely, the (essentially Sellarsian) view to the effect that offering any empirical description, attributing any empirical property, involves modal commitments, that is, commitments as to what would happen to what is so described under various circumstances, what would be true of it if various other claims were true. On this view, every empirical descriptive concept has modal consequences. For example, the ordinary descriptive sentence ‘That lion is sleeping lightly’ has as necessary conditions that some moderate stimulus (e.g. a sufficiently loud noise, bright light) would wake the lion. ‘This patch is red’, among other things, entails that the patch would look red under standard conditions and would look brown to a standard observer under green light. Brandom also shows that the Kant-­ Sellars thesis about modality has consequences about identity claims. This thesis is incompatible with extensionalism about identity (Quine, 1960). Thus, if one accepts the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality, one (pace extensionalism) cannot consistently restrict the descriptive properties with respect to which identicals must be indiscernible to properties that are non-modal on pain of emptying those descriptive properties of any determinate content. From this point of view, extensionalism is seen as a view that ends up draining basic descriptive terms of any determinate content. According to this line of thought, for there to be some determinate way the world is, just is for it to be articulated into states of affairs, that is, objects possessing properties and standing in relations, that include and exclude each other in modally robust ways. Thus, as we saw, Aristotelian properties characteristic of the manifest-image ‘object-property’ framework are modally involved ones. And, from this point of view, a process-­ based framework and ontology, in which there are no objects (substances), with (causal-dispositional) properties, standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence, belonging to kinds, having natures (which by explaining their dispositional properties distinguish them from their actual causal histories) and exhibiting law-governed relations to other objects, is not just false, useless or pragmatically dispensable, but does not make proper sense, as it lacks any determinate content. How can Sellars respond to this devastating critique of his position which is, ironically, carried out with the use of recognizably Sellarsian principles? Before attempting to respond to this serious worry, we must first point out an important consequence of the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality and identity. A corollary of this position (presented by Brandom and first made explicit by Hegel) is a commitment to modal realism and even to

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conceptual realism: the world itself is modally articulated. Laws of nature, dispositions and capacities exist independently of language users. Not only is the thought that, for example, this coin is pure copper incompatible with the thought that it is pure aluminum and has as a consequence that it is an electrical conductor. Objective properties and states of affairs stand in corresponding relations to one another: the fact that the coin is pure copper is incompatible with its being pure aluminum and entails that it is an electrical conductor. These deontic normative sense of ‘incompatible’ and ‘consequence’ that articulates the attitudes of knowing subjects and the alethic modal sense of those terms that articulates objective facts are deeply related: they can be understood as different forms that one identical conceptual content can take. And, in this sense, the world itself can be understood as having literally conceptual form, as being conceptually articulated (through the modally robust relations of exclusion and consequence exhibited by the modal properties of objects, with the latter understood as constituents of facts), independently of language or concept-users.2 And this metaphysical viewpoint (which, arguably, is needed in order to make the manifest-image modally robust world knowable, i.e. rationally responsive, to manifest-image framework users3) seems hard to shallow, especially if one has certain materialist and nominalistic proclivities that sit uncomfortably with the real existence and causal efficacy of universals or ‘real connections’ or the view that the independent world—its facts, laws, objects, properties—is literally conceptually articulated.

2  Note that this is a resolutely non-psychological and a semantic externalist conception of concepts which (a) takes it that the existence (though not the sense) of concepts is independent of concept use, application or activity, and (b) against current orthodoxy, it holds that the contents of our concepts or the meanings of our words cannot be discovered a priori or just by introspecting. To find out what the contents of the concepts we apply in describing the world really are (what we are really committed to by applying them), we have to find out what the laws of nature are, which is ultimately an empirical matter. 3  Here, we are in essential agreement with McDowell (1994) and Brandom’s Hegel (2019). The very fact that the world can be knowable and something to which we can be rationally responsive only if it is essentially thinkable by concepts as a world of alethic modal facts (e.g. laws of nature) means that it is conceptually structured—though, of course, in a non-deontic, non-normative sense of ‘conceptual form’.

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2  Sellars’ Nominalism to the Rescue Now, unlike Brandom, Sellars would not accept the above modal realist interpretation and consequences of the object-property framework as the latter runs counter to his fundamental commitment to nominalism. According to the latter, possible worlds, universals, properties, relations, facts and so on are not metaphysical structures of reality that ground our practices. They are not truth-makers for modal or counterfactual claims made in the actual world. Rather, they are essential ‘skeletal’ features necessary for our descriptive and explanatory practices to be able to represent themselves as such, codify their (material inferential) commitments and revise them in the face of ‘anomalies’ (materially incompatible commitments) (Sellars, 1948). In this way, modal discourse enables the user of a conceptual framework to be consciously self-critical toward his own past, present and future tokenings of propositions licensed by the rules (counterfactually robust inferential commitments and entitlements) of a given conceptual framework in the face of explanatory anomalies (incompatible commitments). As Kraut eloquently puts this point, specifically on the issue of the metaphysical status of possible worlds: “possible worlds can be regarded as a helpful mechanism for codifying aspects of modal discourse: clarifying modal intuitions, regimenting modal inferences, and recursively characterizing truth for modal assertions. Possible worlds are no ‘metaphysical foundation’ of our modal practice, nor are they part of the best explanation of that practice. The worlds do not legitimize or explain our modal practices; the worlds represent those practices” (Kraut, 2016, p. 74). If this is correct, it follows that, contra Brandom, modal expressivism entailed by the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality (i.e. the view that alethic modal notions are concepts whose function is to make explicit the features that make description and explanation possible within an (object-­property) framework) need not entail modal (and hence conceptual) realism. In Sellarsian fashion, we can indeed construe alethic modal notions such as possibility and necessity as ‘pure’ categorial concepts (in Kant’s sense) that express lawful connections among ground-level empirical concepts, thus making description and explanation possible in the context of the object-­ property framework. But, at the same time, we can view the ‘modal realist’ corollary of the above modal expressivist view as a correct analysis only in the context of the world disclosed by the use of the object-property framework, the Kantian ‘phenomenal world’ (the world existing only in actual and obtainable representings of it). Thus, we can view the

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categorial-metaphysical (essentially modal) structure of the object-­ property framework as not necessarily ontologically committal. But what does this mean? What are its consequences for ontology? Could modal notions, at least in their ontological dimension, be dispensable in favor of an alternative framework built around different (modal or a-modal) categories and pointing toward a radically different non-­ conceptually articulated world, bereft of real connections, and properties or relations as causally efficacious universals sustained by the object-­ property structure (based on relations of material incompatibility and consequence)? And in what sense could the strange inhabitants of this radically materialistic and nominalistic world be said to have determinate conditions of identity and individuation?

3   The Individuation of Entities in a Nominalistic Process World This objection can seem even more plausible if we bring to mind the radical categorial difference between the object-property and the process framework. In the process framework, there would be no objects (substances), with (causal-dispositional) properties (standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence), belonging to kinds, having natures (which by explaining their dispositional properties distinguish them from their actual causal histories) and exhibiting law-governed relations to other objects. In this sense, there would be no facts (as facts are precisely states of affairs with objects, properties and relations as constituents). Moreover, pure processes are neither ‘physical’ nor ‘mental’ (i.e. they are beyond the ‘physical-mental’ categorial distinction); they are neither subjective nor objective (beyond the ‘is-seems’, ‘real-illusory’ distinction); they are also subjectless, objectless (beyond the ‘subject-object’ distinction) and ‘occurrent’ (characterized by intrinsic, non-iffy properties). Now, to see how processes would be nameable and identifiable while at the same time bereft of all the above categorial characteristics, it is instructive to focus on three things: 1. In the process framework, properties would be non-sharable ways of being particulars (individuals). The naming and characterizing function of processes (‘this-such’ structure) would not be understood

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along the lines of the subject-predicate (one object—many properties) subsumptive model, but on a non-subsumptive verb-adverb model. From this point of view, what is ostensibly a single particular exemplifying a number of universals (Aristotelian object-property framework) is actually a number of particulars (e.g. qualia episodes) exemplifying simple universals (e.g. ‘qualia-tropes’) (Sellars, 1949a, 1960a). Thus, at bottom, the one-many framework is ultimately based on a many-one framework, in which particulars are not subsumed under universals and where the dualism between ‘abstract’ (universals) and ‘concrete’ (particulars) ceases to make sense. Instead of thinking of a universal genus subsuming a multitude of individuals, we have to think of a quality that has been entirely particularized: in this case we are more dealing with an individual that is a genus unto itself (Nunziante, 2021).4 Moreover, according to the process language verb-adverb model, ordinary sentences of the form ‘this table is red’ would be reconceived and transformed into, for example, ‘it tablely reds’. Note that in the process language the naming function is not performed by objects but by ‘particularized properties’ (with the objects being modes of the latter) or, in general, by happenings, doings or acts of unfolding in certain ways. Processes are essentially adverbial modifications of spatiotemporal occurring, a way of ‘bringing spatiotemporal occurrence about’ that is conceptually not separable from their occurring (processes permeate space and time, rather than being ‘in’ space and enduring ‘through’ time5). The occurrent character of a process would differentiate it intrinsically from other processes, independently of relations of material exclusion (determinate negation) or consequence (inferential mediation) it might bear, as a contentful state, to other worldly and linguistic contentful states. Thus, processes as basic individuals are ‘primitively different’ (not mediated by exclusive difference or identity) and their ‘identity’ or ‘reidentification’ is 4  This shows that in defining the ‘architecture of reality’ one is not forced to assume that there are (at least) two types of ‘building blocks’, one corresponding to things and another corresponding to the things’ qualitative aspects; nor does the nominalist ontologist who aims for simplicity and economy have to attempt a complete reduction of everything to either one of these two categories (Morganti, 2012). 5  Thus, in this framework, time should not be understood as a ‘neutral’, homogeneous medium in which self-identical ‘now’s’ indefinitely ‘repeat’ themselves, differing only in their successive ordering.

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based on a notion of ‘repeatability’ which is not to be confused with exact repetition of the ‘same’ under rigidly fixed laws.6 2. Ordinary, manifest-image counterfactual propositions about the dispositional properties of objects would be replaced by propositions expressing uniformities in the co-occurrences of particular actual processes ‘enveloped’ in the object (those that are—synchronically or diachronically—implicated in its occurrent dynamic ‘force field’). These uniformities in the co-occurrences of these processes should not be considered as causal laws (there are no causal laws at level of processes), but as occurrent ‘laws of co-existence’ of the processes in question.7 The manifest-image categorial framework of objects whose ‘natures’, by accounting for their dispositional properties, distinguishes them from their actual causal history, would be replaced by a process framework where objects would be r­ econceived 6   Interestingly, I think that Deleuze’s ontological framework in his Difference and Repetition (1968), suitably updated with the resources of topology (number of dimensions of virtual space, its connectivity, its ‘universal singularities’) and dynamic systems theory (phase space, trajectories, attractors), provides some valuable conceptual tools for understanding the individuation of processes independently of the object-property framework. As we saw in Chap. 7, according to Deleuze, at the fundamental level of ontology what really exists is ‘pure’ differences, primitive compatibilities-incompatibilities, that are not internally related through negation (relations of exclusive difference) but co-exist in a virtual plane of ‘multiplicities’ and are related through ‘inclusive disjunctions’ (in the mode in which all colors are ‘folded’ in white light). The ‘explication’ (morphogenetic realization) of this topological space in the actual world is what produces discreet (extended and exclusively incompatible) colors (or objects as loci of exclusively incompatible properties). Moreover, the individuation of events is based on a notion of ‘re-identification’ (‘repetition’) without generality, or need for an original self-identical entity, and in which every identifying act is simultaneously an act of creation or (non-interchangeable) variation. In other words, to identify and individuate an event is simultaneously to transform it. We saw in Chap. 7 how the Deleuzian notion of virtuality can be integrated into a Sellarsian process-nominalism which eschews traditional modal notions (possibility-necessity) and is based only on occurrent intrinsic characteristics of processes. That is, it might be the case that Sellars’ a-modal ontology needs to be supplemented with a further a-modal category equally real with, yet distinct from, occurrent actuality to account for the ongoing differentiation (and continuous ‘creation’) of temporal ‘planes’ in sensation (τ-dimension). Note also that topology and dynamic systems theory, which might prove indispensable for articulating a nominalistic process view of the world bereft of the object-property structure and exclusive difference, both make use of the ‘category’ of the ‘virtual’. 7  In the process framework (suitably enriched by evolutionary theory), laws of nature are not immutable, but rather, at best, express evolutionarily entrenched ‘habits of the universe’ (Peirce).

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as loci of bundles of (micro-macro-physical) co-present overlapping processes whose ‘natures’ would be such as to make these dynamicprocessual ‘objects’ identical to their (synchronically ‘retained’) actual causal histories. 3. Processes as ‘basic particulars’ or individuals can be determined (individuated) without reference to subsuming universals (kinds, counterfactuals, dispositions, laws). Moreover, the fact that those basic processual particulars do not stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence entail that they do not exhibit the standard metaphysical structure of compatible determinable families (‘polygonal’, ‘colored’) of incompatible determinate properties (‘circular-triangular’, ‘green-red’), which are merely different from determinates falling under other determinables (‘blue’, ‘triangular’). Thus, it must be stressed that nothing of this taxonomic determinable-­ determinate structure of our ordinary lifeworld framework (and of the framework of many current sciences) could be available from the standpoint of a nominalistic process language or to the corresponding structure of a nominalistic process world. This is connected to the fact that, as was mentioned above, at the bottom ‘atomic’ level of the process framework, instead of thinking of a universal genus subsuming a multitude of individuals, we have to think of complexes of qualities that have been entirely particularized: in this case we are more dealing with an individual that is a genus unto itself (Nunziante, 2021), as opposed to its being determined by a hierarchical determinable-determinate structure. Note, moreover, that even ordinarily existing objects like shapes are exclusively different from one another only if we restrict ourselves to shapes exhibiting the same number of dimensions as the space they inhabit. A three-­dimensional pyramid with a rectangular base might be thought to exhibit both triangular and rectangular shapes. Colors form a family of exclusive different contents only if we restrict οurselves to monochromatic regions (e.g. polychromatic white light envelops all colors). As we shall see, in a process language, ‘content’ determination is provided in a way that does not make any use of exclusive difference. The mathematical resources of topology (number of dimensions of virtual space, its connectivity, its ‘universal singularities’) and of dynamic systems theory (differential equations, phase space, trajectories, attractors) might be useful to articulate such a radically nonAristotelian and non-Hegelian view about content d ­ etermination.

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From this point of view, the latter would be seen as pragmatically useful (though ontologically non-committal) categorial frameworks for coping with manifest-image middle-size three-­dimensional ‘phenomenal’ entities and processes. Here it could be objected that a language of processes would be essentially indeterminate in the sense that processes are incapable of being individuated. But I do not think that this is necessarily the case. Processes can be nameable and identifiable in terms of the causal-functional roles which their intrinsic (qualitative or intensive) characteristics play within a system of other processes. Recall that for Sellars, ‘to be is to have power’, ‘the distinguishing mark of the real is the power to act and to be acted upon’ (Sellars, 2018). Thus, the causal-functional roles performed by the intrinsic character of processes in effect individuate processes by what they do, by the difference they make to other processual doings—those that they presuppose and those they engender. From this point of view, the basic particulars of the object-property framework (e.g. specific physical objects or human beings) would be understood as ‘logical constructions’ out of a plurality or multiplicity of more basic complex ‘processual’ individuals. For example, instead of being individuated in terms of its differing in ‘matter’ among members of the same essential ‘form’ (species), where the latter is conceived as a ‘natural kind’ (defined by characteristic ‘iffy’ causal-­ dispositional properties), a particular human being, for example, ‘Socrates’, would be reconceived as the locus or ‘dynamic field’ of historically unfolding and synchronically ‘retained’ (across different space-time scales) co-­ occurring and co-selected patterns of bodily-brain processes. The collective ‘resonance’ (‘allostatic balance’) of these ‘nested’ processes sustains in relative stability through change what we might call the ‘Socrates-event’ (itself individuated by the difference it synchronically and diachronically makes to the processes it presupposes, engenders and encounters). This would be a conception of Socrates as a complex particular (Sellars, 1949a), namely, as a complex of particular episodes of its occurrently retained and evolving causal history, as expressed in the above multiplicity of episodic co-selected co-occurring processes that generate and maintain the ‘Socrates-event’ (by constantly transforming it) through its worldly encounters. Yet, at this point one might ask how can we understand, in this dynamic-processual model, the conditions under which a processual individual ceases to be, as opposed to its undergoing changes in its property-­episodes (which do not affect its ‘identity’), without subsuming

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it to kinds, expressive of its general essence? The short answer here is that this difference is itself accounted for in processual-dynamic terms, being ultimately a function of the ongoing relative stability (allostatic balance or imbalance) of the field of forces that dynamically ‘sustain’ (or fail to do so) the processual individual through its development in space-time. There is no underlying essence or substratum to account for this ‘identity through change’ of a processual individual; its ‘identity’ or ‘essence’ is constituted by the ‘gravitational’ (dynamic differential) field of forces around it.8 This nominalistic process model of individuation, which fuses the abstract and the concrete, the ‘particular’ and the ‘universal’, is directly opposed to determination in terms of the object-property framework, on the basis of something’s (Felix, Socrates) being a contingently differing instance of the same essential ‘form’ (cat life-form, human life-form), characterized by specific counterfactual modal properties (capacities, powers, dispositions) standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. Of course, this is not to deny that the nominalistic wager of completely expunging universals as general essences or ‘forms’ may prove an exceedingly difficult task: it does not involve only the adoption of a novel ontological-­semantic stance (the nominalistic-processual one) but must also be accompanied with a detailed case-by-case replacement involving the specification of both genetic and maintenance processes for pinning down processual individuals, and there is no general recipe to perform this 8  Armed with this conception of process individuation we can also respond to Gabriel’s rejection of a process ontology due to its supposed essential content indeterminacy (Gabriel, 2015). Gabriel defines absolute processes as “processes without anything being processed, mere becomings, not becomings of anything, but just becomings, change without anything changing”, and he dismisses the notion by arguing that “we always experience substances, rather than pure processes, and there really are no pure processes if we mean by this something that someone could possibly refer to” (Gabriel, 2015, pp. 33–34). But even if it is true that change presupposes something that changes (a locus of change), it does not follow that this ‘something’ should be substance-like. As we saw, it could well be a (bundle-structured) patterned regularity, an ongoing pattern of events, an adverbially characterized unfolding process that is individuated by what it does, by the difference it makes to other processual doings. Gabriel seems to believe that without a subjectual-objectual substratum, pure processes would be so unstable that they could not even be individuated as such. But, again, this does not follow. A patterned regularity can well be stable enough to permit individuation without an underlying essence or substratum to account for its ‘identity through change’ as a processual individual, as its ‘identity’ or ‘essence’ is constituted by the ‘gravitational’ (dynamic differential) field of forces around it.

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substitution. All reified generalities must be replaced, but this must be laboriously done one case at a time.

4  A Nominalistic Process Language? Moreover, a serious challenge for a nominalistic process framework is to make intelligible a language for saying that ‘things are thus and so’ without using properties and propositional contents. Since properties are, after all, things that we say of things and propositions are things that we say, how can a nominalism which rejects the existence of both properties and propositional contents (as universals) avoid the paradoxical conclusion that nothing can be said? If the world is a collection of particulars, how can we make sense of what we are doing in saying that ‘things are thus and so’? (Brandom, 2015, p. 270). In response, we can say that while we are saying something, for example, when we say of a table that it is brown, we are not necessarily committed to saying that there is some thing that we are saying of it (Sellars, 2018). ‘That is brown’ does not pick out some thing, but functions to characterize what we are doing in saying this: making certain sorts of move in the space of reasons (committing us to saying that the table is colored, precluding us from saying that it is green, etc.) (Simonelli, 2022). In general outline, this is how we must begin conceiving a resolutely process-nominalistic language: propositions would not be conceived as expressing contents referring to objects, properties and relations, as constituents of facts (with the latter conceived as truth-makers of these propositions). Rather, they would be understood as ‘languagings’, as particular (not universal) repeatable (not general) happenings (not objects), identifiable in terms of the difference they make among other linguistic doings (de facto precluding or mandating them in linguistic practice). These linguistic acts would be doings of a certain sort, namely, sayings, due to their functional role in the game of giving and asking for reasons, where this functional role would be played by intrinsic features of these languagings as representing acts. We can illustrate how this language might function by bringing to mind Sellars’ fictional language of Jumblese (Sellars, 1962b), in which the compatibilities and incompatibilities of semantically significant styles are reflected in the compatibilities and incompatibilities of quality spaces. Recall that Sellars takes it that a perspicuous language (‘Jumblese’) would have a bottom ‘atomic’ level composed of ‘basic singular statements’ formulated in a radically nominalistic, non-general, non-predicative language

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(i.e. not of the ‘subject-predicate’ form), in which the world consists of nameables, not facts, dynamically pictured by genuine (i.e. properly ‘atomic’, not ‘molecular’) singular terms and the multifarious empirical relations in which they stand, in single complex representational acts, which capture their empirical/pictorial—as opposed to conceptual/logical—structure and complexity (Sellars, 1967, pp.  120–125; Rosenberg, 2007, pp.  110–115; Brandom, 2015, pp.  269–270). For example, the basic singular statement ‘A’—written in Sellars’ resolutely nominalistic language, ‘Jumblese’, in which predicates are dispensable, their functional role being that of helping bringing it about that two (or more) names stand in a certain dyadic (or polyadic) matter-of-factual relation—could represent (picture) the object a by virtue of being ‘a’-shaped and represent a as being red and triangular by virtue of being italicized and capitalized. In this way, the complex state of affairs that we might represent in a logical calculus by an extended conjunction—‘Ra & Ta & Bb & Sb & aLb’— could be represented in a Jumblese-style representational system by a single composite sign whose mode of composition is a matter of its parts simultaneously instantiating a multiplicity of (representationally relevant) properties and relationships. In this way, it becomes possible to conceive, for example, of our own total visual field at a given time as a single composite state functioning as a ‘pictorially’ complex representation of our then and there visual environment. And insofar as they are appropriately caught up in dispositions to inferences (expressing mastery of the game of giving and asking for reasons) and certain courses of action, such sensory (or affective) states could be said to function as highly complex Jumblese-style ‘sentences’9 (Sellars, 1967, pp.  120, 1980, p.  57; Rosenberg, 2007, pp. 111–113). Thus, this nominalistic language would be ‘about’ the world in the sense of dynamically picturing it, not in the intentional sense in which a propositional content semantically represents a fact. Propositions in this language would function as pictorially (i.e. not logically) complex ‘languagings’ and the adequacy of picturing would be a function of the 9  Notice also, importantly, that, from this point of view, an expression that is syntactically ‘molecular’, that is, constructed according to formation rules which make use of connective and quantifier signs, can nevertheless be semantically ‘atomic’, that is, represent by picturing. And this enables even highly theoretical (scientific-image-informed) representational systems to contain, in principle, basic singular representations used to make ‘atomic’ statements, which picture individual basic theoretical entities or processes (Rosenberg, 2007, p. 114).

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adequacy of the whole ‘method of projection’, that is, of the whole system of patternings of linguistic doings/happenings of which they are part.10

5  Why Opt for a Nominalistic Process Framework? But, one might ask, even if this radically nominalistic process rendering of the world, ourselves and language does have some resources for making identity and individuation of its denizens prima facie plausible (however remotely strange and orthogonal to our manifest-image categorizations and classification they might turn out to be), what obliges us to pick out this framework as the best option to commit ontologically? Why not see it as an alternative but by no means obligatory option for adopting ‘in the marketplace of experience’? Sellars’ response to this is that the object-property framework—and its principles of content determination—are such that by their very nature raise questions that demand answers in terms of a novel non-object-­ property framework. Specifically, for Sellars, it is essential to concepts of thing-kinds (belonging to the object-property framework) that they are qualified by ceteris-­ paribus generalizations—where the latter qualify as laws in virtue of being counterfactually robust. These laws determine the range of conditions under which the object in question behaves in a predictable way (normal conditions) and allow for a range of circumstances in which this behavior, that is, the actualization of its capacities-abilities (powers-dispositions), is hindered by external obstacles (abnormal conditions). Within the object-­ property framework we can most often distinguish between instabilities in the behavior of object due to abnormal conditions (non-actualization of dispositions due to external obstacles) and anomalous conditions (sustainedly incomprehensible, observationally unpredicted variation, raising explanatory demands which cannot be answered from within the framework). Of course, there are no general rules for judging at what point the anomalies of a framework are sufficiently severe to necessitate its abandonment in favor of a better framework. This depends on a number of considerations many of which are essentially pragmatic (e.g. existence of a sufficiently developed new framework capable of explaining the anomalies 10  An indicator for this latter sort of holistic (yet non-normative) adequacy would be the practical success of this system in orienting ourselves in (or maintaining dynamic homeostatic equilibrium with) the surrounding environment.

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in question, practical everyday needs that are hindered by the anomalies in question and are better satisfied with the application of the new framework) and others epistemic in nature (ability of the new framework to generate new testable generalizations, novel predictions, capacity of the existing framework to overthrow its anomalies in non-ad-hoc ways and to avoid long-term stagnation by producing novel concepts and testable generalizations). Now Sellars wants to argue that, ultimately, some such ‘anomalies’ in the behavior of objects (including mental states like ‘thoughts’) threaten the categorial structure of the object-property framework itself (as opposed to just affecting the specific empirical content of the particular descriptive contents expressing the general categorial concepts of the framework). But why is that so? However many scientific conceptual frameworks might need to be revised or abandoned for the sake of increasing explanatory coherence what reason do we have for thinking that the very categorial structure of the ‘object-property’ framework might eventually have to be itself changed? Here, the fundamental problem seems to be that the object-property framework, which expresses our ordinary lifeworld metaphysics, gives rise to questions and explanatory demands it is not in a position to answer. According to Sellars (1957), this systemic anomaly finds expression in the fact that “thing-kind generalizations by bunching rather than explaining causal properties point beyond themselves to a more penetrating level of description and explanation” (263); “the picture of the world in terms of molar things and their causal properties points beyond itself to a picture of the world as pure episode [i.e. as a ‘lawfully evolving process’]” (263–64) Sellars’ underlying idea here seems to be that the abandonment of the ‘object-property’ framework might be necessary for explaining the counterfactual-causal-dispositional properties that are constitutive of the very identity of the objects of the framework. These properties are explanatorily basic in the context of the ‘thing-framework’ (‘thing-kind generalizations bunch rather than explain causal properties’), but certain methodological principles and explanatory ideals of our epistemic practices themselves push toward the direction of explaining the dispositional (relational, ‘iffy’) properties in terms of categorial (intrinsic, occurrent) properties. Sellars puts this point as follows: “The soluble object has some character such that it is a general fact that anything having this character which is also put in water, dissolves. But this character cannot be another causal property on pain of circularity. … More, indeed, must be known of an

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object than the mere fact that it was put in water, in order to infer that it dissolved. But such thing-kind generalizations as ‘Salt dissolves in water’ include this more not by specifying additional part causes, but by restricting their scope to identifiable kinds of thing, in identifiable kinds of circumstance. But the philosophically more exciting part of the solution consists in distinguishing between the causal properties of a certain kind of thing, and the theoretical explanation of the fact that it has these causal properties. For while causal generalizations about thing-kinds provide perfectly sound explanations, in spite of the fact that thing-kinds are not part causes, it is no accident that philosophers have been tempted to think that such a phenomenon as salt dissolving in water must ‘at bottom’ or ‘in principle’ be a ‘lawfully evolving process’ describable in purely episodic terms. Such an ‘ideal’ description would no longer, in the ordinary sense, be in causal terms, nor the laws be causal laws” (1957, pp. 262–263). And in the Notre Dame Lectures he says: “We correlate in physical theory the possession and abandoning, or the losing, of the disposition [to be magnetized] with a steady stream of actual physical processes at the micro-­ physical level. So that there are constant actual processes going on which accompany the acquiring and losing of this propensity” (2018, p. 128). Parallel things can be said about thinking as an inner mental state. Thinking, according to Sellars, is construed by analogy to the semantic (as opposed to phonological or graphic) properties of public language, and is thus understood, in first approximation, in terms of short-term propensities to thinking-out-loud (which can be inhibited, under certain conditions). In the context of the manifest image, this (verbal-behaviorist) model is enriched by construing thoughts as ‘inner’ occurrent entities, as pure mental episodes can be interpreted as standing to propensities to verbal behavior as micro-physical processes stand to the physical propensities of the familiar material things around us (Sellars, [1956] 1997, 1975). Yet, the occurrent, ‘evental’, categorical nature (as opposed to iffy-­ dispositional properties) of the ‘inner thoughts’ in question is abstract or generic in the extreme, admitting only of a functional characterization (by analogy with the semantic properties of language), leaving essentially undetermined the contentual, qualitative character of thinking that can alone explain its purely occurrent dimension. It is precisely here that the scientific image is pressed to create new concepts and categories beyond the substance-­property framework (micro-psychological, neurophysiological processes) in order to explain the acquiring and losing of our inner thinking propensities, as well as their observationally unpredicted

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variation or break down (e.g. their sustainedly incomprehensible deviation from expected verbal or emotional dispositions, due to brain damage). This is the explanatory pressure that leads to what Sellars calls ‘a more penetrating level of description and explanation’ in terms of a process framework, in which the primary ‘objects’ are no longer substances (things) that endure through change, belong to kinds, and have conditional (causal/dispositional) properties as criteria for belonging to the latter, and where explanation based on ceteris-paribus (counterfactual robust, modally involved) laws gives way to pure—non-causal and non-‘thingish’— description of ‘lawfully evolving processes’ characterized adverbially in intrinsic and occurrent (non-iffy) terms.

6   Modality, Personhood and Process: A Roundabout Internal Connection What is even more interesting in this connection is that this overcoming of the object-property framework in favor of the process framework is directly necessitated (a) by explanatory ideals intimately bound up with our use of modal discourse (the causal modalities) and (b) by normative demands constitutive of our concept of a person. Regarding (a), as we saw in Chap. 6, it can be argued that, for Sellars, the causal modalities can be reinterpreted as having normative-practical (as opposed to ontological) import. That is, they can be construed as the normative infrastructure of thought which make possible the self-­correcting dimension of our descriptive-explanatory practices and epistemically orient it toward the identification and occasional revision of (our conception of) what is physically necessary, possible or impossible. In this sense, the causal modalities can prove to be indispensable semantic and epistemic means for improving the descriptive and explanatory resources necessary for arriving (in the ‘order of knowledge’) at the above radically non-­ Aristotelian picture of the world and ourselves. Thus, modal discourse (the causal modalities) and content determination as expressed in the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality and identity (in the context of the object-property framework) can find a central place in the dialectic that leads to the picture of the world as pure becoming. But the object-­property framework and the causal modalities regulating its descriptive and explanatory resources ultimately point beyond themselves to a picture of the world as pure episodic becoming: it appears that at the deepest level of

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explanation (of this self-correcting process), real connections (necessary logical, causal, deontic laws), far from being fundamental ‘unexplained explainers’, prove to be themselves in need of explanation by a-categorial structures that lack modal, logical, causal properties altogether (this is why the causal modalities are at the end of the day reinterpreted as having ultimately normative-practical-orientational (as opposed to directly ontological) import in our epistemic practices). Moreover, regarding (b), this whole explanatory task or ideal that leads to this unexpected result can be understood as the demand, guided by epistemic norms of the object-property lifeworld framework itself, for drawing material inferences concerning new cases (the unknown), in a way that explains the observed cases (the known), with the view of formulating a systematic body of empirical knowledge capable of yielding arbitrarily general pictures of the world and ourselves, at an arbitrary level of specificity in detail (Sellars, 1964, 1988). This imperative for explanation is experienced precisely as a demand, in the sense that to refuse to inquire further into the ‘why’ of things amounts to recuse oneself from the epistemic community of persons (Garfield, 2012). Thus, the picture of the world as pure becoming devoid of logical, modal and causal-dispositional structure is itself the outcome of following the stringent normative demands of our communal epistemic descriptive-explanatory practices to the very end. In other words, this nominalistic-processual picture of the world expresses nothing less than the fulfillment of the deepest explanatory ideals of a community of persons. It ‘just’ turns out that while ‘to be is to be intelligible’ is true, it must be in the end understood in a radically non-­ Hegelian manner. In this picture, persons, while not ontologically salient, would remain intact in a process world, as normatively individuated entities. Their capacities, abilities and dispositions (potentialities) would be de-ontologized and interpreted in a functional-normative way, as structural features of an essentially social space, along the lines of a ‘normative-functional’ account of personhood: we, as persons, at bottom, construe ourselves as the unifying points of a system of reciprocally recognized ‘schematic’ and ‘ideal’ cognitive and practical commitments. We are complex physical systems whose behavior is sensitive to certain collective pattern-governed behavioral habits regarding ‘language-entry’ transitions (perception), intra-­ linguistic transitions (inference) and ‘language-exit’ transitions (action), such that it can be possible for it to be interpreted as placed within a social network of reciprocally recognized rights and duties (‘cans’ and ‘oughts’)

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pertaining to meaning, knowledge and action. These are the only ‘essential’ properties of ourselves as persons. The only thing that needs to be added to this ‘normative-functionalist’ account of personhood is that, in the context of the nominalistic process framework, it would be completely transparent to us, as persons, that our distinctiveness, our non-identity to human beings, or to whatever materially embodies us in the ‘actual’ world of becoming, is not a metaphysical one, grounded in some kind of ‘ontological essence’, but rather a result of our creation (sustained by recognitive attitudes of holding each other responsible and attributing authority), as complex physical systems, of a distinctive tool for representing our activity to ourselves for the purposes of regulating collaborative action (the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’), and whose ultimate raison d’être is to promote the general welfare of the community. And since persons ultimately exist as the bearers of reciprocally recognized normative attitudes (undertaking and attributing commitments and entitlements), their marching toward an ever-better theoretical and practical understanding of itself-in-the-world is not automatic or a matter of the unfolding of their ‘metaphysical nature’, but has to be sustained by their collective binding to, enactment of and trust in the ‘environment’ of the normative attitudes that make them possible and the synchronic and diachronic entitlements and responsibilities they entail. Thus, while as persons we do not exist in the really real world of becoming, what really exists in that world (complex physical systems) ‘constructs’ persons through its activity (activation of recognitive we-attitudes), in such a way as to make these complex physical systems always capable of overcoming—in an increasingly systematic, non-­ random manner—their current actualization in the world of becoming and of collectively restructuring the range and content of their sensory-­ affective states and attitudes in order to promote their ever-evolving epistemic and general welfare. An important final note: in the above account of personhood, I have presupposed that normative recognitive attitudes (acknowledging and attributing normative statuses of authority and responsibility by undertaking commitments to do so) do exist in the ‘really real’ world of becoming and that normative statuses themselves depend on their causal efficacy on the attitudes of acknowledging and attributing them on ourselves and others. Sellars does not delve into this issue, but we might speculate that, just as, for Sellars, sensible qualitative features exist as emergent causally efficacious properties of sentient organisms of a certain complexity, the same goes for affective qualitative experience, one dimension of which is the ‘desire for

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recognition’ as expressed in the recognitive attitudes of holding or treating oneself and others as responsible or authoritative for believing or doing something. If this is correct, it follows that ‘orectic’ normative we-attitudes, as expressive of emergent affective fields in human organisms, are the real causal forces that sustain social normative structures (practices, institutions). Thus, at bottom, the causal power of normativity lies exclusively in the enactment of those statuses in the corresponding attitudes11—whose cash value is the generation of iterated positive and negative feedback loopscycles in picturings of the physical and social world.12 Of course, this does not mean that normative statuses themselves are just epiphenomenal, illusory states. On the contrary, in the form of internalized impersonal semantic, epistemic, practical and ethical standards of correct performance, they are indispensable functional tools for making explicit, regimenting, coordinating, criticizing and thus (hopefully) for collectively restructuring normative we-attitudes toward sustaining practices and institutions that are more conducive to our epistemic and general welfare.13

References Brandom, R. (2015). From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars. Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press. 11  The attitudes in question are non-normative in their ontology (they are non-conceptual affective acts), but they can legitimately be called ‘normative’ in the sense that the attitudes of, for example, undertaking a certain commitment is something that goes beyond a mere desire, and can even express a willingness to risk or sacrifice one’s other desires. 12  See also Sachs (2022). According to Sachs, Sellars’ understanding of the relations between normative content and naturalistic picturing be illuminated if we construe linguistic behavior as triangulated cybernetic behavior: we ascribe semantic content to any utterance or inscription (including our own) that can be coordinated with other utterances or inscriptions that are functionally integrated into the sensorimotor feedback loops of other cybernetic systems, where the criteria of coordination lie in successful cooperation. From this point of view, personhood is to be understood as the status of a cybernetic system that actualizes a capacity to triangulate its behavior with other cybernetic systems that can also actualize their capacities for triangulated behavior (Sachs, 2022). 13  This ‘relative autonomy’ of the level of normative statuses over normative attitudes (which tends, fetishistically, to be ontologically reified) is indispensable as a tool for regulating the latter at a collective level because (a) normative we-attitudes are not ontologically transparent to themselves and (b) they are context-bound, incapable of being abstracted from their ‘qualitative’ form and content. By contrast, normative statuses, in the form of thinkable conceptual contents, can—as abstract functional roles within the space of reasons—represent any possible fact therein ‘objectively’ (as the same for everyone), irrespectively of the particular qualitative form and content of the corresponding normative attitudes that ontologically sustain the conceptual contents in question.

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Gabriel, M. (2015). Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh University Press. Garfield, J. (2012). Sellarsian Synopsis: Integrating the Images. Humana.Mente, 21, 103–121. Kraut, R. (2016). Norm and Object: How Sellars Saves Metaphysics from the Pragmatist Onslaught. In J. O’Shea (Ed.), Sellars and His Legacy (pp. 60–80). Oxford University Press. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Harvard University Press. Morganti, M. (2012). Sellarsian Particulars. Acta Analytica, 27(3), 293–306. Nunziante, A. (2021). Tropes Variations: The Topic of Particulars Beyond Sellars’ Myth of the Given. Synthese, 199, 12019–12043. Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. MIT Press. Rosenberg, J. (2007). Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images. Oxford University Press. Sachs, C. (2022). A Cybernetic Theory of Persons: How Sellars Naturalized Kant. Philosophical Inquiries, 10(1), 49–72. Sellars, W. (1948). Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable Without Them. Philosophy of Science, 15(4), 287–315. Sellars, W. (1949a). On the Logic of Complex Particulars. Mind, 58(231), 306–338. Sellars, W. (1949b). Aristotelian Philosophies of Mind. In R. W. Sellars, V. G. McGill, & M. Farber (Eds.), Philosophy for the Future: The Quest for Modern Materialism (pp. 544–570). Macmillan Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1957). Counterfactuals, Dispositions and the Causal Modalities. In H. Feigl, M. Scriven, & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II (pp. 225–308). University of Minnesota Press. Sellars, W. (1960a). Grammar and Existence: A Preface to Ontology. Mind, 69, 499–533. Sellars, W. (1962b). Naming and Saying. Philosophy of Science, 29, 7–26. Sellars, W. (1964). Induction as Vindication. Philosophical Studies, 31, 197–231. Sellars, W. (1967). Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1975). The Structure of Knowledge. In H.  N. Castaneda (Ed.), Action, Knowledge and Reality (pp. 295–347). Bobbs-Merrill. Sellars, W. (1980). Naturalism and Ontology. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1988). On Accepting First Principles. In J.  E. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 2, Epistemology (pp.  301–314). Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. ([1956] 1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press. Sellars, W. (2018). Wilfrid Sellars Notre Dame Lectures 1969–1986 (P. V. Amaral, Ed.). Ridgeview Publishing Company. Simonelli, R. (2022). Sellars’ Ontological Nominalism. European Journal of Philosophy, 30(3), 1041–1061.

CHAPTER 10

Free Will in a Scientifically Disenchanted World

As we have seen, for Sellars, the very essence of personhood—its identity and individuation conditions—is normative, rather than descriptive or explanatory. As he himself observes regarding the essentially normative (and social) nature of personhood: “To say that a certain person desired to do A, thought it his duty to do B but was forced to do C, is not to describe him as one might describe a scientific specimen. […] To think of a featherless biped as a person is to think of it as a being with which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties” (Sellars, 1963a, p. 38). Persons are not identified and individuated on the basis of considerations having to do with the material constitution of their bodies but rather on the basis of functionally characterized capacities and abilities of these bodies. If a complex physical system is bound up in a network of (reciprocally recognized) semantic and epistemic rights and duties and can be functionally characterized as having intentions (thoughts that motivate one to realize their content), then this complex physical organism—whatever its ultimate material constitution—is a person. An important consequence of the above resolutely normative conception of the being of persons is that the very distinction—crucial for the possibility of the freedom of the will—between our being disposed or impelled to act in a certain way (e.g. running away from danger) and our having compelling reasons for acting or not acting in this way (which can be potentially in conflict with our desires, dispositions or impulses) is itself a normative-functional one and not an ontological distinction between © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_10

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different incommensurable levels of reality. In other words, if what persons ‘really are’ ontologically (multiplicities of psycho-socio-historical processes enveloped in neurophysiological ones) can be functionally described as capable of doing X on the basis of reasons, in spite of potentially intense desires, dispositions and impulses to do Z, then personal freedom (in the sense of acting on the basis of reasons) is fully preserved without compromising the radical Sellarsian nominalistic and naturalistic picture of the world. Now, as we saw, freedom is said in many ways: there is ‘freedom as autonomy’ and ‘freedom as choice’, that is, freedom to do something autonomously (based on reasons) and freedom from compulsion. And as we shall see below, although these are different senses of freedom, they are not unrelated; they are both entangled (sometimes confusedly) in the issue of the freedom of the will, as well as in the topic (again sometimes confusedly) of scientific determinism. Thus, I think that to better understand this normative-functionalist account of freedom, especially in the context of a philosophy, like Sellars’ own, which also puts great emphasis οn the scientific conception of ourselves-in-the-world, we must place the former within the general context of the free will problem. This is not the place for a systematic discussion of the vast literature on this issue. Nor is my intention to offer a systematic exposition of Sellars’ own important contributions to the topic of free will and determinism (see Sellars, 1966, 1975b). I will instead provide a very brief overview of what I take to be the most crucial conceptual junctures for understanding the problem of free will, placing it within a framework in which the tangles and tensions surrounding the issue are somewhat eased. While this ‘normative materialist’ framework—as we might call it—is inspired by Sellars, it also has (broadly pragmatist and even Nietzschean) affinities and extensions not directly anticipated by Sellars.

1   The Conflation of Causal Determination with Compulsion We can begin by reminding that human beings, as well as many animals, do things voluntarily, in the sense that they are self-moving and exhibit intelligent behavior, adapting in a highly successful way to their environment. This is sufficient for attributing a minimal (though not rational) form of freedom or free will. Yet, at the same time, influenced by the

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scientific image, many philosophers believe that the behavior of everything in the universe—including animals and humans—is causally determined by laws of nature. These at first glance equally reasonable ways of understanding ourselves-in-the-world seem to be in conflict with one another. This is one way to formulate the problem of free will, which, in this sense, concerns the freedom of animate beings in general within a world governed by natural laws. Now, this problem can, I think, be resolved if we draw a distinction between two different ways of understanding the concept of ‘causal determination’. We can conceive it as a form of compulsion by external causal forces (Kant) or as something ‘internal’ to an entity expressive of its self-­ organization or its ‘autopoietic’ tendency for recursive self-maintenance, for example, through self-monitoring of its behavior (Spinoza’s Conatus is a good example here). In this latter case ‘causal determination’ does not preclude the voluntary behavior or ‘spontaneity’ of an entity. The latter is an expression of the former. In other words, contra Kant, to say that there are temporally antecedent causes expressive of a law of nature that are relevant to changes in the behavior of a thing or state of affairs does not imply that these causes are ‘external’ to the thing in question, that the latter is completely ‘passive’ with regard to the former and that the causes compel this thing to change its behavior (Sellars, 1972, pp. §45–49). Presumably, the misleading equation of causation with compulsion is explained by the fact that the root metaphor built into our ordinary notion of ‘cause’ is that of a person bringing about changes in another person which would not otherwise have occurred. And while this practical sense of causation as compulsion was gradually ‘depersonalized’ in its application to nature into the analogical concept of a merely material thing, persons still hover in the background of even this ostensibly depersonalized sense of the term, as the material thing in question is the ‘cause’ of changes in another in the sense of bringing about changes which would not otherwise have occurred. Thus, as Sellars observes, this root metaphor of causation as compulsion is by no means completely ‘frozen’ and this undoubtedly accounts, at least in part, for the fact that many philosophers find it simply absurd that an action which was caused could be done of the agent’s own free will (Sellars, 1966). Another potential confusion here stems from the failure to realize that the distinctive trait of the scientific revolution was not that all events are caused but that all events are ‘predictable’ (in principle derivable) from relevant information about the context in which they occur, where the

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notion of ‘predictability’ is not used in the epistemic sense of the term (Sellars, 1963a, pp. 13–14). Hence, even if the scientific image were deterministic (which need not be the case), it would be so in a sense that does not imply any kind of external compulsion or total epistemic predictability of events. Lastly, as we know, the Sellarsian scientific image is one of overlapping processes unfolding in patterned regularities. This picture of the world as a tissue of processual goings-on (not objects) unfolding in patterned regularities (not grounded in any external real necessity) makes it easier to conceive of the stability and lawlike character of these regularities as immanent—and not ‘external’—to the unfolding of each patterned process, at all levels of organization.

2  Natural Freedom vs Normative Freedom However, the above disentanglement of causal determination from compulsion does not seem by itself sufficient to resolve the problem of free will in its distinctively human form. This is because there is an important distinction between a more primitive or ‘minimal’ form of animal spontaneity, activated by biological needs for satisfying the ‘natural purposes’ of an animal species, and a distinctively human form of spontaneity, characterized by and expressed in a socially articulated space of giving and asking for reasons. And while it might be argued that this distinction is, in a sense, a difference in degree, the fact remains that this distinctively human form of spontaneity, through the medium of language and the capacity of collective, cooperative communication enabled by it, makes possible novel forms of positive freedom (e.g. articulation of novel intentions, purposes and interests) that are inconceivable to animals. Here, it must be stressed that the abovementioned distinction between human and animal ‘spontaneity’ is a distinction between two different forms of free will (and hence not between the presence and absence of free will): that which takes the form of the capacity to think and act on the basis of reasons that can always be negotiated or challenged and that expressed in animal ‘thinking and acting’ on the basis of biologically ingrained ‘natural purposes’ that cannot be made explicit, challenged or ‘internally’ modified in ways other than brute evolutionary pressures. This distinction between animal and human spontaneity brings into focus an existentially important notion of freedom for us persons—which might be called ‘normative freedom’. But, as was stressed above, lacking ‘normative

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freedom’ is not lacking free will altogether. To the extent to which free will is understood as the capacity to do otherwise, we can attribute this capacity, even if at a rudimentary level, to animals, as it is eminently plausible to think that animals do have a minimal capacity of internal ‘deliberation’, that is, of sketching alternative plans of action (e.g. when they are after their prey, search for food or try to avoid danger). Indeed, Sellars himself (1981b) seems also willing to ascribe the capacity to deliberate on alternatives not only to humans but also to animals. Presumably, this capacity can be naturalistically explained in terms of self-picturing, that is, the ability of an organism to picture its own sensory and affective processes and their ‘place’ in a (pictured) external environment (including other self-picturing organisms), coupled with a rudimentary capacity for ‘symbolic displacement’ (representing things that are not strictly speaking present to the external environment through evolutionarily explicable processes of ‘productive imagination’).

3   The Ability to Will Otherwise vs the Ability to Will Rationally We saw that one minimal sense of free will, namely, animal voluntary action, is compatible with one sense of causal determination. Is the same true of free will in the more demanding sense of the (presumably distinctively human) capacity to will otherwise? For example, is it possible to exhaustively describe our ‘nature’ (‘conatus’) in scientific terms without eliminating the capacity to will otherwise? I take it that this is indeed possible, especially if again (contra Kant) we reject the identification of causal determination with compulsion from external forces-causes, and we instead construe causal determination in terms of dynamic homeostatic regulation between brain, body and external environment. In this case, there does not seem to be any a priori obstacle for thinking that free will is compatible with a scientific ‘determination’ of our ‘nature’. Of course, it is true that under certain conditions our capacity of free will (‘the ability to will otherwise’) is severely diminished or completely extinguished. For example, it is impossible not to be disturbed or frightened after a bomb explosion nearby. In these circumstances, our very ability to will (and hence to act) otherwise is seriously diminished or altogether diminished, even if temporarily. The conditions that diminish or extinguish the ability to will otherwise (e.g. serious mental illness, addictive substances,

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unconscious motives) can be unearthed and described in manifest-image or scientific-image terms (the former would concern the ‘character’, while the latter the ‘nature’ of a person), but such descriptions are meaningful only in a context which always allows for genuine exercises of our capacity to will otherwise (Sellars, 1963a). Our conception of capacities, abilities and hindrances is normative-functional; capacities and abilities do not disappear just because there might be a sense in which what we actually did in certain circumstances can be seen as an expression of a ‘determination of our nature’ (conatus). What we actually do at every moment might be the expression of the intrinsic occurrent properties of our (scientifically describable) ‘nature’, but this does not preclude the existence of capacities and abilities of the described complex physical systems (including the capacity to will otherwise) provided that these capacities are understood in normative-functional rather than ontological terms. In this sense, the scientific image does not abolish free will; it just changes our conception about its proper application by redescribing the objects and the conditions in which it can (and cannot) be exercised in scientific terms. Free will is thereby fully preserved and, in fact, in an important sense, expanded in its range of application, through the reconceptualization—on the basis of new empirical-scientific knowledge—of the content of our desires and preferences and the conditions which enable or hinder the capacity to will otherwise. For example, based on new knowledge about the social-psychological-material factors that are related to hindering the very capacity to will otherwise, certain circumstances that are now considered paradigmatic for attributing full responsibility to a person for its wrongdoings could now be considered as exculpatory. Conversely, circumstances that were considered exculpatory for one’s wrongdoings could be reconceptualized as demanding the attribution of full responsibility (e.g. femicide). As is obvious, the reconceptualization of the conditions that enable or hinder our capacity to will otherwise and of the content of our desires and preferences could substantially increase our freedom and would alter our concepts of ‘responsibility’, ‘merit’ and ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ punishment. However, at this point it might be objected that the above compatibilist moves notwithstanding, to construe people as ‘self-organizing homeostatic systems’ capable of doing and willing otherwise does not seem to solve the problem of free will in a resolute manner unless the content of this willing is not arbitrarily chosen but is that of a rationally responsible agent. It is precisely at this point that the more robust ‘normative

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freedom’ mentioned above is internally connected to the freedom of the will: if the latter is understood not just as the capacity to will otherwise (or the ability to choose between alternative courses of action) in an arbitrary fashion, but as the ability to overcome or transcend our desires and impulses acting instead on the basis of reasons or duty. Here we are presented with a crucial—and potentially confusing—ambiguity of the term ‘ability to will otherwise’: in one sense, it can be understood as the ability to will differently than we actually did (irrespective of the content of the willing itself), while in another sense it can be construed as the ability of overcoming irrational or self-centered desires-inclinations and act on the basis of impartial reasons or out of duty.1

4  Naturalistic and Pragmatic Underpinnings of Normative Freedom How can we show that freedom in the above sense, namely, the ability of overcoming impulse and act on the basis of reasons or duty, is compatible with the scientific image of persons construed as ‘self-organizing homeostatic systems’? I think the crucial issue here is whether our capacity for overcoming our desires or impulses in favor of acting on the basis of impartial reasons is understood as a causal product of an (uncaused) self or in normative-functional terms. Sellars does not delve into the issue of the ontological underpinnings of the ability to ‘overcome’ passions in favor of reason, but a sketchy attempt in this direction might be the following: this ‘overcoming’ at the ontological level can be understood in terms of activations of different bundles of affective processes of the central nervous system—without any need for a ‘central headquarters’ such as the ‘self’ that, standing over and above those processes, ‘decides’ what to do. From this point of view, the ‘overcoming of passions’ can be understood as emerging from a differential force-field of conflicting habits, the strongest constellation of which under given circumstances ‘survive’ and express themselves in action. In this case, the ‘sovereign’ self that, as an ‘unmoved 1  This distinction essentially amounts to that between Kant’s conception of freedom as Wille (freedom as autonomy based on reason) and as Willkür (freedom to choose between alternatives) (Kant, 1788 [1997]). A related distinction is made by Stovall (2022) who distinguishes between ‘choice from preference’ and ‘choice from a recognition of duty’ on the grounds that the latter case—but not the former—involves an attitude of rejection toward all actions incompatible with what one chooses, which is robust under changes in one’s desires (Stovall, 2022, pp. 153, 284).

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mover’, effects causal changes in the world from scratch is at best a reified name (serving the pragmatic purposes of being the synchronically and diachronically unifying reference point) of the normative-functional characterization we give to those bundles of affective processes that can ‘control’ (=prevail over, tone down) other such processes that correspond to our ‘impulses’. Once we gradually reach a point (from early childhood to adolescence) in which the related bundles of neurophysiological processes have been ‘trained’ enough, through rewards and punishments, to form habits of activation and response such that they are able to ‘tame’ in a more or less predictable manner the unstable intensity of those neurophysiological processes that constitute what we call ‘impulsive outbursts of desire’, then, to the extent to which we are ignorant (and evolutionarily explicably so) of the detailed structure and function of the implicated physical processes, we tackle with this situation by understanding this ‘overcoming’ of the passions by reason in a normative-functional way: as the expression of a self-imposed rule or commitment for differentially arranging and making salient certain affective patterns (feelings of obligation in oneself and others, affective attitudes of rejection toward actions incompatible with those duty demands) and as a functional classification that marks the acquisition of a certain social status (as opposed to treating it as an ontologically emergent causally efficacious property). And although this distinction between acting on the basis of impartial reasons as opposed to acting from impulse or under the guidance of a-rational desires can well lead us astray if interpreted ontologically, it is maintained, reproduced and refined because it serves fundamental practical purposes of human societies: it facilitates societal order, regulates and eases social conflicts, directs people toward socially important activities and serves far more effectively our long-term desires and interests. Consider, for example, that human beings have evolved in such a way that in a host of circumstances the immediate satisfaction of spontaneous impulses or desires does not lead to the desired outcome in the long run— thereby creating the need of finding a way which increases the probability of receiving long-term satisfaction, which in effect can be done precisely by controlling impulsive outbursts or the immediate expression of desire. Moreover, the attribution of responsibility is a highly efficient conceptual tool for restoring collective and individual ‘psychical stability’—to the extent to which the latter is often disrupted by deeply painful or unfortunate situations such as suffering, disease and death. Also, through the attribution of ‘merit’, the notion of responsibility has the pragmatic

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function of registering reliable sources of practical and theoretical knowledge conducive to survival and well-being and of offering incentives for individually or socially beneficial practical activities. Lastly, and most importantly, forging attitudes of commitment (with the ensuing responsibility) and entitlement (with the ensuing rights) increases collective well-­ being as it enables the functioning of social institutions based on trust: only a creature that can remember the past and anticipate the future, that can in the present bind its own will relative to the future in the certain knowledge that it will in the future effectively remember that its will has been bound (Nietzsche, 1984), can create predictable and functioning social institutions, that come with a substantial increase in collective material and intellectual welfare, and make possible novel forms of positive freedom2 (see Chap. 7). In this genealogical-evolutionary manner, the distinction between acting on the basis of impartial reasons and acting under the guidance of a-rational desires or inclinations is selected for socially and, through education and language training, becomes internalized and salient in individuals, who subsequently think and act, that is, conceptually respond to their own affective states and behavior, in terms of it. Yet, the non-existence of this normative phenomenon of the ‘overcoming of passions by reason’ at the material-physical-neurophysiological level must not lead us to the conclusion that it does not exist tout court. It has been stressed throughout this book that persons are not identified and individuated on the basis of considerations having to do with the material constitution or occurrent properties of their bodies-brains but rather on the basis of functionally characterized capacities and abilities of the latter. If a complex physical system is characterized by occurrent sensory-­affective properties and attitudes of such intricacy and complexity that the latter can be saliently redescribed in normative-functional terms, as expressing the ability to choose between alternatives and act on the basis of reasons 2  Of course, this whole process of socially instituting normative attitudes of commitment and entitlement in practical life as well as in the theoretical domain does come with certain costs. Nietzsche famously argues that a consequence of this process is the development and internalization of attitudes such as ‘resentment’ and ‘bad conscience’ (Nietzsche, 1984). Moreover, the novel possibilities that emerge from turning human beings into responsible thinkers and agents also include novel ways of alienating us from ourselves and others. But, as the point of this section is just to show that a community of beings capable of skilfully navigating the space of reasons would have significant evolutionary advantages over communities that did not engage in the game of giving and asking for reasons, I will not examine this line of thought further (but see Chap. 12).

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that can overtake desire, then this complex physical system does have freedom of the will.

5   Conclusion: Toward a Self-Dirempted Naturalism One last remark is here in order. The above line of thought about the problem of free will offers at most the form of the solution to the problem, by making some important distinctions that can untangle knots which can create much unnecessary philosophical confusion. Yet, I believe that, ideally, a properly comprehensive ontological naturalism must take the above account one step further and say something more informative about the nature of the ‘occurrent sensory-affective properties and attitudes with intricacy and complexity such that they can be saliently redescribed in normative-functional terms, as expressing the ability to choose between alternatives and act on the basis of reasons that can overtake desire’. That is, a fully comprehensive naturalism must in the end attempt not only to make the ontological level of occurrent-intrinsic properties of our sentient dimension compatible with the functional-normative capacities of our sapient dimension, but to show their essential inseparability at the very level of ontology. A very rough first suggestion in this direction can be the following: the specifically human (highly symbolically displaced) abilities to will otherwise, or to deliberate and act on the basis of impartial reasons, are all based as ways of experiencing ourselves-in-the-world on a specific distinctive manner in which we picture (in the technical Sellarsian sense) ourselves-in-­ the-world, namely, on our ability to represent to ourselves (self-picture) part of our own ‘intrinsic’ activity–that is, the occurrence of particular (visual, oral, tactile) sensory impressions, affects and images—as occurrently instantiated schemata (iconic functional roles) for arranging and making salient certain sensory and affective patterns in our respective manifolds—thus enabling the emergence of the distinction between ‘types’ and ‘tokens’. Presumably, the self-synthesizing, ‘sign-making’ function (the ability of seeing in what it is something other than it) of what we may call ‘nominalistic self-consciousness’ is effected through evolutionarily pragmatically explicable processes of compression, stabilization, resolution and integration of its manifold sensuous and affective particularity, thus yielding ‘sapient self-consciousness’ through both productive

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imagination (integrative processes) and ‘subtractive’ imagination (compressive, stabilizing, resolution processes). In this way, it is as if nominalistic self-consciousness becomes self-dirempted in its striving to better ‘regulate’ itself.3 This does not mean that the ‘sapient’ ‘space of reasons’ level has independent or emergent causal powers of its own. Its productive powers (e.g. the subsumption of schemata to concepts-rules) are, as it were, a subtractive manner of appearance of a (non-transparent) relation of nominalistic self-consciousness with itself at the level of we(sign-­ instituting)-attitudes4; yet, at the same time, this ‘productive-through-­ subtraction’ manner of existence of the space of reasons level is necessary—in the form of positing impersonally timelessly valid normative statuses—for the reliable self-adjustment of this self-picturing relation. Now, precisely through this self-diremptive manner and by these essentially ‘productive-through-subtraction’ procedures, the above self-­ representing function opens up the space for (normatively) distinguishing between a relatively stable ‘self’, its expression in actuality (perception, volition, action) and the conditions under which it is ‘within its power’ to perceive, will and act, thus making meaningful a sense in which one can be held responsible for the latter. And, as we saw in Sect. 4, this normative distinction, along with the relevant (meta)linguistic habits-skills and abilities of self-control, presumably developed by accelerating processes of gene-culture coevolution, is selectively reinforced, established, internalized and culturally reproduced at the level of the community due to their crucial pragmatic function for our collective survival and well-being in linguistically constructed cultural niches. I will not pursue this huge and exceedingly difficult issue further here. I just want to point out that the difficulty of this project and the inevitably 3  Compare here Frege who, commenting on this sign-making function (representing perceptual occurrences as signs), connects this ability with freedom of the will. As he puts it: “We create in this way a firm, new focus about which ideas gather. We then select another idea from these in order to elicit its symbol. Thus, we penetrate step by step into the inner world of our ideas and move about there at will, using the realm of sensibles itself to free ourselves from its constraint. Symbols have the same importance for thought that discovering how to use the wind to sail against the wind had for navigation” (Frege, 1964, p. 156). 4  By this I do not mean that there are no emergent causal powers involved in this self-­ relating sign-making process, but that there are not located at the level of general structures such as ‘types’ of things. Types of things do not exert a direct causal influence on the ‘really real’ world, but influence it only indirectly, via the ‘productive-through-subtraction’ manner mentioned above, which is an emergent process located at the nominalistic level of concrete individuals.

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sketchy and promissory-note-ish character of the respective philosophical research programs must not detract us from the fact that naturalism in ontology cannot be comprehensive and a real live option in philosophy unless it is—theoretically and practically—integrated (and not only seen to be ‘compatible’) with our normative practices in the context of the lifeworld. This is perhaps its biggest attraction as a view of ourselves-in-the-­ world as well as its major problematic feature. Paraphrasing Sellars, we might say that “once we have eaten the apple with which the naturalistic philosopher tempts us, we begin to stumble on the familiar and to feel a haunting sense of alienation. But this gap between oneself and one’s world, can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core; for after the first bite there is no return to innocence” (Sellars, 1975a, p. 295).

References Frege, G. (1964). On the Scientific Justification of a Concept-Script. Mind, 73(290), 155–160. Kant, I. ([1788] 1997). Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. ([1887] 1984). On the Genealogy of Morals. Cambridge University Press. Sellars, W. (1963a). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1966). Fatalism and Determinism. In K. Lehrer (Ed.), Freedom and Determinism (pp. 141–174). Random House. Sellars, W. (1972). … This I Or He Or It (the Thing) Which Thinks. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 44, 5–31. Sellars, W. (1975a). The Structure of Knowledge. In H.  N. Castaneda (Ed.), Action, Knowledge and Reality (pp. 295–347). Bobbs-Merrill. Sellars, W. (1975b). Reply to Donagan. Philosophical Studies, 27, 149–184. Sellars, W. (1981b). Mental Events. Philosophical Studies, 39, 325–345. Stovall, P. (2022). The Single-Minded Animal: Shared Intentionality, Normativity, and the Foundations of Discursive Cognition. Routledge.

PART V

Philosophy, Disenchantment and Self-Critique

CHAPTER 11

The Dialectic Between Manifest and Scientific Image in the Wake of Weberian Disenchantment

In this chapter, I turn my attention to metaphilosophical issues. The conceptual resources of Sellarsian philosophy do not only provide novel ways of formulating and answering first-order philosophical problems, but also enable us to better understand the evolution and contemporary status of philosophy itself and its relation to wider socio-cultural developments. Thus, here I examine how Sellars sees the manifest and the scientific image as critical metaphilosophical concepts capable of throwing ample light on the historical evolution and contemporary scene in both analytic and continental philosophy in the face of the continuing Weberian disenchantment. Moreover, I argue that a further, usually overlooked, distinction between the original and the manifest image is crucial for understanding the emergence of philosophy itself as a discipline. Lastly, based on this analysis, and in the spirit of friendly amendment, I propose that the scientific image, in its role as a critical metaphilosophical tool, suitably enriched by sociological supra-personal explanations (a la Marx, Weber), can be used for criticizing Sellars’ own overall conception of science.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_11

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1   The Original, Manifest and Scientific Images as Critical Metaphilosophical Concepts Accounting for the Two Waves of Disenchantment One very important use of the notions of the manifest image and the scientific image of humanity-in-the-world is as explanatory philosophical concepts through which we can illuminate the historical evolution and contemporary scene in both analytic and continental philosophy in the face of the continuing Weberian disenchantment. To see this, notice, for example, that Sellars explicitly says that the notions of the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’ are idealizations which are designed to illuminate the inner dynamics of the development of philosophical ideas. Sellars, interestingly, also adds that, from a somewhat different point of view, the notions of the manifest and scientific image can be compared to the ideal types of Weber’s sociology (Sellars, 1963, p. 5). Both of these points suggest that the distinction between the manifest and the scientific image is metaphilosophical and is designed to illuminate (i.e. provide a hypothetical explanation1 of) the historical development of philosophical ideas. This means that those metaphilosophical conceptual tools, among other things, provide the framework in which we can make sense of the history of philosophy. Recall, for example, that Sellars, in his ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ (1963), argues that the major strands of what has been called the perennial tradition in philosophy, that is, the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition broadly understood (including Plato and Neo-­ Platonism, Aristotelian Scholasticism, major strands of medieval philosophy, contemporary neo-Thomism, etc.), can be construed as attempts to understand the structure of the manifest image. Indeed, according to Sellars, the defining feature that unites the perennial tradition is that it construes the manifest image as ultimately real. And precisely because an essential feature of the manifest image is that the connection between conceptual/rational thinking and reality cannot be understood in more elementary (non-conceptual, non-rational, pre-personal) terms, that is, in terms which do not already, in some way or another, presuppose the conceptual framework of persons, the perennial tradition was limited to understanding the relation between the intelligible worldly order and 1  It must be emphasized that the metaphilosophical concepts of the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’ are hypothetical concepts designed to provide an illuminating explanation of the historical development of philosophical ideas. They are not revealed through ‘intellectual intuition’, conceptual analysis or ‘phenomenological’ reflection into the essence of philosophy in its historical unfolding.

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individual minds which use the conceptual framework of persons in terms which bear an essential analogy to (the capacities and abilities of) persons (Sellars, 1963, pp. 15–16). For example, the relation between the conceptual and the real order was understood in terms of an illumination of the mind by intelligible essences, forms, God, as the social-historical unfolding of Absolute Spirit, as an intentional correlation sustained by a ‘transcendental subject’ and so on. All these notions are understood by analogy to the conceptual framework of persons, as is shown, for example, by the fact that, exactly like the latter, they are all conceptually and explanatorily irreducible to more elementary (non-conceptual, non-rational, pre-­ personal) processes. It can be argued that, at bottom, each of these philosophical conceptions characteristic of the perennial tradition is, in its own way, the expression—and absolutization—of the following fundamental ‘intuitive’ picture which animates the manifest-image framework: we cannot build a person—its capacities, abilities and the whole (perceptual, practical) way in which he is related with the world—out of assemblages of parts, however complex the latter might be, if they do not already exhibit the right form of ‘unity’ that characterizes persons. Moreover, Sellars attempts to show that modern and contemporary forms of epistemological skepticism are the result of an immature attempt by early modern philosophy to replace the categorial ontology of the manifest image, and the ensuing categorial irreducibility of the framework of persons to more elementary terms, with that of the emerging scientific image, by attacking the manifest-image conception of nature. In this way, perceptual and affective qualities are ultimately construed as subjective states of the human mind projected onto an external world now understood in terms of relations (of mechanistic causation) and properties of imperceptible particles and hence devoid of qualitative content. This pervasive philosophical tendency finds expression in the—otherwise very different—systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke and Hume. Sellars also sees the ‘transcendental turn’ of Kant’s philosophy as an attempt to salvage the sound core of the manifest image (the rationality, freedom and autonomy of persons) and insulate it from the onslaught of the scientific image, while simultaneously accounting for the objectivity of the latter, that is, for the fact that the scientific image gives us an objective representation of nature. Kant’s attempt, however, remained unsuccessful and skeptical or ‘dualist’ in its form, mainly due to Kant’s overly restrictive picture of the scientific image. Kant conceived the scientific image along the lines of its early modern predecessors. According to this conception, nature is a system governed by deterministic mechanistic laws, bereft of any qualitative content. But, as a consequence, two irreconcilable dualisms

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emerge: that between qualitative content and structural/relational form (perceptual and affective qualities are understood as subjective states of the human mind projected onto an objective world governed by natural laws and bereft of any qualities whatsoever) and that between deterministic relations of mechanistic causation (sufficient for the objective description and explanation of nature) and human freedom, understood as the capacity of persons to make choices based on reasons, rather than mere external, a-rational causes (desires, impulses, social pressures, tradition). Moreover, although Sellars himself does not make this point explicitly, I take it that this Sellarsian metaphilosophical framework, which interprets the history of modern philosophy in terms of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image, can also find application in the post-­ Kantian reaction against Kant’s radical separation of the realm of reason (or ‘realm of freedom’) from the realm of nature. Specifically, the reaction of philosophers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (also known as ‘philosophers of suspicion’) against Kant’s hypostatization of reason and their view to the effect that what we take to be a purely autonomous, insulated realm of ‘pure reason’, is at best a rationalization in which we unconsciously engage in order to infuse our life with meaning and purpose, and can be adequately and exhaustively explained in terms of (sub-personal) natural and (pre-personal) social/historical causes, can be interpreted as an—again premature—attempt of the nineteenth century’s scientific image to attack the manifest image at its very conceptual core: the category of personhood and the view that persons can have unproblematic categorial and epistemic access to their own beliefs, thoughts, desires and intentions (see also Brandom, 2019). But this is not the sole metaphilosophical function of this fundamental Sellarsian distinction between those two basic ways of understanding the world and ourselves: as is well-known Sellars believes that this distinction also illuminates the content of many different and seemingly disparate contemporary philosophical views or systems. That is to say, according to Sellars, the very formation of the ideological space or ‘battlefield’ of contemporary philosophical ideas or frameworks can also be understood in terms of the manifest-scientific image distinction. Recall, for example, Sellars’ conviction to the effect that such seemingly unrelated or disparate philosophical frameworks as the major schools of continental thought (including phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics) and American and British philosophies of ‘common sense’ (including Strawson’s Oxford Aristotelianism and later Wittgenstein’s philosophy)

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are, at bottom, sophisticated philosophical systematizations of the manifest-­image categorial framework of man-in-the-world, which take the manifest-image conception of the world as ultimately real. For recall that, in Sellars eyes, all those seemingly unrelated continental and ‘analytic’ philosophical systems of thought are united in believing that the categorial framework of persons and its relation to the world cannot be understood in terms that do not already presuppose the basic categorial concepts and distinctions of the framework. And in this way, I take it that, by Sellarsian lights, all these schools of thought effectively absolutize what is perhaps the most basic (and in a certain sense sound) ‘intuition’ which stands behind the basic categorial distinction of manifest image: that we cannot build a person—its capacities, abilities and the whole way in which he is related with the world—out of assemblages of parts, however complex the latter might be, if they do not already exhibit the right form of ‘unity’ that characterizes persons. In this sense, continental phenomenology and existential hermeneutics as well as Strawsonian Aristotelianism and the ‘practice-­based’ philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, all prove, in their own distinctive way, to be heirs of philosophia perennis. Furthermore, it can be suggested (though Sellars himself is less clear on this point) that the manifest-scientific image distinction also serves as a metaphilosophical tool which throws light on the very emergence of philosophical problems in general and, more radically, to the emergence of philosophy itself as a discipline. Now, as was shown above, the relevance of the manifest-scientific image distinction for explaining the emergence of philosophical problems in modernity (from Descartes onward) is, I think, obvious. For Sellars, at bottom, contemporary philosophical problems in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—and the characteristically modern skeptical anxieties aroused in all these fields—spring from the conflict between our manifest-image conception of ourselves-in-the-world and the radically disenchanted image of ourselves-in-the-world offered by the scientific image. In effect, the very distinction between the manifest and the scientific image is, at bottom, the theoretical expression—internal to the discipline of philosophy—of the cultural process of what Weber called the disenchantment of the world (and, eventually, of ourselves), that is, of the gradual overcoming of ‘magical’ or ‘anthropomorphic’ ways of understanding the world and ourselves, through the relentless depersonalization of

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explanation.2 It is exactly this basic feature of modernity, that is, the process of the disenchantment of nature that stands behind the characteristically modern radical disconnection of the Sellarsian ‘logical space of reasons’, which represents our manifest-image conception of ourselves as possessors of distinctively human characteristics, such as freedom, rationality, deliberation, from the ‘logical space of causes and effects’, which articulates our modern, scientific-image conception of the world and ourselves as complex physical systems characterized by all kinds of habits (related to perception, inference and action) yet devoid of normativity (rationality, freedom, deliberation).3 In this way, the connection between the manifest-scientific image distinction and the emergence of distinctively modern philosophical problems does seem plausible enough. Distinctively modern philosophical problems emerge as a result of the separation and conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of humanity-in-the-­ world, and much of modern and contemporary philosophy can be understood as an attempt to bridge the gap in our self-understanding opened by the separation and conflicting nature of those two basic categorial images of ourselves-in-the-world. But, one might wonder, what is the explanatory value of the manifest-­ scientific image distinction in the case of the emergence of problems in pre-modern (e.g. ancient or medieval) philosophy, or, more radically, in the emergence of philosophy itself, as a discipline, in antiquity? Although Sellars himself did not delve into this issue in detail, I suggest that a case can be made for thinking that philosophical discourse was itself born as a result of the emergence of the manifest image proper out of what Sellars calls the ‘original’ image—where all kinds of objects were understood on the model of persons and their capacities, abilities and impulses. Recall that, for Sellars, the manifest image is itself in its way a scientific image (it is self-critical and uses explanatory methods or correlational induction to refine and extend the framework) and emerges out of a gradual 2  Brandom gives the following concise description of Weberian disenchantment: “The meanings and values that had previously been discerned in things are stripped off along with the supernatural and are understood as projections of human interests, concerns, and activities onto an essentially indifferent and insignificant matter” (Brandom, 1994, p. 48). 3  Sellars was fully aware of this role of the disenchantment of nature in the occurrence of specifically modern philosophical problems concerning the place of a value-laden human experience within a norm-free nature (although he did not use the specifically Weberian term, but rather spoke of the ‘depersonalization’ of explanation). See, for example, Sellars (1963, pp. 9–14, 25–32).

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depersonalization of objects other than persons. Natural objects are thereby eventually deprived of the full range of capacities and abilities of persons. The former, unlike persons, do not now count as self-determining beings—that is, beings capable of doing things with an end in view by exercising their rational (deliberative) powers.4 Specifically, in the early stages of the development of the manifest image, nature is understood as including ‘truncated persons’ which are mere creatures of habit, acting out routines, broken by impulses, in a life which never rises above what ours is like in our most unreflective moments. Now, on the basis of this model, we can begin to understand the gradual transition from the original image to the manifest image. Instead of mythically construing natural phenomena on the model of persons and its capacities, abilities and impulses, humanity, precisely by depersonalizing nature, gradually distinguishes itself from it and begins to construct the image in terms of which humanity first becomes aware of itself as humanity-in-the-world, where nature is considered now as the realm of non-sentient (non-living) or

 Thus, in the original image to say of the wind that it blew down one’s house would imply that the wind either decided to do so with an end in view, and might, perhaps, have been persuaded not to do it, or that it acted thoughtlessly (either from habit or impulse), or, perhaps, inadvertently, in which case other appropriate action on one’s part might have awakened it to the enormity of what it was about to do. In the early stages of the development of the manifest image, the wind was no longer conceived as acting deliberately, with an end in view, but rather from habit or impulse. Nature became the locus of ‘truncated persons’: that which things could be expected to do, became nature’s habits; that which exhibits no order, its impulses. Inanimate things no longer ‘did’ things in the sense in which persons do them— not, however, because a new category of impersonal things and impersonal processes has been achieved, but because the category of person was now applied to these things in a pruned or truncated form (Sellars, 1963, p. 13). Note also that, although Sellars does not mention this point, the person-like, globally teleological mode of explanation in the original image directly explains particular events without mediation from universals such as substances, properties, relations, kinds, or laws of nature. Person-based mythical explanations are in essence thing-like, ‘materialized’ teleological powers directly expressed in concrete particulars as their immanent (teleological) cause. It is not until the ancient Greek enlightenment (6th-5th century BC) that the categories of explanation start to distinguish between things and persons, appearance and reality, (sovereign) self and (external) world, and to disentangle different roles in the above mythical explanatory unity, namely the universal and the particular, gradually understanding particulars as instances of independently understood universals (Plato’s Ideas, Aristotle’s substantial forms). 4

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sentient yet non-­rational existence.5 I suggest that this transition was the result of the rise of a very early and primitive form of the scientific image6 and, in particular, (1) of the Jonesean ‘scientific revolution’ of the postulation of thoughts, sensations, intentions, desires and emotions conceived as inner mental states (as opposed to semantically significant events/forces existing ‘out there’ in the external public world, occasionally ‘taking hold’ of us) (Sellars, 1997) and (2) of ancient Greek astronomy and mathematics. Here, we will focus on this latter development of the ‘ancient’ scientific image.7 Astronomy with its mathematical discourse of the motion of the planets ceases to explain a phenomenon with the exemplary narratives of myth (a classic mode of explanation of natural phenomena and human behavior in the original image) and utilizes essentially abstract, idealized and non-perceptible modes of explanation—thereby making possible a 5  Note that since in the original image all objects were persons, but humanity became aware of itself in the manifest image, it follows that persons had not been aware of themselves as such all along (in the original image) and came to self-awareness through the process of depersonalization (Mitani, 2019). In other words, Sellars here presents us with the intriguing thought that persons conceived themselves as humans—as endowed with the ‘metaphysically distinctive nature’ of humanity—only when they differentiated themselves from things that are not persons. And, by distinguishing the status of being a person from that of being a member of humankind, it also invites the even more radical thought that at the next stage of categorial evolution, when the scientific image will have fully demystified persons, depriving them of any metaphysical nature or essence, persons will perhaps again cease to be aware of themselves as ‘humans’, albeit not because they lack the resources to differentiate themselves from things that are not persons (as in the original image), but because, precisely through this demystifying process, they will have self-consciously come to realize that their ‘essence’ is normative and communal and not ontological, natural-kind-like and individualistic. In this way, in the ideal synoptic vision, persons will be metaphysically reunited with nature (all ‘objects’ will be again persons, albeit in a resolutely non-metaphysical sense) by coming full circle, from being non-human persons ‘in themselves’ (original image) to being post-human persons ‘for themselves’ (enlightened scientific image). 6  Recall that the manifest image is itself in a sense a scientific image, as opposed to the original image which is completely unscientific. The main difference between the pre-modern and the modern version of the scientific image lies in the categories they postulate as basic: the basic category of the pre-modern scientific image remains that of persons, applied in a truncated form in the case of objects other than full-blown persons (that is why the pre-modern scientific image is essentially a development within the manifest image), whereas the basic category of the modern version of the scientific image is that of an impersonal thing or, ultimately, of an impersonal process. 7  The ideas that are presented in what follows about the basic structure of the ‘ancient’ scientific image are not thematized by Sellars, nor do they seem to be implicitly endorsed by him. I present them as a friendly amendment or reasonable extension of his metaphilosophical views in this area.

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substantial distinction between what is ‘objectively real’ and what merely appears to be so.8 In this way—and also in the wake of the Jonesean ‘scientific revolution’—a gradual and unthought scission is produced between the new science of ‘being’ (based on the mathematical description of the motions of celestial bodies), which is now considered to be what is ‘really real’, and man’s understanding of himself as a source of values and norms within a perceptible, concrete and non-exact ‘manifest’ reality, which is now relegated to the realm of mere ‘appearances’. This scission between value and being gradually makes its presence felt, among other things, because the discourse of values, unlike the new science of imperceptible ‘being’ described by astronomy and mathematics, preserves the structure of narrative and myth, as if by inertia,9 thereby gradually severing a hitherto taken-for-granted ‘mythical’ unity between values and being (see also Meillassoux, 2011, pp. 197–199). Thus, it might be claimed that the very manner in which the manifest image comes into existence produces a gap in our understanding of nature and ourselves (registered by the sophists), which, in turn, creates the need for the emergence of a form of thinking whose constitutive aim is precisely to erase the gap in question and restore the disturbed coherence in our understanding of the world and ourselves: and philosophy as a discipline, from Plato onward, emerges precisely as an attempt to do just that, albeit in a distinctive (non-religious, non-scientific, non-ordinary) way. 8  Note that one of the most distinctive features of mythical description and explanation, characteristic of the ‘original’ image, is that no substantial distinction is made between appearance and reality. As Cassirer (whom Sellars had read) puts it in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929): “In myth there is no thing-substance lying at the basis of the changing and fleeting appearances as a stable and enduring something. Mythical consciousness does not infer from the appearance to the essence, but it possesses the essence, it has the essence in the appearance. … The demon of the rain itself is that which is living in every water droplet and which is palpably and bodily there. … The essence manifests itself in the appearance as a whole, as an unbroken and indestructible unity” (Cassirer, [1929] 1957, pp. 67–68). 9  Thus, it was still possible, for example, for a cultivated Greek to explain courage by narrating the feats of Achilles even after ceasing to believe in such mythical narratives as regards the movement of celestial bodies or the nature of becoming. In this way, myth continued to serve as the legitimating source of values, while at the same time being itself gradually delegitimized through its incapacity to explain the realm of ‘being’ in general. The ensuing ‘Jonesean revolution’, semi-unconsciously developing through the centuries in ancient Greek enlightenment, medieval Christianity, renaissance and early modernity, with its gradual placing of values and norms in the realm of subjectivity, further challenges the early manifest image’s ‘objectivist’ understanding of the connection between values and persons, thus intensifying and redirecting the gap between values and being.

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Notice that although there are important differences between the ‘ancient’ and the ‘modern’ version of the scientific image, each in their own distinctive way, challenged the hitherto natural way of understanding nature and ourselves in it, by creating a gap between value and being—which philosophy, since then, aims to bridge. We could perhaps understand this whole historical process, where the manifest image challenges the original image and is, in turn, challenged by the (‘modern’) scientific image, as characterized by two waves of disenchantment (of nature and ourselves) and corresponding ‘scientific revolutions’: The first wave of disenchantment took place already at the dawn of history and antiquity—through the ‘scientific revolutions’ of the postulation of thoughts, intentions, emotions, desires as inner mental states and the invention of mathematics and astronomy—and gradually transformed the original image into the manifest image (albeit without challenging its basic category, i.e. that of persons). The second ‘Weberian’ disenchantment occurred in early modern times—through the modern Copernican revolution all the way to Galilean and Newtonian physics—and challenged the categorial authority and adequacy of the manifest image itself (including the fundamental category of personhood) from the standpoint of an image emerging as the ‘determinate negation’ of the latter, namely, the ‘modern’ scientific image of humanity-the-world. The first wave of disenchantment brought philosophy proper into being, while the second gave it its distinctively modern form.

2  Sellarsian Self-Critique According to a Kantian-Hegelian line of thought, also espoused by Sellars, a philosophy worthy of the name would have to be self-conscious, self-­ reflective and self-critical. This said, I think that the bottom line of the argument in Sect. 1 is that the Sellarsian notions of the manifest and the scientific image, in their metaphilosophical use, can be understood as precisely the concepts through which a philosophical system can become self-­ aware, self-reflective and (hence) self-critical—that is, aware of its own methods, presuppositions and limits. But in what precise way can the metaphilosophical concepts of the manifest and the scientific image serve as tools for fulfilling the ultimate purpose of a properly self-reflective philosophy, namely, to make it aware of its own presuppositions and limits, thereby rendering it capable of ‘transcending’ them from ‘within’, as it were? Can those Sellarsian metaphilosophical tools be applied to Sellarsian philosophy itself, thereby providing it with a means to ‘immanently transcend’ itself? I suggest that

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indeed there is—irrespectively of whether Sellars himself was actually aware of this possibility. Specifically, it can be proposed that the scientific image of man-in-the-­ world, applied to anthropology, psychology and the social sciences (including economics, social psychology, social anthropology and social-cultural history), could throw light on the specifics of the very complex way in which ‘external’ history, that is, non-philosophical events such as scientific or socio-political advances and revolutions, mediated and theoretically reconstructed throughout ‘the history of philosophy’, are related with the very content of contemporary philosophical problems. For example, in this way we could perhaps throw light on the complex interrelation between the ultimate practical sources of the cultural process of Weberian disenchantment (a candidate here, e.g. could be a scientific-image successor concept of what Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 2002) call ‘the domination of physical and human nature’), the way in which the major practical consequences of this cultural process are theoretically reconstructed and comprehended throughout the history of philosophy (e.g. as indicating an essential bifurcation between the ‘space of reasons’ and the ‘space of causes’) and the way in which this latter theoretical understanding finds expression in the formulation of purely philosophical problems (and attempted answers thereof) in contemporary philosophy (e.g. the problems of accounting for the place of modality, morality, meaning and intentionality within a naturalistically described world). Note here that the scientific image, for example, as applied to anthropology, economics, social psychology and history, goes beyond a manifest-­ image rendering of these disciplines in that it postulates unobservable and impersonal or pre-personal states, ‘forces’ and mechanisms to account for observable anomalies within the ‘personalistic’ manifest-image account of the social sciences. Might we not then suggest that the scientific image, as applied in anthropology, economics, social psychology, sociology and history, can, in principle, be used as a metaphilosophical tool for retrospectively throwing light on the way in which non-philosophical events such as scientific, economic and political advances or revolutions in the twentieth century (i.e. in Sellars’ time), mediated and theoretically reconstructed by twentieth century’s ‘history of philosophy’, can illuminate those crucial practical, cultural and theoretical presuppositions which formed the unquestioned background for the formulation of Sellarsian philosophy itself? Let us provide a very sketchy example of such a self-critical application of Sellarsian metaphilosophical tools. It could be argued that from a social-­ scientific perspective (Marx, Weber), processes of social reification,

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enhanced by the capitalist system of production-distribution of socially significant goods (including material and immaterial labor), systematically distort the structure of the Sellarsian ‘space of reasons’ itself, by gradually forcing it to take the form of instrumental ‘means-ends’ (as opposed to cooperative) rationality. This pathologization of reason can be said, in turn, to be partly reflected in the structure and orientation of scientific practice itself (thereby indirectly distorting its very contents) as well as in the gradual colonization of diverse lifeworldly ways of knowing, of relating to the world and others, by ‘scientific reason’ (see Giladi, 2019). Now, Sellars did not have a fully developed theory about the social-­ practical underpinnings of the emergence and reproduction of specifically philosophical problems. And in this sense, he does not possess the conceptual tools for understanding the way in which the two major waves of disenchantment mentioned earlier in some dimensions ‘transformed man in bondage into man free’ while in others turned ‘man free into man in bondage’ and for connecting those transformations to the radical categorial change of our conception of ourselves-in-the-world (the relations between manifest and scientific image). However, I believe that Sellars’ philosophy does have the resources for articulating the general form in which a ‘scientific’ ‘theory of ideology’ would make its presence felt in philosophy and for the way in which we, as rational beings, ought to engage in scientific practices to maximize our general welfare, treating one another as an end in itself as opposed to mere means for our own private ends. As for the first issue, the Sellarsian myth of the Given, understood as the view to the effect that our thinking, acting and categorizing the world can be legitimized only if it is guided by metaphysical necessities having normative force independently of their being recognized as such by our social practices, can be construed precisely as the most general form of a theory of ideology (of an ideological recognition-misrecognition of physical and social reality). In this way, Sellarsians could utilize this analysis as a tool for more intimately connecting certain socio-practical conditions to the emergence and reproduction of specifically philosophical problems (and better understanding the positive and negative feedback loops between them), as well as for criticizing the current categorial structure of the scientific image itself. Recall, for example, that Sellars identified a pervasive background assumption of the current scientific image, the causal closure of the physical under mechanical laws of nature bereft of qualitative content, and considered it as an ideological distortion. He called it ‘the scientific ideology of the autonomy of the mechanical’ (Sellars, 1981) and considered it is as the major stumbling block for properly accommodating sensory and affective

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qualities in the natural world. Moreover, I think he would have held an analogous view about the very categorial structure of the scientific image in its current form, to the extent to which the descriptive and explanatory resources of the latter are based on the object-property categorial framework and its causal modalities (dispositions, capacities). That is, he would construe the ontological rendering of the object-property framework as a reification of alethic norms instituted by we-attitudes pertaining to linguistic function. It is no accident that the ideal (ontologically committal) scientific image for Sellars will be one of processes devoid of logical, causal or modal structure. This enables Sellarsians to hold that some of these ideological distortions and objectifying attitudes in the structure and content of the scientific image in its current form can in part be a reflection of its adopting an increasingly dominating and instrumental (means-ends) stance toward the world and ourselves. Thus, regarding the second issue (although Sellars himself did not delve into it), a Sellarsian could concede that from the standpoint of our best current social sciences, it turns out that, descriptively talking, scientific practices themselves are intimately implicated in the process of ‘the domination of physical and human nature’ (Horkheimer & Adorno, [1944] 2002), while also normatively distinguishing between an emancipatory and a non-emancipatory dimension of those practices. Scientific practices can be emancipatory to the extent to which they treat the process of exerting mastery over physical and human nature (and the ensuing epistemic and practical alienation from the world and ourselves) as means to an ulterior, independent end: the liberation of humanity from physical, evolutionary, psychological and social constraints hindering the collective flourishing of capacities and abilities of persons. And scientific practices can be non-emancipatory (pathologized) if they treat their mastery over nature and humanity as an end in itself, as a result of being animated by essentially private (non-universalizable) epistemic and practical ends-­interests (see also Chap. 12). In this way, an updated, expanded Sellarsianism could be in a position to provide an ‘immanent critique’ of science itself—thereby extending and supplementing Sellars’ own ‘theoretical-­ transcendental’ critique of science with a corresponding (descriptive as well as normative) analysis of the practical orientation of scientific practices in relation to other human practices and to civilization as a whole. If such a self-critical use of Sellars’ metaphilosophical tools were possible—and I do not see why it should not—nothing could prevent them, in principle, from being in a position to identify the social-historical and ultimate conceptual limits of Sellars’ own philosophical system (the lack of a

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descriptive-explanatory scientific analysis of the place of science within culture), while at the same time transcending them (by providing a normative framework for distinguishing between emancipatory and non-­emancipatory dimensions of science, informed by the above descriptive-explanatory analysis). This could be done, in turn, by gradually incorporating the scientific-­image (postulational, impersonal and ‘factual’) knowledge about the decisive external social-historical factors that influence the internal history of philosophy, in our evolving lifeworld (non-postulational, first-­ personal and normative) understanding of ourselves-in-the-world. Importantly, this ‘transcendence-through-immanent-recognition’ of the social-historical limits of Sellars’ system (expressed in a sedimented way into his very concepts) would be retrospectively possible by means internal to Sellarsian philosophy itself. And this fact would reveal a dynamic self-­ critical dimension lying at the heart of the Sellarsian system: the ability of this philosophy to revise itself and expand its horizons through the use of its own metaphilosophical principles.

References Brandom, R. (1994). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press. Cassirer, E. ([1929] 1957). Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. Yale University Press. Giladi, P. (2019). The Placement Problem and the Threat of Voyeurism. In P. Giladi (Ed.), Responses to Naturalism: Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism (pp. 71–97). Routledge. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. ([1944] 2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2011). Excerpts from L’Inexistence Divine. In G. Harman (Ed.), Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh University Press. Mitani, N. (2019). The World in Which Everything Is the Self: The Philosophy of the Original Image and Pan-self-ism. In J. Garfield (Ed.), Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy: Freedom from Foundations (pp. 3–31). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1963). Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Science, Perception and Reality (pp. 1–40). Routledge. Sellars, W. (1981). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Sellars, W. ([1956] 1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press.

PART VI

Scientific Naturalism and Non-­instrumental Values

CHAPTER 12

Science and the Objectification of Values: A Sellarsian Response to the Continental Critique of Science

1   Introduction In the preceding chapter, I argued that although Sellars himself does not delve into this issue, Sellarsians do have the resources to distinguish between an emancipatory and a non-emancipatory dimension of science and, hence, can contribute to discussions, most often conducted by continental philosophers, about the moral and political dimension of science or, more specifically, about the precise sense in which science can be said (or cannot be said) to contribute to the objectification of non-instrumental epistemic and moral values, central to our human flourishing. In this chapter, I shall cash out this claim through an examination of an essential tension that is expressed in our age and in Sellars’ work alike between a radically disenchanted scientific naturalism in ontology and an equally radically ‘humanistic’ account of ethics which stresses the unconditional value and non-instrumental character of the moral point of view. In previous work (Christias, 2018c), I have examined the way in which this tension finds expression in Sellars’ work at the theoretical level, between two kinds of fundamental background beliefs: (1) at the level of ontology, strictly speaking, only non-normatively characterized things, objects or processes exist, and (2) the reality of the moral point of view goes hand in hand with a commitment to an intersubjectively reasonable and universally applicable categorical imperative (normatively binding for all rational beings), which is radically non-instrumental in character. There, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_12

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I offered a proposal about how these beliefs can be reconciled and even be considered as mutually reinforcing: on the one hand, strictly speaking, the moral point of view is normatively individuated on the model of the Sellarsian categorical imperative: “I, as one of us [i.e. as a member of the community of all rational beings] shall promote the general welfare of the community” (Sellars, 1967a, pp. 221–225). According to Sellars, moral autonomy (the reality of the moral point of view) demands that we rise above our—ultimately ‘heteronomous’—individual, ‘ego-centered’ intentions, however impartially benevolent they may be, conceive ourselves as members of a most embracing community (of a ‘we’), namely, that of all rational beings, and perform actions which realize the abovementioned collective intention. On the other hand, since ultimate reality according to scientific naturalism is non-normatively structured, the only way to salvage the non-instrumentality of the moral point of view at the level of the ‘what really exists’ would be to find non-normative correlates of the non-­ instrumentality of the moral point of view. I suggested that such things exist, and I argued that they are materially realized in those conative and affective attitudes of the organism that are conducive to the promotion of certain ‘non-moral’ goods and the avoidance of certain non-moral ‘evils’. A ‘non-moral good’ is something that human beings pursue and find desirable even if no moral credit is accrued from pursuing or possessing it. Exemplary cases of non-moral goods are joy, happiness, creativity, self-­ actualization, trust, love, friendship, concern for others (sympathy), physical health and so on.1 Correspondingly, exemplary cases of non-moral ‘evils’ are suffering, cruelty, misery, resentment, illness and so on.2 Non-­moral goods contrast with ‘moral goods’ such as justice, virtue, fulfillment of duty, fairness, autonomy and so on, whose (moral) value stems from the conscientious following of certain moral rules and principles which tell us what we ‘ought’ to do irrespectively of our desires and impulses. I argued that, correlatively, the reality of the moral point of view can be cashed out ontologically in terms of its contribution to the material realization of a deep-seated human interest, which, though situated at the 1  An important distinction should be made here between what might be called ‘altruistic’ non-moral goods, such as love or concern for the well-being of others, and non-moral goods such as joy, happiness, physical health and creativity, which are not intrinsically altruistic. 2  The distinction between non-moral goods and evils roughly corresponds to Spinoza’s distinction between joyful and sad passions or Nietzsche’s distinction between active and reactive forces. Yet, what I call ‘altruistic’ moral goods (n. 1) do not seem to fit neatly into either Nietzsche’s category of active forces or to Spinoza’s joyful passions.

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non-normative level of ‘non-moral goods’, preserves, at that level—though in a different, non-moral sense—the unconditionality and non-instrumentality characteristic of the moral point of view. The deep-seated human need in question is our need “to feel loved and appreciated for our own sakes—unconditionally, and not as something turned on or off depending on what we do”3 (Sellars, 1967c, p. 232). And, very roughly, I suggested that the normatively individuated moral point of view can be reconciled with its naturalistically described ‘material basis’ if it is understood as an ‘axis of coordination’ that makes possible a self-correcting process of ever-­ more determinate and ever-more adequate descriptions and explanations of the non-moral goods that promote our collective welfare4 and shapes the correlative habits of action that realize them in individual life and our collective institutions (Christias, 2018c). Yet, I also contended that a more serious objection can be leveled against the proposed reconciliation of a radical scientific naturalist standpoint in ontology with the normative, unconditional and non-­instrumental character of the moral point of view: even if it is conceded that the above theoretical moves of ours can indeed ease the internal tension between a radically a-normative scientific materialism in ontology and the normativity, unconditionality and non-instrumentality of the moral point of view, they can do so, at best, only at the level of our theoretical commitments about the world and ourselves—that is, abstracting from issues pertaining to the way in which such purely intellectual commitments are connected 3  If we add to this formulation the view that, as a matter of empirical fact (further corroborated by scientific-image psychology, sociology and affective neuroscience) that “the ability to love others for their own sake is as essential to a full life as the need to feel ourselves love and appreciated for our own sakes” (Sellars, 1967c, p. 232), it becomes clear that the deep-­ seated human need that we identified above as the cash value (at the non-normative level) of the moral point of view can, as a matter of fact, be satisfied only if the relation between ‘altruistic’ and ‘neutral’ non-moral goods is not antagonistic but mutually reinforcing. 4  Of course, as was mentioned in Chap. 8, the precise material content of ‘collective welfare’ is itself subject to debate, constant refinement and self-correction. Consider, for example, that even if welfare is interpreted ‘objectively’ (i.e. non-hedonistically and non-eudemonistically), there is no agreed list of objective criteria (combination of ‘non-­ moral’ goods) that collectively maximize welfare for all humanity—either in ideal conditions or under the constraints of currently existing individual and social conditions. Nevertheless, we can at least say that according to this ‘objectivist’ conception, which I think would be most congenial to Sellars, our desires have an ineliminable normative component (we often appreciate that there are things we should—individually and collectively—want), while at the same time being neither completely transparent to us nor forever fixed.

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with concrete practical attitudes toward reality. But the problem of the internal tension in question reappears in a more concrete way at a deeper level. This time the tension in question can be understood as a problem between two equally fundamental but mutually incompatible practical stances or ‘orientations’ toward reality—which are, accordingly, the expression of two equally deep-seated but mutually incompatible practical needs and interests which, by scientific naturalism’s own standards, inform our ‘form of life’ (as essential constituents of non-moral goods that are conducive to our general welfare). It is to this tension, as it makes itself manifest at the practical level, where it finds expression in the form of mutually incompatible practical stances or ‘orientations’ toward reality, that I want to focus on here. It is precisely at this point that, based on a Sellarsian conception of science and scientific explanation, we can draw a distinction between emancipatory and non-emancipatory science, and suggest it as a possible way of overcoming the tension in question. Moreover, I will briefly discuss the non-­ trivial epistemic, moral and political consequences of the proposed solution to our conception of personhood. It will be argued that the best way to make sense of an eventual integration of a radical scientific naturalism with the non-instrumental character of the moral point of view is by envisaging a post-human community of persons that directly relates the world to its purposes by construing its intentions and actions in scientific terms. Here, among other things, I shall provide a framework, based on what I call a ‘democratic prometheanist’ viewpoint, that challenges deeply ingrained assumptions in the fields of ethics and bioethics to the effect that the process of disenchanting physical and human nature through techno-scientific means, practices and procedures necessarily drains persons from their freedom and autonomy, by ‘objectifying’ them, thereby making them prone to viewing others—and, ultimately, even themselves—on the model of ‘human resources’, fit to be mastered and controlled, rather than persons which ought to be treated as ends in themselves.

2   A Conflict of Naturalistic Interests: Science and the Objectification of Non-instrumental Values As was mentioned above, I take it that the internal tension between the scientific disenchanting conception of the world and the reality of the moral point of view is, at bottom, the expression of an internal tension

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which lies at a deeper (practical) level, namely, that between two equally fundamental needs-interests of our ‘form of life’ (both admitted as such by a Sellars-inspired radical scientific naturalist viewpoint): the first informs empirical inquiry and its sophisticated extension, science, while the second can be regarded as the ‘material basis’ of the moral point of view—as the latter is expressed, for example, in the second formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative, according to which we should “act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in our own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant 1785, [1993], p. 36). These (equally fundamental) needs-­ interests are the following: (1) Our need-interest to be liberated from any kind of ‘external’ limitation, constraint or obstacle (be it physical, psychical or social) which hinders the free expression of our capacities and abilities in the world. This deep-seated need-interest of our ‘form of life’ finds expression in the development and continuing sophistication of practices for describing and explaining the world and ourselves and is best satisfied by adopting a radically instrumental stance toward the world and ourselves.5 Of course, it must be immediately stressed that an essential part of this deep-seated interest of ours would be the need to identify the conditions upon which our ever-increasing freedom from constraint depends for its existence and efficaciousness. A good example here would be the growing recognition of the fragility and contingency of earth’s climate system, which serves to condition other aspirations in ways that would more adequately enable their fulfillment under the real conditions of life on earth. When I speak in what follows of a fundamental need of ours for unconditional freedom from constraint, I do not mean to deny that the freedom in question, no matter how ‘unconditional’, must be materially conditioned in some way in order for it so much as to exist as such. For example, it can be argued that a very general boundary condition that must be in place for our quest for unconditional freedom to be so much as meaningful is the always present possibility of failure of our life projects, that is, the risk that they might turn otherwise than expected (Hägglund, 2020). I 5  Recall also that, on our Sellarsian model, those needs-interests are better served by the ideal scientific image.

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just want to highlight (a) the fact that there is a deep-seated ‘existential’ interest of ours in gaining theoretical and practical control over those material conditions that hinder the optimal expression of capacities and abilities of persons and (b) the fact that this is a never-ending process of unearthing, thematizing, theoretically understanding and practically changing whatever material conditions stand in the way of our achieving this grand goal. In this process, nothing is sacred. There is no fine line between things that function as enabling conditions of human freedom and things that block its further development.6 (2) A second, equally deep-seated need-interest of humanity is that of feeling ourselves loved and appreciated for our own sake, that is, unconditionally, and not as something turned on and off depending on what we do (Sellars, 1967c, p. 232). This need-interest of our ‘form of life’, in stark contrast to the other equally fundamental one, is radically non-instrumental in character and, on our Sellarsian model, can be best served by conceiving ourselves as members of a most embracing community (of a ‘we’), namely, that of all rational beings, and by thereby performing actions which realize the collective intention (‘we’-intention) to the effect that “I, as one of us [i.e. as a member of the community of all rational beings] shall promote the general welfare of the community” (Sellars, 1967a, pp. 221–225). Now, the problem here is that it is not at all clear that the satisfaction of the latter basic need-interest of our form of life, which is best brought about by adopting an instrumental or ‘engineering’ stance toward the world and ourselves, can so much as be the kind of thing that can go hand in hand with the satisfaction of the former basic human need-interest, which is best brought about by adopting a radically non-instrumental stance toward ourselves and the world. Τhis is because the instrumental or ‘engineering’ stance toward the world and ourselves which best satisfies our need-interest for what might be called ‘unconditional freedom from constraint’ is an intrinsically objectifying stance toward the world and 6  For example, a change in the development of productive forces or in the relations of production, by changing the space of material possibilities of expressing our freedom, can transform ‘quasi-transcendental’ enabling conditions of freedom into ‘empirical’ hindrances that block its further development.

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ourselves. And this means that from this point of view both external worldly objects and subjective states are investigated from a ‘third-­ personal’ standpoint and are essentially understood as ‘untamed’ (i.e. unpredictable, anomalous) physical processes that ought to be mastered and controlled until their ‘behavior’ becomes fully predictable (as this is precisely our way to eliminate our dependence on them). But this essentially instrumental stance, which treats the world and ourselves as natural or human resources to be mastered and controlled and hence as means toward an external end, seems to be directly opposed to the non-­ objectifying, non-instrumental stance that best satisfies the other, equally fundamental need of ours, namely, our need for unconditional love and appreciation. Further, if we, plausibly, take it that the practical stance we take toward ‘things’ (nature, ourselves, others) directly affects the way we experience those things, it seems to follow that adopting an instrumental stance toward things necessarily occludes some experiential aspects of the latter, namely, those that are disclosed from a non-instrumental point of view. And does this not imply that taking the ‘instrumental stance’ toward nature, ourselves and others would necessarily result in a very serious impoverishment of our experience of nature, ourselves and others? (see, e.g. Horkeimer & Adorno, 1944 [2002]; Heidegger, 1949 [2012]; Marcuse, 1964 [2013]).

3  Response: Distinguishing Between Emancipatory and Non-emancipatory Dimensions of ‘Disenchanted Reason’ Now, a first very general response to the above serious objection, which was also briefly mentioned in Chap. 4, could be that an intrinsically instrumental and objectifying stance toward the world and ourselves need not necessarily go hand in hand with a coercive attitude toward natural objects, ourselves or other human beings and hence does not necessarily oppress non-instrumental facets of our lived experience of the latter. Accordingly, we can distinguish between what we might call an emancipatory (beneficial, non-coercive, liberating) and a non-emancipatory (detrimental, coercive) dimension of our intrinsically instrumental or objectifying stance toward the world and ourselves and argue that it is only in its latter, non-­ emancipatory dimension that our instrumental and objectifying stance toward reality is directly opposed to the non-objectifying, non-instrumental

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stance that best satisfies our fundamental need for unconditional love and appreciation (see also Chap. 11). Of course, it can be argued, for example, by appeal to actual historical experience, that those dimensions of ‘disenchanting reason’ (i.e. of our taking an increasingly objectifying stance toward the world and ourselves), even if they can and should be methodologically distinguished, can hardly be disentangled in actual practice. For example, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that while the objectifying and rationalizing element of the cultural process of disenchantment (which promised to increase human freedom and well-being as a result of controlling external and human nature) was in a sense actually emancipatory, as the completely formal character of the objectifying and rationalizing element of this disenchanting process makes reason indifferent to the ‘qualitatively’ justified social injustices of pre-modern societies, it also yields non-emancipatory results, to the extent to which, as ‘internalized domination’, socially expressed in the ‘alienating’, reified form of our modern social institutions, it generates new and more sophisticated forms of self-­ oppression and impoverishment of experience: the repression of joyful, libidinal and creative dimension of our affective experience for the sake of compulsive productivity7 (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944 [2002], pp. 1–35, 79–80). This may well be in the right direction as a descriptive-explanatory sociological account of the process of disenchantment by science, an account that Sellars lacks, but is not theoretically precluded from embracing (see Chap. 11). But does this historical-sociological description-explanation of the disenchanting process preclude the normative distinction between the emancipatory and non-emancipatory dimensions of disenchantment and science? And if not, do they preclude its potential realization in reality? Is it not at least conceivable that we could eventually succeed, if not in completely disentangling the dimensions in question, at least in maximizing the non-coercive, emancipatory dimension of (intrinsically objectifying) theoretical rationality while at the same time minimizing its coercive, non-­ emancipatory dimension? Perhaps, historically sedimented power-relations expressed in economy, politics and having a detrimental reifying and impoverishing effect at the level of experience, judgment, belief and action preclude the realization of this possibility ‘here and now’ or in the 7  Adorno nicely summarizes this view as the paradox that it is progress itself that inhibits progress (Adorno, 2006, p. 147). See also Marcuse (1969).

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foreseeable future. But are those power-relations that directly or indirectly instrumentalize our life and objectify our experience, thinking and action in an oppressive and impoverishing manner, necessary structures of the universe or immutable laws of the development of society? Would this not be an expression of the myth of the Given in one of its most basic forms (which, interestingly, connects it with, ideology critique)? I think the answer is clear enough: however deeply entrenched and sedimented in society, these relations of social domination and their objectifying distortive, oppressive and impoverishing features are, at bottom, historically contingent.8 Thus, I conclude that if such a maximization of the emancipatory dimension and correlative minimization of the non-emancipatory dimension of scientific practice is at least conceptually possible, it would render conceivable—even if only as a regulative ideal—the vision of an eventual reconciliation between our need for unconditional freedom from constraint and our need for unconditional love and appreciation. Yet, it is obvious that even if the above are in the right direction, they can be properly cashed out only if we first explicate what could possibly count as an ‘emancipatory’ or ‘non-emancipatory’ use of ‘third-personal’ scientific-style hypothetical explanations. This will be the subject of the next section.

8  Adorno himself seems sensitive to the historically contingent status of the intertwinement of emancipatory and oppressive dimensions of progress through disenchantment. For example, he says that “without society the notion of progress would be completely empty; all its elements are abstracted from society. If society had not passed from a hunting and gathering horde to agriculture, from slavery to the formal freedom of subjects, from the fear of demons to reason, from deprivation to provisions against epidemics and famine and to the overall improvement of living conditions, if one thus sought more philosophico to keep the idea of progress pure, say, to spin it out of the essence of time, then it would not have any content at all” (Adorno, 2001, p. 148). Moreover, while, according to Adorno, real progress would ultimately demand the reconciliation of humanity with nature, this, as he recognizes, is not a matter of resonating with the ‘harmonious rhythms’ of nature as if the latter were free of domination, but of achieving a society in which the domination of inner and outer nature would no longer be a condition of existence (see also Brassier, 2021).

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4   A Sellars-Inspired Account of the ‘Emancipatory’ and ‘Non-emancipatory’ Dimensions of Scientific-Explanatory Reason I suggested above that an intrinsically objectifying stance toward the world and ourselves need not necessarily go hand in hand with a coercive attitude toward natural objects and ourselves. I also proposed that, on this basis, we can distinguish between an ‘emancipatory’ and a ‘non-­ emancipatory’ dimension of our intrinsically instrumental or objectifying stance toward the world and argue that it is only in its latter, non-­ emancipatory dimension that our objectifying stance toward reality is directly opposed to the non-objectifying stance that best satisfies our fundamental need for unconditional love and appreciation (i.e. the ‘material basis’ of the moral point of view). However, the discussion was conducted at a very high level of abstraction, without further explicating what could count as an ‘emancipatory’ or ‘non-emancipatory’ dimension or use of scientific-style hypothetical explanations. And until we put some flesh on the bare bones of the abstract possibility of drawing the distinction in question, the justification for the claims of Sect. 2 would itself be too abstract to be taken seriously. In what follows I shall attempt to make the abovementioned distinction between a ‘beneficial’ and a ‘detrimental’ use of reason more concrete. I will take as my point of departure the case of ‘theoretical’ reason (the ‘theoretical stance’ toward ourselves and the world) as the latter is expressed in our descriptive and explanatory practices—which, as we saw, are themselves informed by our need for unconditional freedom from constraints. In what sense can it be suggested that there is indeed a distinction there to be drawn between an ‘emancipatory’ and a ‘non-­emancipatory’ use of third-personal scientific-style hypothetical explanations? Let me just state here that the account to be given below is a Sellars-­ inspired one—though not one Sellars ever explicitly endorsed. It is heavily indebted to Sellars’ version of scientific realism developed in Chap. 3 and it is premised on a view developed in Chap. 5, namely, that the best paradigm of an overarching scientific-style explanation capable of unifying diverse scientific viewpoints of humanity-in-the-world (physical, biological, psychological, social), while simultaneously accounting for their different explanatory procedures, is that of the evolutionary selectional model of explanation.

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4.1   The Continental Critique of Science and Its Tacit Presuppositions Before presenting our Sellars-inspired account for justifying the existence of an emancipatory dimension of scientific hypothetical explanations, it would be useful, first, to state the opposing view, according to which the ‘inherently disenchanting’ or ‘objectifying’ explanations in question necessarily result in an impoverishment or ‘distortion’ of our lived experience. According to this line of thought, scientific explanations have certain features which make them constitutively incapable of capturing essential features of the world or human experience, such as the qualitative particularity of sensory and affective experience, the qualitative and particulate character of physical objects and the essential value-ladenness of human perception, thought and action. Some of the most important ‘experience-distorting’ features of scientific explanation are the following: scientific explanations are inherently third-personal, their content is essentially non-normative and impersonal, they are objectifying, they subsume particular features of experience under necessary universal causal laws and so on. Moreover, proponents of this view maintain that there is a necessary connection between our disenchanted ‘theoretical’-scientific stance toward the world and ourselves and a ‘dominating’ practical orientation toward nature and ourselves. This dominating attitude is theoretically distorting and practically detrimental (non-emancipatory) in the following way: as was mentioned above, in scientific-style hypothetical explanations the qualitative particularity of human sensibility and of physical objects as well as the essential value-ladenness and first-personal (‘expressive’) character of human perception, thought and action are essentially lost from view. But, precisely due to this fact, our understanding of nature is gradually transformed in that the latter is ‘reduced’ to a set of impersonally perceived ‘natural resources’. Nature, including human nature, is gradually understood, from an essentially detached point of view, as an undifferentiated substratum which should be mastered and controlled. Thus, this process also transforms our understanding of ourselves: we begin to view others, and eventually ourselves, more on the model of ‘human resources’, fit to be mastered and controlled, rather than persons who ought to be treated as ‘ends in themselves’ (see, e.g. Bilgrami, 2010, pp. 38–45; Horkeimer & Adorno, 1944 [2002]; Heidegger, 1949 [2012]; Habermas, 1970). Let me briefly mention before attempting to respond to the above critique of science and scientific explanation that, in what follows, I will be

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concerned with internal reasons—belonging to very logic of scientific explanation—for thinking that science distorts the particularity and wealth of human experience, and not with the external question about whether other factors (political, economic, psychological), transposed into scientific practice might make it more prone to having this distortive effect. I believe that there is indeed such an influence and also that external questions cannot be completely insulated from internal ones (see, e.g. my critique of Sellars in Chap. 11, as well as Sect. 2 above). However distinguishable, scientific practice is inseparable from other domains of civilization. Yet, it is distinguishable, it does have a ‘relative autonomy’, and what concerns me here is views (springing mostly from continental phenomenology and Frankfurt school critical theory) that locate this distortive effect in the very nature of scientific practice (or hold the essentially similar view to the effect that political, economic factors and social power-relations affect the very epistemic (descriptive-explanatory) dimension of science at its very core). With that proviso in mind, my response to the above ‘continental’ critique of science would proceed as follows: First, I agree that science is indeed incapable of capturing the normative character of human sensibility, thought and action in a certain (‘semantically irreducible’) sense of the term in which normativity is something that can only characterize and be attributed to the behavior of persons. But, as we saw in Chap. 8, the semantic irreducibility of the normative to the non-­ normative does not pose any insurmountable problems for the project of reconciling our manifest conception of ourselves-in-the-world with a scientific conception of the world and ourselves. Yet, at the same time, I take it that the scientific image can indeed capture the normative character of human sensibility (sensory and affective experience), thought and action, in another sense of the term in which normativity is understood in terms of conduciveness of function of our bodily organs or metabolic processes to the well-being (or flourishing) of an organism within its environment (see Sect. 1). In this sense science is, in principle, perfectly capable of capturing and specifying, for example, the exact blend, content and structure of the non-moral goods that are in fact conducive to our individual and collective general welfare. Moreover, I agree (and I take it that Sellars would also agree) that on a certain understanding about what scientific explanation amounts to, science would indeed be (or is) constitutively incapable of capturing the qualitative particularity of sensory and affective experience. And it is

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precisely in this sense, I contend, that scientific explanation would necessarily be an expression of a theoretically distorting and practically detrimental dimension of ‘disenchanting’ reason. According to our Sellars-inspired account, this would be the case if the following views about science in general and scientific explanation in particular were correct: (1) The view according to which scientific explanation is, at bottom, a relation of deductive entailment between particular observable facts (explanandum), middle-level empirical generalizations and higher-level theoretical generalizations (universal laws), where particular facts are explained by empirical generalizations, and the latter are in turn explained by higher-level theoretical generalizations. According to this line of thought, which Sellars aptly calls ‘the layer-cake picture of theoretical explanation’, scientific theoretical posits turn out to be calculational devices of merely instrumental or pragmatic value (for the systematization of observable phenomena) and are essentially abstractions whose meaning, in the last analysis, is essentially connected to a more originary and self-contained stratum of experience, namely, the concrete experiential phenomena of the ‘lifeworld’ (see Chap. 3 for a development and critique of this view). Note that this picture of scientific explanation does not only appear in the works of logical positivists and empiricists, but is also adopted by many philosophers belonging to the continental tradition such as phenomenologists, existentialists, critical theorists, structuralists and post-structuralists. (2) The view (intimately related to (1)) that scientific explanation is not conceptually distinct from prediction and is, at bottom, deductive and ‘calculative’ in nature, essentially consisting in mathematical equations of fundamental physics—which are ideally suited for accurately predicting the course of future events. Interestingly, this view explains why one might find the abovementioned ‘layer-cake’ picture of scientific explanation eminently plausible, that is, why one might construe the theoretical terms used in scientific explanations as mere calculational devices useful for practical purposes (e.g. the systematization and prediction of observable phenomena) which, however, have no ontological import. (3) The ‘reductive physicalist’ view—intimately related to (1) and (2)—according to which an explanation of a particular observable

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phenomenon is properly scientific (legitimate) only if it can be reduced to explanations admitted in current mathematical physics, that is, only if the particular phenomenon in question is understood as a manifestation of universal, necessary and timeless natural laws which are essentially expressed in the language of pure mathematics. (4) A conception of natural science, widespread among scientists and philosophers of science alike, according to which the physical world is a ‘causally closed’ order under exclusively mechanistic laws and principles. That is to say, according to this line of thought, which Sellars himself called ‘the scientific ideology of the autonomy of the mechanical’ (Sellars, 1981a III §109), the realm of nature (what really exists in the sense of being capable to act and to be acted upon) is confined to that which can be described and explained mechanistically—that is, at best, to the properties and relations of non-sentient beings. Notice also that if we combine this widespread ‘scientific ideology’ of the ‘autonomy of the mechanical’ with the second or the first view above, namely, with the view that scientific explanation is, at bottom, ‘calculational’ or deductive (a relation of deductive entailment between explanandum and explanans) and ‘subsumptive’ (it subsums particular, contingent, experiential ‘lifeworld’ phenomena to universal, necessary, timeless laws and principles), then it is eminently plausible to conclude that science, in this sense, can ‘explain’ the qualitative particularity of our sensory and affective experience only by explaining it away. If this were the correct view about what science and scientific explanation really come down to, then it would indeed be the case that the adoption of the scientific worldview in practice as the measure of what really exists could only lead to a distortion and impoverishment of our lived experience—including, obviously, our experience of non-moral goods and evils (since they are an essential part of our affective experience). Our scientific conceptualization of the non-moral goods and evils in question, by entailing a practically objectifying and instrumental stance toward the experiential affective contents it attempts to understand, would ineradicably distort the latter, no matter how refined, holistic and sophisticated the explanatory framework for subsuming those experiences might turn out to be. An example of such an objectionable move here could be the reduction of the qualitative intensity of ‘joyful passions’ to quantitatively

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measured degrees of utilitarian ‘happiness’ or the understanding of the quest for self-actualization in terms of ready-made life-coaching technics currently thriving in the self-help industry. 4.2   Do Scientific Explanations Necessarily Distort Our Lived Experience? However, I contend that even if it is indeed true that some of the views discussed above (in particular, (2), (3) and (4)) do characterize at least part of current scientific practice, and are even present in philosophical systematizations of the latter, it is also the case that neither of these views about science or scientific explanation captures elements and features that are essential to science and scientific explanation. And, more importantly, neither of these views need necessarily characterize the ‘ideal’ scientific image as such (which, after Sellars, we might call ‘Peircean’ scientific image). More specifically, a Sellars-inspired account of how science (in the sense of the ideal scientific image) and scientific explanation works would reject all four views developed above as follows: (1) The ‘layer-cake’ picture of theoretical explanation should be rejected because (a) explanation must not be equated with derivation and (b) theories do not explain the empirical generalizations of the ‘lifeworld’. In fact, they explain directly why the particular observable entities of the ‘lifeworld’ behave the way they do and obey the empirical laws they do, to the extent that they do obey those laws. Furthermore, as we saw in Chap. 3, the unobservable entities postulated by theory are indispensable because they explain why ‘lifeworldly’ observational generalizations are occasionally violated in an unpredictable, incomprehensible manner—that is, they explain why entities at the observational level do not behave as they are expected to do if their behavior had indeed been governed by the observational generalizations in question. The ‘picture of levels’ cannot accommodate the fact that empirical generalizations formulated at the ‘lifeworld’ level (of ‘macro-objects’) are unstable, that is, subject to sustainedly incomprehensible observationally unpredicted variation (Sellars, 1961). Hence, as was mentioned above, theories explain directly why the particular ‘lifeworldly’ entities obey the empirical laws they do, to the extent that they do,

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and, more importantly, why the observational generalizations involved are occasionally violated in a way that makes them essentially unstable, non-lawful. Following Sellars, it can be suggested that theories explain the behavior of the observable phenomena by changing the meaning of the observable ‘lifeworldly’ phenomena that obey the empirical generalizations in question and by ultimately identifying those phenomena with unobservable phenomena posited by the theory. It is because the ‘lifeworldly’ entities which obey the observational generalization in question really are unobservable entities with unobservable properties as described by the theory that explains why those observational generalizations are unstable, discontinuous and hold only within certain boundary conditions if they are understood as belonging in the observational framework of the ‘lifeworld’ (Sellars, 1961, §41–52; Rosenberg, 2007). (2) According to our Sellars-inspired account, scientific explanation (a) cannot be conceptually identified with prediction and (b) is not, at bottom, ‘calculative’ in nature. That is, it does not essentially consist in mathematical equations of fundamental physics. Regarding (a) it can be argued that prediction cannot be conceptually equated with causal explanation because the latter is essentially counterfactually robust—unlike the former which can, in principle, be accurate and successful without any support from counterfactually robust causal explanations. However, it must be also stressed that there is one special kind of prediction that is indeed conceptually connected with scientific causal explanation, namely, prediction of novel phenomena. That is, for an explanation to be properly scientific (i.e. for it to have empirical content) it must not only explain the apparent explanatory success and the explanatory failures of predecessor explanatory theories, but also (have the potential to) make novel predictions. That is, it must be able to identify novel phenomena (as well as new kinds of experiments and instruments to use in our observations) whose existence can subsequently be confirmed or disproved. Yet, note also, importantly, that a scientific-explanatory theory is capable of formulating new empirical generalizations, that is, making novel predictions (incapable of being anticipated and conceptualized as such within the ‘lifeworld’), just because, as was mentioned in point (1) above, it is in a position to restore the lawful character of unstable,

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‘anomalous’ ‘lifeworldly’ generalizations only through the essential use of terms about unobservable entities. As for point (b), it can be argued that while mathematical equations are an indispensable tool of scientific explanation (at least in the case of fundamental physics), this indispensability need not be understood as having direct ontological implications. That is, scientific explanation need not be understood as being mathematical in content. Otherwise, we would be committed to the existence of causally efficacious universals, that is, essentially abstract entities or structures deprived of any concrete, material, qualitative, particulate content, which nevertheless produce real causal changes in the world. Moreover, relatedly, an ontology deprived of content of this (qualitative, particulate) kind (1) would not have the resources to account for the very possibility of qualitative content, and (2) it would not be in a position to explain the way we come to know truths about the mathematical abstract entities in question except by appeal to some kind of rationalist or phenomenological Given, such as the Husserlian Wesensschau (‘intuition of essences’). However ‘mathematical’ the form of explanations of the ideal scientific image may be, their content can—and indeed must—be about concrete, finite, dynamic, qualitatively individuated particulars (which need not even be thing—or object-like). I think that, currently, dynamic systems theory might be considered as one such scientific framework which can successfully combine mathematical form (attractors, phase-spaces, differential equations) and concrete-particulate physical content (process-like historically evolving structures) in an explanatorily unified manner that can cover physical, biological and social phenomena, without sacrificing their concrete nature and dynamically evolving character. (3) We need not accept the (highly influential) version of the ‘reductive physicalist’ view, modeled off Newtonian physics, according to which an explanation of a particular observable phenomenon is properly scientific only if the particular phenomenon in question is understood as a manifestation of universal, necessary and timeless natural laws expressed in the language of pure mathematics. It can be proposed, instead, that our best model of (ideal) scientific explanation would be the Darwinian one. Evolutionary explanations differ from Newtonian ones, in that, unlike the latter which explain a phenomenon by showing why what actually happened had to happen that way (i.e. why what is actual is necessary), Darwinian

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explanations explain contingent happenings by displaying the conditions under which they can be seen to have been probable. In this way, Darwinian explanations are able to explain the existence and persistence of a particular phenomenon even if the latter is recognized as being ultimately contingent and time-bound—and hence, not just a manifestation of universal, necessary and timeless natural laws. As we saw in Chap. 3, Darwinian explanations make intelligible the contingent emergence of collective order from individual randomness by providing concrete, situated historical narratives of local, contingent, mutable practical reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats (Brandom, 2011, pp. 36–37). In their most general form, they do this by construing worldly events in general as processes of adaptation in which interaction with the environment (other processes) selects (preserves and reproduces) some elements, while eliminating others. This insight is encapsulated in the concept of (evolved) habit, which can be used to explain not only evolution at the level of species, but also, importantly, learning processes at the level of individual: the latter is also understood as the evolution-by-selection of a population of habits. In this way, even first-personal practical knowledge or experience (know-how) at the level of individual can be understood in terms of flexible adaptive habits that have occurred in a specific environment through evolution-by-selection. And the same goes for theoretical knowledge: it can be understood in terms of adaptive inferential habits occurring and sustained in an environment where practical know-how ceases to be smooth and skillful coping breaks down. Hence, in effect, Darwinian explanations make possible the naturalistic construal of a cognitive continuum that runs from the skillful coping of the competent predator, through the practical intelligence of primitive hominids, to the traditional practices and common sense of civilized humans, all the way to the most sophisticated theorizing of contemporary scientists. Moreover, this evolutionary selectional model of explanation can be generalized to inorganic nature: what (under the spell of Newtonian models of explanation) we take to be eternal, immutable, necessary, universal laws of nature, can be understood as themselves, in the broadest sense ‘habits’ (sufficiently stable patterns/regularities) of the universe—a kind of order that has arisen contingently by a selectional-­ adaptational process operating on a population of such regularities,

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which in turn provides the dynamic habitat to which all must collectively adapt.9 In this way, the evolutionary selectional model of explanation unifies our understanding of nature, experience and culture since all of them are to be understood in terms of the processes by which relatively stable constellations of habits arise and sustain themselves through their interactions with an environment that includes a population of competing habits. (4) We need not accept what Sellars calls ‘the scientific ideology of the autonomy of the mechanical’, that is, the view according to which the physical world is a ‘causally closed’ system of substances having attributes, conforming to laws of nature, and interacting with other substances, where this causal interaction is understood in exclusively mechanical terms (under the spell of what Sellars calls ‘the impact paradigm of causation’). We also need not accept that the ideal scientific image ought to be committed to a substance ontology (the corollary to the ‘ideology of the autonomy of the mechanical’), that is, to the view that, at bottom, what really exists, is objects, understood as discreet substances which endure through time, interact with other substances, and have essential and accidental (causal and dispositional) properties. The regulative/‘coordinating’ role of those two metaphysical views (which are widespread among scientists and philosophers of science alike) in empirical inquiry has to be questioned if we are to accommodate the qualitative particularity and phenomenal character of sensory and affective experiences of sentient beings. And there is nothing in the very nature of scientific explanation that prevents a more developed version of the scientific image from discarding both those metaphysical assumptions. Note also that the adoption of a Darwinian model of scientific explanation coupled with a resolute rejection of the ideology of the ‘autonomy of the mechanical’ and of a substance-attribute ontology (which stand behind the Newtonian ‘deductive-necessitarian’ model of explanation) makes a lot more sense as an explanatory model of the ideal scientific image if we realize that when we speak of the ‘scientific image’ in this context we are not concerned with the ‘scientific image’ in general, but with the (ideal) 9  Note that, from this point of view, the Newtonian model of scientific explanation appears as a special, limiting case of the Darwinian model.

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scientific image of humanity in particular, that is, with the human being as it appears to the (ideal) theoretical physicist, the biochemist, the neurophysiologist, the evolutionary biologist, the anthropologist, the psychologist, the social scientist and so on, where all these viewpoints are to be contrasted with humanity as it appears to itself from the standpoint of sophisticated common sense (i.e. of an ideally developed ‘manifest image’). Ideally, all those particular scientific standpoints on man-in-the-world can be integrated in a single complex and stratified image of humanity-in-the-­ world while simultaneously preserving a relative explanatory autonomy as special sciences with a specific subject-matter. And, according to our Sellars-inspired account, a glimpse of this ideal explanatory integration can be offered ‘here and now’ precisely by the Darwinian model of explanation, according to which scientific explanations are essentially historically informed and oriented, non-object-bound, dynamic (non-mechanical) and situated (i.e. they do not explain by subsuming particular events under eternal, necessary laws of nature). This Darwinian mode of scientific intelligibility, being patently radically different from the Galilean-Newtonian model of scientific intelligibility (tacitly presupposed by many analytic (logical positivists, ordinary language philosophers) and continental philosophers (phenomenologists, existentialists, post-structuralists) alike), cannot be light-heartedly dismissed as distorting or impoverishing our lived experience in its descriptive-­ explanatory dimension, just because it is essentially ‘third-personal’ or ‘objectifying’. And this is because while evolutionary explanations are indeed objectifying (they ‘decontextualize’ our lifeworldly experience, as all explanations do), they are so not by subsuming particular facts under necessary laws of nature, or by being ‘calculative’, ‘deductive’ and ‘mechanical’, but by being historically informed and oriented, situated, non-object-bound and dynamic. Moreover, the fact that scientific explanation would indeed reconceptualize or even recategorize our ‘lifeworldly’ (perceptual, affective, practical) experience, transforming it, for example, into an experience that essentially understands itself on the model of Darwinianly shaped dynamic attractors, does not at all entail that the experience in question would thereby be distorted or impoverished. This would follow only if one tacitly endorses the ‘layer-cake’ picture of scientific explanation mentioned above, according to which our lifeworldly experiences form an autonomous stratum of self-authenticating ‘intuitive’ descriptions and explanations which cannot be challenged by scientific

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counterpart, categorially different, ‘non-intuitive’ descriptions and explanations. Now, in spite of the reasons offered above for doubting the supposed necessary link between objectifying and distorting effects on experience by attempts to scientifically explain it, one might still wonder how it is so much as possible for the qualitative particularity of the world to be captured by the ideal evolutionary explanations of our Sellars-inspired ideal scientific image, especially if this qualitative particularity is something that we are, in some sense, aware of (think, e.g. of our sensory and affective states and processes). How is it even possible that the qualitative particularity of our own conscious states be more adequately understood or explained from a third-personal scientific—or, in general, hypothetical—point of view? Why does it not suffice for this purpose the implementation of an essentially ‘first-personal’ and purely descriptive investigation or point of view—be it transcendental, phenomenological, hermeneutical, existential or what have you? A first answer here would be that the states in question are essentially phenomenologically opaque or ‘dark’ (Roden, 2013). That is to say, the qualitative content and structure of our sensory and affective states is not phenomenologically accessible—for example, by some kind of ‘eidetic intuition’—at the level of the self (self-consciousness). The content and structure in question are instead to be found at a level where the experiential states in question are not transparent and should not be understood as properties that ‘belong’ to a subject intentionally ‘directed’ toward an independent world. In this way, the idea that the qualitative and particulate character of sensory and affective fields can be properly understood only with the aid of ‘third-personal’, hypothetical (philosophical and scientific) conceptual tools, which precisely abstract from what is presented in ‘phenomenological intuition’, far from being absurd, can well be an indispensable tool in our attempt to properly understand the categorial nature of our own innermost sensory and affective states and processes. One last remark is here in order: as we saw in Chap. 4, one very general (Heideggerian) objection about the capacity of science to capture the ‘truth’ about the world and human experience was that the objectifying character of scientific explanation by necessarily decontextualizing and idealizing worldly entities ‘conceals’ or closes off world-disclosing possibilities, thereby impoverishing our experience. But, as emphasized by American pragmatism, the theoretical-explanatory-scientific stance toward the world and ourselves and the ‘objectifying’ attitude involved in it is not merely a spectatorial, passive and abstractive one, but also, at the same

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time, it is the expression of a particular kind of engaged skillful coping with the environment. Indeed, it can be argued that the very raison d’être of theoretical-explanatory concepts, laws and principles is that they be realized or embodied in carefully designed experimental devices through which we deliberately intervene in reality at the practical-material level (thereby speeding-up the process of our continuing effort to better ‘adjust’ to the environment which already takes place—in a less systematic way—in the context of the ordinary lifeworld). This active, intervening dimension of our scientific practices was also emphasized by the late Heidegger, but with purely negative overtones: as we saw, for Heidegger, contemporary techno-science reveals things to us as ‘standing reserve’, in the sense that everything is imposed upon or ‘challenged’ to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use (Heidegger, 1993). But, as has been stressed by pragmatic naturalists (Ihde, 2010; Rouse, 2015), this actively engaged, systematically intervening, practical dimension of science also discloses a whole world of novel entities, relations and processes which are ‘invisible’ or, at best, phenomenologically opaque from the standpoint of the (descriptive-explanatory resources of the) ordinary lifeworld. Indeed, science, as embodied technology, by enframing worldly entities does not only ‘conceal’ or close off possibilities, but also thereby opens up novel hitherto unforeseen spaces of possibilities for the efficient and creative expression of our powers to perceive, think and act.10 Arguably, we are often blind to this novel potential in periods of revolutionary changes in science and technology, because we tend to think of the science and technology we are already accustomed to in the context of our present lifeworld as exemplary of rationality and ‘authentic’ expression or communication. And, correlatively, we tend to describe novel techno-­ scientific developments (e.g. the digital revolution) as less rational, much less likely to succeed in expressing and communicating ‘authentic’ ideas (or the ‘authentic’ self) and even as potentially compromising our very core features of humanity (dignity, authenticity, etc.). But, as Nehamas succinctly puts it in the context of a discussion of the supposed 10  All this becomes clear if we remind ourselves that even writing, by involving various kinds of objectifications, ‘freezings’, calculative-manipulative and abstractive ‘theoretical-­ explanatory attitudes’ over oral speech, is also a culturally invented ‘proto-scientific’ technology, no less (initially) ‘present-at-hand’, alienating and experientially impoverishing than any other. See also Chap. 4.

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authenticity and reliability of speech over (the then newly formed) writing technologies in Plato’s Phaedrus: “What is often true in such discussions is that we make an unfair comparison: we judge the new medium according to its ability to communicate the type of ideas for which the older one had been designed, and it is no surprise that it fails in that regard. Moreover, we tend to identify the ideas suited to the old medium and the manner in which that medium communicates them with what is rational. Accordingly, even if the new medium is sometimes judged to be successful in communicating its own ideas by its own methods, we are tempted to consider these ideas at best as inferior to the former, at worst as irrational and harmful” (Nehamas, 1995, p. 346). Thus, one reason why we are often under the illusion of the inferiority or potential harmful nature of novel techno-­ scientific developments is that we judge the latter with concepts that are ill-suited for this purpose. Lacking the concepts to adequately understand the novel techno-scientific realities and potentials,11 we project to the latter the spontaneous understanding of science and technology that we have learned in our ‘mother’s knee’.12 11  This phenomenon is readily understood if we recall that concepts are tools that function as rules for guiding behavior by making salient certain patterns and possibilities of experience (see Chap. 5). They are not psychical powers (mental images, states) directly illuminated by the essential structures of reality that give transparent categorial access to the world that created them but have evolved for purposes of collective coordination within certain (unpredictable, hostile) environments. Thus, it is only to be expected that concepts, being formulated under pragmatic pressures and thus largely expressive of a certain pragmatically mediated and historically situated worldview, cannot provide adequate ‘answers’ (subsumption of novel phenomena under them) for every possible future ‘questions’ (courses of future experience). They are multi-purpose ‘linguistic virtual technologies’ which, as any other, must be constantly modified and updated if they want to be useful and relevant under continuously changing circumstances. 12  The most recent instance of this phenomenon is the negative comparison of the visual media, specifically television, to writing in the twentieth century or of the social media to visual media in the twenty-first century. As Nehamas observes (1995), what is particularly ironic in this regard is that almost every argument Plato gave in the Phaedrus in favor of speech and against writing was given in the twentieth century in favor of writing against television (and, I would add, in the 21st, in favor of traditional visual media over contemporary social media). This suggests that what matters in each specific case is not the pair of media being compared, but the fact that, having already accepted one medium as an effective and rational method of communication, we are bound to consider the other ineffective and unreasonable. We thus put the other medium at an inherent disadvantage from the very beginning, and we are prevented from taking its own claims seriously (Nehamas, 1995, p. 347).

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To recapitulate, I think that, as the arguments of this section suggest, the intrinsically objectifying or ‘decontextualizing’ character of explanatory practices in general, and of evolutionary explanations in particular, does not, as such, necessarily distort the qualitative particularity of external objects or of sensory and affective experience. Neither does it thereby necessarily result in an impoverishment of our ‘lived’ experience. Note that this is compatible with the view that processes of social reification, enhanced by the capitalist system of production-distribution of socially significant goods, can have a distortive effect in scientific practice by gradually forcing scientific instrumentalities at work in scientific theory, experimental practice and general ideology to take the form of a dominating or coercive (as opposed to liberating) attitude to nature, ourselves and others. But this is at most a tendency or a potential of scientific instrumentalities, not a necessary feature of the ‘essence’ of scientific enterprise. And, as I argued above, (a) if scientific explanation is purged of its deductive, subsumptive, mechanical, causally closed understanding of nature and humanity based on universal, necessary and timeless natural laws and a substance-attribute static ontology, and instead embraces a dynamic, historically oriented, context-bound and essentially evolutionary model based on a process ontology, and (b) if science and its ‘enframings’ or ‘objectifications’ are understood in pragmatic terms as tools of ‘existential orientation’ that do not wear their essence on their sleeves, then the above pathologizing tendencies of our civilization as a whole can be mitigated or at least not seen as an essential feature of science. In this sense, it can be argued that at least this particular objectifying explanatory stance toward reality and ourselves, namely, the ‘evolutionary’ stance, may well be compatible with—that is, not directly opposed to—the non-objectifying, non-­ instrumental stance that best satisfies our fundamental need for unconditional love and appreciation. 4.3   Can Science by Emancipatory? Sellars contra Habermas Finally, it is instructive to compare and contrast our Sellars-inspired account of how scientific reason can be compatible with the moral point of view and the deep-seated needs that motivate the latter, with another such account, that of Habermas (1970), who also attempts to respond to a similar worry, expressed in Marcuse (1964), about the potential non-­ emancipatory character of natural scientific understanding.

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Marcuse articulates this non-emancipatory dimension of science in the following characteristic passage: “The principles of modern science were a priori structured in such a way that they could serve as conceptual instruments for a universe of self-propelling, productive control; theoretical operationalism came to correspond to practical operationalism. The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective domination of nature thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the ever-more-effective domination of man by man through the domination of nature. Theoretical reason, remaining pure and neutral, entered into the service of practical reason. The merger proved beneficial to both. Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture” (Marcuse 1964, p. 158). Interestingly, Marcuse believes that this kind of instrumental scientific rationality directed toward domination is contingent and thus changeable. A new type of instrumental reason, following the abolition of class society and its correlative performance principle, would generate a new science and new technological designs (modeled on aesthetic practices) which would place us in harmony with nature rather than in conflict with it. Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through realizing nature’s inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste in the interest of narrow short-term goals such as power and profit (see also Feenberg, 1996). Despite its obvious practical implausibility and its controversial metaphysics of a supposed inherently teleological nature which ‘prefers’ life to death and ‘strives’ to realize its inherently life-­ enhancing potentialities (Marcuse, 1969), Marcuse’s utopian sketch of a reconciliation between science and nature has the merit of showing that the ‘essence’ of science and technology can change (a view that, as we shall see, Habermas rejects). However, I think that Marcuse’s view to the effect that modern science in its theoretical dimension is a priori structured (geared toward ‘productive control’) to serve the power-interests of the ruling capitalist elite is, at best, overstated. Now, Habermas responds to Marcuse’s utopian vision of a reconciliation between science, art and nature and his subordination of science and technology to ideology, by (correctly) pointing out the relative autonomy of science from vested interests or ideology. But Habermas’ acceptance of the relative autonomy of science explicitly turns on an unacceptable instrumentalist conception of scientific reason, in which the potentially emancipatory dimension of the latter is ruled out by definition. Specifically, he

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holds that contemporary science, being itself a major force of production, and entangled with technology in a mutually reinforcing feedback relation, effectively produces ‘technocratic consciousness’, which gradually eliminates the distinction between the practical (e.g. emancipatory transformations of the institutional framework) and the technical (progress in systems of instrumental purposive-rational action) and makes the practical interest in intersubjective communication free of domination disappear behind the interest in the expansion of our power of technical control (Habermas, 1970, pp.  256–259). But because Habermas also wants to make room for ‘critical emancipatory reason’ and secure the unconditionality of the moral point of view, he arrives at the—problematic—conclusion to the effect that this emancipatory dimension of theoretical reason and the moral point of view requires a radically non-naturalistic conception of humanity as fundamentally motivated by ‘transcendental interests’. Note, for example, that, according to Habermas, our ‘transcendental interest’ in public intersubjective communication free of domination (in Sellarsian language, for a ‘space of reasons’ undistorted by instrumental ‘means-ends’ reasoning) is conceived as a feature of the lifeworld that is completely disconnected from any empirically and naturalistically grounded interest as well as from any interest that informs scientific understanding. And, as we saw in our Sellars-inspired account, (a) certain naturalistically grounded interests such as the need for receiving unconditional love and appreciation, far from being irrelevant to the unconditionality of the moral point of view (or, in Habermasian terms, to our need for intersubjective communication free of domination), are in fact what explain the latter’s raison d’etre, and (b) the instrumentalities which govern scientific understanding do not in any way directly entail a morally objectionable instrumentalization of human experience, thought and action (although, of course, they can be partially used in this morally objectionable way in the context of certain forms of social organization). Moreover, there is a clear tendency in Habermas—derived from his complete severing of the connections between our interests in emancipation in terms of communication free of domination and our interests in controlling the world and ourselves so as to liberate us from any kind of limitation, constraint or obstacle (physical, psychical or social) which hinders the free expression of our capacities and abilities in the world—to perceive techno-scientific progress as a temptation that can lead us into going ‘too far’—entering the ‘forbidden’ territory of biogenetic manipulation, thus engendering the very core of our humanity (autonomy,

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dignity) (Habermas, 2003). Habermas’ thinking here is influenced by his view that transcendental reflection (revealing the abovementioned transcendental interest in communication free of domination) restricts science to a pre-ordained horizon (the instrumentally rational dimension) of meaning and thus denounces as illegitimate its consequences for the ethical sphere. However, by insisting only in the distinguishability of the ethical and scientific-naturalistic interests and neglecting their essential inseparability, Habermas does not see that (a) nothing prevents science from questioning fundamental presuppositions of our human freedom and dignity and that (b) this entanglement between science and ethics does not eliminate the distinction between the ethical and the scientific but compels us to reconceptualize and in some ways radically alter our core concepts of personhood. We will attempt to sketch some of the consequences of this process of radical reconceptualization-without-­ elimination of our core conception of ourselves as persons in Sect. 5. Interestingly, this austere demarcation of the ethical and the empirical-­ scientific, where the former expressed the non-instrumental dimension of meaning, experience and action while the latter expressed the domain of instrumental means-ends rationality and ‘strategic’ action, has also problematic ‘bio-conservative’ consequences in the field of bioethics. Specifically, Habermas believes that there is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that define our human species membership and that those very conditions make us who we truly are. Our identity is conceived as part of a species identity (Habermas, 2003, p. 23, 39). For example, an awareness of our own freedom requires a certain understanding that our biological lives as a species are not at our disposal. Any modification of this condition for species identity would have a significant impact on our essential capacity of being oneself and thereby on the process of ethical self-realization as free and equal moral agents.13 By altering our genetic heritage, we alter the ontological conditions essential for assuming the status of a full member of a moral community14 (Habermas, 2003, p. 23, 81; Morar, 2015). These views are directly connected to the above 13  Recall that, for Habermas, moral equality demands from the moral actors involved in a communicative action to be in symmetrical position of argumentation in order to achieve a consensus over normative matters. This condition of symmetric recognition is supposed to be directly violated by our ability to intervene in our genetic endowment. But this does not follow. See the discussion below and Sect. 5 where this point is discussed in more detail. 14  Thus, Habermas argues that since our genetic essence is a central component of our personal identity, and, at the same time, the foundation of equal freedoms that exist among persons of equal birth, all attempts to bring our essence within the realm of human discretion and choice ought to be prohibited (Habermas, 2003, p. 115).

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s­ upposed clear separation between ethical and scientific experience/rationality. Even more problematically, Habermas defines the ethical core of humanity in an essentialist manner (blurring the distinction, otherwise supported by Habermas, between the factual and the normative), which is, however, confined to a dimension of lifeworld meaning and experience forever beyond the reach of science as the (instrumental means-ends) interests that inform the latter are incommensurable with the (non-­ instrumental) interests that inform the former. All this results in a problematically essentialist conception of personhood which fails to understand the nuanced distinctions and interconnections between ethical and empirical-­scientific intelligibility. More specifically, from our point of view, Habermas’ bio-­conservativism seems arbitrary, ultimately unjustified and succumbs to a version of the myth of the Given, this time applied to our conception about the ontology and epistemology of personhood. In our view, a resolutely anti-Givenist conception of personhood understands the latter as essentially normative, not as a natural kind (with supposedly normative implications and restrictions). The only essential properties of ourselves as persons are that ‘we’ as persons, that is, as normative self-determining subjects of knowledge and intentional action, are the unifying points of a system of reciprocally recognized schematic and ‘ideal’ cognitive and practical commitments. And the ever-more concrete determination, by empirical-scientific inquiry, of this schematic content needed for the satisfaction of those ideal cognitive and practical commitments (the optimal material realization of personhood in the world) could well necessitate a conception of ‘who we really are’ that would abandon a large part of our specifically human form as the latter was developed by the causal-biological forces of evolution (Christias, 2020; see also Chap. 8). From this point of view, the ‘determinate’ content of the commitments that form the core of personhood is not semantically transparent or ‘Given’ in advance. Contra Habermas, nothing about the determinate content of personhood (i.e. about its embodiment in specific material, biological, psychological, socio-historical structures) is Given in advance, as a ‘factum of our humanly formed reason’ or of our being the specifically biological species with a specific genetic heritage. On the contrary, an essential part of our commitment to personhood—that constitutes personhood as such—is to scrutinize it and elaborate its determinate content, so as to make explicit, and when necessary revise, the network of its incompatibility and consequence relations with other ‘material’ commitments or ours (see also Brandom, 2015; Negarestani, 2014).

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This is an ongoing process of explicitation and revision of our determinate conception (our substantial assumptions and expectations) about what/ who we ‘are’ and what that entails. In other words, it is essentially a self-­ correcting process: the project of unpacking and updating our commitments about what we are in the face of incompatibilities—produced in the process of making those commitments more determinate—between our normative-functional conception of personhood and our (evolving) descriptive-explanatory renderings of its material embodiment. In this self-correcting process nothing is sacred; any view about the way in which our normative-functional ‘essence’ is realized in worldly structures— including the seeming platitude that the ideal medium for actualizing the essence of personhood is the human body in its present form or the fact that certain innate mental dispositions of a certain individual are part of its personality—is potentially revisable (the only criterion being explanatory coherence with our developing worldview).15 Note that the above self-­ correcting and updating project is not a mere external, accidental appendage to our commitment to consider ourselves persons (normative self-determining subjects distinguished by our capacity to play the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’) but is itself essentially dictated by that very commitment (see also Negarestani, 2014; Brassier, 2011). Again, we will attempt to sketch some of the consequences of this self-correcting process of radical reconceptualization-without-elimination of our core conception of ourselves as persons in Sect. 5.

15  Some of these beliefs about personhood may well be part of our current—synchronically fixed—‘grammatical’ or ‘background certainties’ around which other, less central and potentially revisable, beliefs about personhood ‘revolve’ (Wittgenstein, 1969). But even these background beliefs could diachronically change epistemic status and become (fallible) very general empirical propositions, which, however pragmatically useful for everyday purposes within a certain physical and social environment, could turn out to be strictly speaking false. This is precisely what has actually happened with the gradual disenchantment of nature and ourselves from modernity onward and our contention here is that this process does not eliminate personhood, though it does and can radically change our conception of it (see also Chap. 8 and Sect. 5 below).

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5  Could a Radically Disenchanting Theoretical Stance Be Complementary with a Radically ‘Humanistic’ Practical Stance? In Sect. 3, I suggested that the intrinsically objectifying character of explanatory practices in general, and of evolutionary explanations in particular, does not, as such, necessarily distort the qualitative particularity of external objects or of sensory and affective experience. Neither does it thereby necessarily result in an impoverishment of our ‘lived’ experience. Thus, I argued that the ‘evolutionary’ explanatory stance toward reality and ourselves may well be compatible with the non-objectifying, non-­ instrumental stance that best satisfies our fundamental need for unconditional love and appreciation. However, it must be stressed here that even in an ideal situation in which our need-interest for unconditional freedom from constraints were to be satisfied with the exclusive use of the beneficial (emancipatory) dimension of scientific-explanatory reason it would not follow that our need for unconditional love and appreciation (i.e. the need that informs the moral point of view) would thereby be equally satisfied. This emancipatory character of theoretical/scientific reason would not by itself be sufficient for bringing into existence a world in which we would treat ourselves and others as ends in themselves. One reason for this is that from the viewpoint of the scientific-evolutionary stance, there would be nothing intrinsically wrong with treating the satisfaction of our interest for unconditional love and appreciation solely as means for the satisfaction of (however benign) external ends—namely, the attainment of unconditional freedom from constraint. And this would be so even if, as we argued above, an intrinsically instrumental and objectifying stance toward the world and ourselves need not necessarily ‘oppress’ non-instrumental facets of our lived experience (in its descriptive-explanatory dimension) or imply a coercive attitude toward nature, ourselves and other human beings. Perhaps it could be argued, in this connection, that although the satisfaction of our need for unconditional freedom (through the ‘emancipatory’ use of instrumental/disenchanting reason) might not be sufficient for the satisfaction of our need for unconditional love and appreciation, it could well be necessary for the satisfaction of the latter. But, again, it must be emphasized that the fundamental need that animates our epistemic-­ scientific practices, namely, unconditional freedom from constraint, does not imply, if satisfied, the direct satisfaction of the primal need at the heart

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of our moral practices, the giving and receiving of unconditional love and appreciation. Translated in ‘space of reasons’ terms, this means that the satisfaction of the ends of collective theoretical (scientific-oriented) reasoning do not directly imply the satisfaction of the respective ends of practical morally oriented reasoning, namely, the general welfare of rational beings in general (be they human, alien or ‘post-human’) through their organization in a community essentially characterized by forms of cooperative (non-means-ends) rationality. This lack of direct implication between theoretical-scientific and practical-ethically oriented reasoning explains why our scientific and moral practices must be constantly and reciprocally constrained, criticized, updated, through a process of dynamic coordination aimed at the expansion of our powers of perceiving, thinking and acting in a way that maximizes our collective flourishing.16 Another way to put this point is that, in the absence of a direct implication between theoretical-scientific and practical-ethically oriented reasoning, the objectifying character of the former can have a direct emancipatory effect on the latter only if, by treating nature, ourselves and others as a means to a certain—liberating—end (unconditional freedom from constraint), it simultaneously treats them as ends in themselves. This could be so if scientific reason envisages the satisfaction of the need for unconditional freedom from constraint as distinguishable but inseparable from the satisfaction of the need for unconditional love and appreciation (and vice versa). Correlatively, the decontextualization of experiential elements from the ‘lifeworld’ effected by scientific reason adopting the ‘engineering’ stance upon nature, ourselves and others can be directly emancipatory at the practical level only if the process of recontextualizing the resulting novel descriptive-explanatory conceptual tools/methods and related technological advances back into the lifeworld is itself guided and characterized by a resolutely non-instrumental stance toward nature, ourselves and others. For example, the objectifying character of theoretical-scientific 16  Sellars himself anticipates this line of thought when he insists that despite Hegel’s and Peirce’s valiant efforts, it cannot be shown that the intention to promote the epistemic ends of the space of reasons (through scientific investigation of the structure of the world and ourselves) directly implies the intention to promote the general welfare of all rational beings (which would make the space of reasons implicitly real ‘here and now’ as an ‘ethical community’) (Sellars, 1967a, pp. 225–226). Presumably, we could show this if we could demonstrate that the collective commitment to the pursuit of empirical truth implies a collective commitment to the construction of an ideally free and equal ethical community. But it is hard to see how such an implication could be justified a priori.

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would have a direct emancipatory effect at the level of non-instrumental practical reason if the conceptual, experimental and technological innovations produced by the former and the ensuing development of productive forces and higher standards of living were geared toward creating a globally sustainable environment, advancing solidarity for humanity as a whole and minimizing poverty and misery beyond national frontiers and spheres of vested interests.17 Presumably, for this to be the case, that is, for the conceptual, experimental and technological dimension of our techno-­ scientific practices to be calibrated in such a way that the control or ‘regulation’ they exert to physical and human bodies (by, among other things, unearthing previously unknown powers of the former and capacities of the latter) be directed toward the collective flourishing of humanity within a sustainable external environment, we would have to change not only the content, but the very form of our current techno-scientific practices—for example, in a way that the above values be directly incorporated in scientific methodology, experimentation and in the very technical codes that govern technical design, production and function.18 17  Of course, this is a regulative ideal of human practices. And it does not exclude non-­ cosmopolitan cultural formations such as nations, states or small-scale communities, so long as their practices are conducive or at least not detrimental to the general welfare of humanity as a whole. Moreover, the above normatively characterized regulative ideal of humanity must not be confused with the causal (broadly social-scientific) project of finding the most efficient way in which existing institutions could be modified or revised so as to contribute to the realization of our normative ideals without sacrificing vitally important existing material goods and social rights, such as the present level of material growth, the existing level of respect for human rights, individual and political freedom and so on. The latter causal project is a broadly empirical matter and cannot be settled in an a priori manner. 18  This is, I contend, the grain of truth contained—in a highly distorted form—in Heidegger’s critique of technology (Chap. 4) and—in a less, though still distorted form—in Marcuse’s ideal of a fusion of scientific, technical and artistic experience. But, of course, in practice, we must always be careful not to exclusively tie scientific research to specific substantial moral values (about how to best achieve collective welfare), as the latter often prove to be no better guides to human flourishing than science itself. Indeed, the non-existence of a direct implication from scientific to ethical ideals (n. 16) shows the pragmatic utility of the (otherwise problematic) ‘fact-value’ distinction: by not being exclusively guided by substantial ethical values in its methodology and modes of explanation, science is thereby free to propose alternative ways of understanding the world and how to best collectively thrive in it, which can then be communally judged and recalibrated or revised on the basis of their pragmatic consequences in actual practice. (Note that the justification of the fact-value distinction is itself value-laden, which is not to say that there is no such distinction, but that it must not be turned into a dualistic dichotomy, e.g. supposedly justified by formal logic alone.)

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6  Socio-political Implications: Toward a Post-­human Community of Persons In conclusion, I would like to sketch the important non-trivial consequences of the view developed in this chapter and, in particular, of attempting to simultaneously satisfy our fundamental needs of unconditional freedom from constraint (which informs ‘theoretical-scientific reason’) and unconditional love and appreciation (which informs practical reason and the moral point of view) in our conception of personhood. In our Sellars-inspired account, the simultaneous satisfaction of the above deep-­ seated interests activates a dialectical self-correcting process of successive radical reconceptualizations of the descriptive-explanatory aspect (i.e. the ‘material basis’) of personhood (see also Chap. 8; Christias, 2018d). 6.1   The Radical Implications of the Regulative Ideals and Existential Constraints Built in the Concept of a Person Recall that, as was suggested throughout this chapter, the whole point of our descriptive-explanatory practices—which, in the limit, converges with the raison d’être of normative discourse itself—is to make the world a field of affordances and opportunities for the expression of the capacities and abilities of a community of persons. That is, it can be argued that our lifeworldly practices, whatever else they make possible, are, at bottom, expressions of our continuous effort to collectively alter our relation to the ‘external’ world (to ‘lifeless’ external processes, to our a-rational drives and impulses and to the non-rational social forces that affect our lives) by directly integrating an ever-expanding portion of this ‘external’ world into our very lifeworld, that is, into our embodied relations and transactions with the environment. In this way, hitherto ‘lifeless’ and ‘inert’ external objects or a-rational drives and impersonal social ‘forces’ are transformed into a field of affordances and opportunities for the expression of capacities and abilities expressive of personhood. And although at the causal-­ descriptive level this process is vitiated by what Habermas has aptly called ‘the colonization of lifeworld by profit and power-oriented systems’ (government, capitalist markets, corporations, bureaucracy), this does not detract from the fact that the immanent ideal of the lifeworld is to gradually bring into existence a (non-exclusionary) we-community of rational beings possessing practical mastery of previously ungoverned

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(‘colonizing’, ideological, ‘repressive’) processes of individual and social development. Now, from the point of view of our Sellars-inspired account, this transformative process would have non-trivial ‘existential’ effects, since it would be necessarily accompanied with a radical change in our conception of persons as regards the concrete material structures that realize the functional role of personhood (see also Chap. 8). Of course, throughout these radical changes, the fact that a complex physical system counts as a person only if the latter exhibits a certain kind of embodied ‘functional unity’ would not itself be revised. It would be a framework condition of the above radical revisions themselves that in order for a complex physical system to be considered as a candidate for being a person it must necessarily be characterized by a special kind of unity of material structures and patterns. Specifically, this complex physical system should be a recursively self-maintaining metabolic system whose complex behavioral patterns could be plausibly interpreted as (a) changes in the internal environment of the organism as a result of the latter’s being affected by external and internal stimuli (sensing, feeling), (b) retainings of past events (remembering), (c) propensities to ‘move’ from certain representational states to other representational states (inferring) and (d) intervenings (changes) in the external environment as a result of the organisms’ being in certain representational states (willing, acting). Moreover, the above necessary conditions of personhood presuppose that the organism’s behavior, by being sensitive to certain collective pattern-governed behavioral habits regarding ‘language-entry’ transitions (perception), intra-linguistic transitions (inference) and ‘language-exit’ transitions (action), can be interpreted as placed within a social network of reciprocally recognized rights and duties (‘cans’ and ‘oughts’) pertaining to meaning, knowledge and action. Those ‘skeletal’ normative-functional requirements would not undergo change in the process of radical conceptual revision of the material realizers of personhood. However, the background categorial structure and specific material content that concretely realizes this kind of functional unity can and would be subject to change, and a radical one at that. Now, from the point of view of our Sellars-inspired account developed in this chapter, this process of gradual ‘disenchantment’ of our conception of the material content of personhood is necessary for liberating persons from (seemingly natural, inevitable) bodily and psychical limitations that put material (social, historical, psychological, evolutionary) constraints on the optimal expression of the capacities and abilities of persons. However,

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it is also the case that the liberation of persons from all the above kinds of constraints could lead to their communal self-realization only if, throughout this process of the gradual disenchantment of our conception of the material content of personhood, we are simultaneously committed to treating ourselves and each other not merely as means, but also, at the same time, as ends in themselves (i.e. as beings whose most fundamental need is to be loved and appreciated for their own sakes, unconditionally). And the extremely interesting further point that must be mentioned here is that, in this dialectical self-correcting process, the actual material content and categorial structure of these latter notions (‘feel loved’, ‘feel appreciated’, ‘for our own sake’), which are obviously central for bestowing concrete meaning to the notion of the ‘reality of the moral point of view’, that is, to the moral dimension of personhood, would also be subject to change, related to corresponding changes in our conception of what counts as ‘our bodily (sensory, affective) and mental (mnemonic, inferential, volitional) unity, directed to the world and others through perception and action’. Of course, it is not at all easy to imagine what such a change in our conception of what counts as ‘feeling loved’, ‘feeling appreciated’, ‘for our own sake’ might actually amount to. The repercussions here of radical conceptual changes such as we are envisaging would no doubt be tremendous. Suppose, for example, that, in the near or distant future, due to scientific and technological advances, we actually were in a position to manipulate—that is, control and change—part of our own physical and mental endowment. This would surely challenge our present conception of personal identity and hence our conception of the essential features in virtue of which persons should be respected for their own sake. For, in such a case, our very bodily and mental characteristics would lose the aura of sacredness endowed to them by the fact that they now feature as background natural, non-negotiable conditions of our very identity as persons (and hence as part of what must be respected ‘for its own sake’) and would be viewed instead as processes to which we can intervene and change at will for the satisfaction of our ends. (Note that the content and orientation of the ‘I’ would have now itself changed, as it would view its bodily and mental capacities as something that is ‘within its powers’ to change, as being part of the (scientifically describable) content of its own intentions and volitions.) Thus, in such a case, we could perhaps even be in a position to manipulate—and hence intentionally choose—the set of bodily desires-­ interests that best fit our most fundamental needs (promotion of

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non-moral goods),19 while at the same time viewing ourselves more and more as a complex biochemical-conative system within a network of other such systems. Mental and bodily capacities and abilities that were considered as part of our very identity as persons, as part of what we are, and hence as demanding unconditional respect, would now be understood as manipulable means for satisfying deeper needs and interests of ours. This would amount to a tremendous increase of our individual and collective freedom, albeit at the cost of disenchanting some of what we now take to be core elements of personhood. Would it thereby follow that our sense of ourselves as irreplaceably unique beings would be irretrievably lost? What would happen to our conception of ourselves as beings that can be held personally accountable and deserve to be treated as ends in themselves? As was suggested throughout this chapter, I think that a more sober response to thought experiments of the above kind could be that our sense of the irreplaceable uniqueness of our personal identity or of our personal accountability and dignity need not thereby be extinguished but could well radically change in content and orientation—for example, in the sense that, in such a case, the very elements that materially embody the specific ‘normative-­functional unity’ of those essential features of personhood would themselves undergo change. This means that in this process even some of our current background certainties that are presupposed in the very meaning of those features of personhood (e.g. the fact that certain innate mental dispositions of a certain individual are part of its personality, the view that the optimal medium for actualizing the essence of personhood is the human body) would be eventually challenged. Features (specific bodily and mental dispositions) that hitherto functioned as enabling conditions of human freedom (personality, character) would be now revealed as things that block 19  Note that in this case, the ‘satisfaction of our ends’ yielded by the direct intervention to the structure of our very desiring states and dispositions would not imply the satisfaction of any specific ‘end-in-view’ but rather, the enhancement of ‘joyful passions’ and diminishment of ‘sad passions’. Or better, any given ‘end-in-view’ would, in the last analysis, be understood as a ‘stabilizing practical tool’ for better regulating the flow, intensity and direction of those passions, which, in turn, would be experienced as essentially dynamic, open-ended and expressive of the free exercise of sensory and intellectual abilities as joyful ends in themselves. (This is because in a nominalistic process world, ‘purposes’ or ‘ends-in-view’ do not have independent ontological efficacy but are understood as a species of normativity. They are selected for their collective coordinating function, which is projected to the world by the ‘productive imagination’.)

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its further development. Relatedly, mental and bodily capacities and abilities that were considered as part of what we are, and hence as demanding unconditional respect, would now be understood as manipulable means for satisfying deeper needs and interests of the ‘complex desiring machines’ we are. But it does not follow from this that the concept of person would no longer have meaning or application. It would ‘just’ be gradually seen for what it is: a normative-functional structure, instituted by we-attitudes of (synchronic and diachronic) reciprocal recognition, that serves as a tool for orienting us toward the harnessing and implementation of those internal (bodily-mental) and external (physical-social) material structures that maximize our collective welfare as complex physical systems that perceive, think and act in a world they never made. This would presumably be a world, envisaged only in imagination, in which the concepts of ‘personality’, ‘feeling loved’, ‘feeling appreciated’ ‘for our own sakes’, would have lost all metaphysical content and would apply to hitherto non-salient (synchronic and/or diachronic) bundles of bodily-mental attitudinal processes. So long as the network of we-attitudes of mutual recognition (regarding both epistemic and general welfare) were in place, persons would remain loci of personal accountability and dignity, albeit in a sense that would be radically disentangled from our current conception of personal identity. It is not imprinted in the very fabric of existence that mutually recognitive communities of persons must exist or prosper, but neither is it written in stone that the limits of capacities and abilities of persons bound by such communities or the (identity) conditions that make them rightful possessors of unconditional respect can be determined and anticipated in their ‘essential form’ by armchair lifeworld ordinary concepts of the self, independently of empirical inquiry. But, one might say, can we not know some such substantial existential limits of personhood in advance (at least at the level of necessary conditions) independently of empirical inquiry? Is not the contingency of birth—our ‘thrownness’ into the world—and the necessity of death examples of such essential limits? Is this not the ultimate horizon within which alone we can conceive of our identity, our dignity and our ‘existential possibilities’? Can we not construe personhood as the locus of certain existential ‘constants’ that are unearthed through careful phenomenological analysis independently of ontic-empirical inquiry (in the manner of Heideggerian ‘finitude’)? And is not our above analysis of personhood in terms of normative-functional attitudes of mutual recognition too formal, ultimately making the identity and dignity of persons virtually

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unrecognizable? Once again, I think that things here are not so simple. It might well be true that a necessary structural feature of personhood is that the world in which we have our being (perceive, thing, act and suffer) cannot be completely under our control under every aspect, since an essential feature of persons is that in our dimension as perceiving and orectic beings we are ‘passively’ affected by external and internal worldly processes out of our control. Perceiving, thinking and acting depend for their very existence as structural features of personhood on the existence of a world that is partly out of our control and in which the success of our projects cannot be guaranteed. Yet, the substantial content of those limits that are essential for making sense of personhood cannot be drawn in advance based on everyday ‘lifeworld’ categories. However much we can learn from pain, suffering and death (empathy for others, motivation for creativity), there is no reason to dignify them by taking them as necessary conditions for a person’s life to have meaning or purpose. The only existential limitation that might be thought as a necessary condition of meaning (in the existential sense) is the always present possibility of failure of our life projects, that is, the risk that they might turn otherwise than expected (Hägglund, 2020). But note that (contra Hägglund and Heidegger) it is the possibility—not the inevitability—of loss (including death) that functions as an existential ‘limitation’ necessary for making sense of persons capable of existentially committed to pursuing various worldly projects. And again, while it might be true that there is a sense in which our ‘finitude’—the ultimate fragility of everything we care about due to the possibility of loss or death—is a necessary structural condition for a complex physical system to count as a person, it is also true, I submit, that “only if such a state were reached, in which we were really identical to that which we are not but which we deeply know we could become, might we have the possibility of being reconciled to death. Only then, probably, would we be equal to the experience of death, and as long as that possibility is attributed to any other condition, it is merely a lie” (Adorno, 2001, p. 136). The bottom line of the above is that while it is true that we are always dependent for our existence and flourishing as persons on contingent worldly circumstances out of our control, we need not conceive of this dependence as something that can be antecedently determined in an a priori, absolute or ‘intuitive’ manner. Neither should we conceive of it as something sacrosanct, as a ‘gift’ from nature which must be accepted as given and not to be interfered with pain of intolerable hubris.

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Τo recapitulate, there is no doubt that the repercussions of such radical changes in our conception and experience of personhood, effected by the envisaged extension of our physical and mental plasticity, would be tremendous, unpredictable and even uncodifiable from a contemporary perspective. But we should not be afraid of the unknown, of the myriad possibilities which lie hidden at the (phenomenologically opaque, pre- and supra-personal) level of what might be called our ‘subjectless subjectivity’—situated at the intersection between our bodies, our sensory and affective fields and the surrounding world. We must embrace the risk and throw ourselves into the deep unexplored ocean of promethean freedom, taking full responsibility for it, being vigilant at every step not to let our increasing freedom completely unconstrained, and treating it instead, again at every step, as inseparable from the satisfaction of our basic non-­ instrumental need for giving and receiving unconditional love and appreciation (as expressed in we-attitudes of reciprocal recognition). 6.2   Toward a Democratic Prometheanism In such circumstances of radical change as we are envisaging, the forging of a link between mutual recognitive attitudes regarding epistemic welfare and those regarding general welfare would be all the more urgent. That is, it would be even more urgent to put the satisfaction of our need for ‘promethean freedom’ (epistemic welfare) to the service of our general welfare, as the latter is expressed by a community essentially characterized by forms of cooperative (non-means-ends) rationality. And this further implies that the promethean impulse for unconditional freedom should be put under democratic control and channeled through social institutions and avenues that foster transparency, accountability and criticism and are sensitive to the emergence and reproduction of systematically unequal distribution of individual, social and political power. Those sociο-political functional constraints are abstract, general and flexible enough to find application even to cases in which the socially produced and distributed goods are our very bodily and mental abilities. They also thereby do not compromise the relative autonomy of science with respect to other spheres of culture (whose substantial aesthetic, moral or political values and ideologies can also threaten to ‘colonize’ scientific research). Of course, the fact that the content of the socially produced and distributed goods could change so dramatically as to involve parts of what we now take to be

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essential elements of our vert personhood shows the extreme importance of their being under constant democratic control. The fact that in existing societies the radical disenchantment of our conception of personhood through science and technology could be utilized and harnessed as a means for capitalist profit and as an opportunity for an attempted increase of inequalities in political, social or individual power is a reason for being extremely vigilant in actually implementing such a vision in practice, but not for considering it incoherent or theoretically problematic. In fact, the promethean impulse for human enhancement and for full automation of production can be the basis for raising universalist emancipatory demands that are in direct conflict with current capitalist orthodoxy (e.g. questioning the moral justification of the inequality of distribution of natural skills and talents of individuals, challenging the value of wage labor20 through the demand for a universal basic income). This shows that while ‘disenchanting reason’, and the ‘promethean freedom’ it promises, does not by itself imply unconditional respect for persons, it transforms nature, individuals and society in such a way that the stakes of not respecting persons become a matter of existential significance. In these circumstances, where increasing techno-scientific literacy and sophistication would make the minimization of domination and the achieving of unconditional respect a live option for everyone ‘here and now’, while at the same time making it possible for those in positions of power (corporations, governments) to align humanity to their interests directly at the biological level (e.g. by valuing and reinforcing profit-related abilities, feelings, thoughts and behaviors), the demand for equality in possession and distribution of socially significant goods would lose its ideal and semiabstract status and would be motivationally salient and concrete for (almost) everyone. This heightened sense of the imminent utopic and dystopic possibilities that are simultaneously opened for us would force us to understand at the concrete, experiential level, that the general (economic, political) structure of society is directly connected to our everyday concerns. It has been said that the utopian impulse can—and must—be released from its capitalist-­individualist ideological shackles in order to expand the space of the possible, mobilize a critical perspective on the present and cultivate new desires (Srnicek & Williams, 2015). Under such 20  It can be argued that capitalist wage labor is inherently alienating and ‘irrational’ since in the context of such a system, we, as persons, are not part of deciding the purpose of what we are producing, and our work is conceived for the sake of a profit that is posited as an end in itself rather as a means to our freedom (Hägglund, 2020, p. 308).

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circumstances, this utopian impulse, which unites promethean freedom with unconditional respect for everyone, would also lose its ideal status as a mere abstract regulative principle of political organization and would be concretely expressed as a motivationally salient existential commitment necessary for the very survival and minimal well-being of humanity. This utopian ‘democratic prometheanist’21 impulse can perhaps be also thought of in terms of an envisaged internal connection between (the extreme forms of) negative and positive freedom at the individual and collective level: the ultimate point of our deep-seated need for unconditional freedom from constraint, if it is to be satisfied in conjunction with the need for unconditional love and appreciation, would be to increase our freedom to democratically negotiate, transform and challenge the constraints of the practical identities in light of which we lead our lives (including the purpose and function of ‘necessarily heteronomous’ social institutions such as corporations, markets, state laws, bureaucracy, government22). However difficult this may prove to achieve in practice, the very fact that, if our argument is on the right track, it presents us with a coherent vision of 21  Perhaps this view can be more accurately described as ‘metademocratic promethenism’, as one of its essential elements would arguably be the application of democratic decision making to the task of evolving better decision making. 22  This is not to say that these essentially heteronomous social structures are necessarily incompatible with the existence of a free and autonomous we-community of rational beings. Indeed, if these social institutions are construed as providing the ambience of principles that make normative freedom possible, they might turn out to be positive empirical conditions of the origin, development and realization of freedom as autonomy (see also Chap. 7). But they may well be de facto incompatible with this regulative ideal to the extent to which they function in tandem with (‘instrumentally rational’) power structures that systematically extract and harness the creative (e.g. productive) powers of individuals and ignore or discourage non-profit-related abilities thereby producing and reproducing conditions of impoverished experience and systematically unequal access of the majority of humanity to forms of socio-­ political power and individual well-being. Yet, in the unlikely event that these systematically distortive and coercive effects were minimized or at least mitigated, the fact that these social institutions are heteronomous could be seen as a pragmatic, empirical ‘necessity’ that, while not excluding the possibility of power inequalities, would constitute no unsurpassable obstacle to freedom as autonomy. For example, part of the heteronomous dimension of social institutions could be seen as an empirically ‘necessary’ expression of the pragmatic advantages gained from the division of material labor, intellectual labor, social power, and of the fact that institutions must be minimally predictable in order to diachronically ‘survive’. From this point of view, the key to successful collective self-government lies in taking advantage of the possibilities of individual and collective freedom opened by social institutions while at the same time being vigilant not to let power inequalities that nearly inevitably will occur as a result of the semi-heteronomous nature of social institutions (and, ultimately, of the practical necessity of the division of labor) be sedimented and obtain a systematic character.

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humanity-in-the-world is a compelling reason to view it as a regulative ideal of our lifeworldly practices, one which, if only in imagination, points toward the integration of the scientific naturalist viewpoint with the reality of the moral point of view at the level of concrete practice.23 Nothing, of course, guarantees that the regulative ideal in question and the utopian impulse that stands behind it, which unites promethean freedom with unconditional respect for everyone, will be actually satisfied. There are no laws of nature or history to guarantee this much.24 The liberating—yet potentially frightening and paralyzing—dimension of disenchanting reason is the gradual realization that our successful survival and flourishing in the world ultimately depends on our collective commitment, as ‘socially attuned complex physical organisms’, to make the natural and social world a place worth living and striving for.

23  Indeed, although Sellars was almost completely silent on the issue of the political implications of his views, it is interesting to note that his father, Roy Wood Sellars, who was also a philosopher and with whom Sellars fils mostly agreed in matters philosophical, wrote the Ηumanist Μanifesto (1933) in which he holds that the grain of truth in religious experience can survive only if the latter becomes scientific and secularized, reorienting humanity toward the development and fulfillment of human personality in the here and now, in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being. This brand of ‘religious humanism’, as Sellars pere called it (a better label would be ‘scientific humanism’), was recognizably socialist as it explicitly held that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in its methods, controls and motives must be instituted in the direction of a socialized and cooperative economic order. Moreover, scientific humanism has a strictly immanentist ontology (it regards the universe as self-existing, not created, and believes that humanity is a part of nature and has emerged as a result of a continuous process), affirms life rather than denying it and seeks to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it. I take it that a Sellarsian political-ethical vision for the twenty-first century, inspired by the scientific humanism of the American naturalists of the early 1930s, must nevertheless take a post-humanist turn (while retaining its broadly socialist political orientation), as in a nominalistically described world bereft of natural kinds or essences, unconditional value can, strictly speaking, only be ascribed to persons (not humans, considered as a natural kind). 24  Indeed, given the present state of empirical knowledge in anthropology, psychology, history and sociology we have reason to believe that this utopian impulse co-exists with equally strong opposing human impulses (sometimes found in the same individual), such as the tendency to seek asymmetric recognition by obtaining a higher social status than other individuals and to systematically reproduce the conditions that maintain this status. And, as was mentioned above, the only long-term tendency that the cultural process of continuing disenchantment can be said to exhibit is that as promethean techno-science gradually reveals the ever-increasing existential risks of the conflicting nature of these deep-seated impulses, people will be gradually pressed to face the truth of their individual and social existence and to ‘take sides’ in this existential struggle for survival and well-being. But again, nothing guarantees that the outcome of this struggle will benefit humanity as a whole.

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References Adorno, T. (2001). Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems. Stanford University Press. Adorno, T. (2006). History and Freedom. Lectures 1964–1965. Polity Press. Bilgrami, A. (2010). The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay. In M.  De Caro & D.  Macarthur (Eds.), Naturalism and Normativity (pp. 23–54). Columbia University Press. Brandom, R. (2011). Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classic, Recent and Contemporary. Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. (2015). From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars. Harvard University Press. Brassier, R. (2011). The View from Nowhere. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 8(2), 7–23. Brassier, R. (2021). Final Repression: Adorno and Marcuse on the Antinomy of Progress. file:///C:/Users/dxris/Downloads/Final%20Repression_Adorno%20 and%20Marcuse%20on%20the%20Antinomy%20of%20Progress%20(1).pdf Christias, D. (2018c). Reconciling Scientific Naturalism with the Unconditionality of the Moral Point of View: A Sellars-Inspired Account. Res Philosophica, 95(1), 111–149. Christias, D. (2018d). On the Proper Construal of the Manifest-Scientific Image Distinction: Brandom Contra Sellars. Synthese, 195(3), 1295–1320. Christias, D. (2020). Are Persons Human Beings? Res Philosophica, 97(3), 363–385. Feenberg, A. (1996). Marcuse Or Habermas. Two Critiques of Technology. Inquiry, 39(1), 45–70. Habermas, J. (1970). Technology and Science as Ideology. In J. Habermas (Ed.), Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (pp. 81–122). Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (2003). The Future of Human Nature. Polity Press. Hägglund, M. (2020). This Life: Secular Life and Spiritual Freedom. Pantheon. Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. Routledge. Heidegger, M. ([1949] 2012). Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Indiana University Press. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. ([1944] 2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press. Ihde, D. (2010). Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives. Fordham University Press. Kant, I. ([1785] 1993). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Hackett. Marcuse, H. (1969). An Essay on Liberation. The Penguin Press. Marcuse, H. ([1964] 2013). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Routledge. Morar, N. (2015). An Empirically Informed Critique of Habermas’ Argument from Human Nature. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21(1), 95–113.

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Negarestani, R. (2014). The Labor of the Inhuman. In R. MacKay & A. Avanessian (Eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (pp. 427–466). Urbanomic. Nehamas, A. (1995). The Phaedrus. In A.  Nehamas & P.  Woodruff (Trans.), Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ (pp. xi–xxvi). Hackett Publishing Company. Roden, D. (2013). Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalized Phenomenology. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 72, 169–188. Rosenberg, J. (2007). Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images. Oxford University Press. Rouse, J. (2015). Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. University of Chicago Press. Sellars, W. (1961). The Language of Theories. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science (pp.  57–77). Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Sellars, W. (1967a). Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company. Sellars, W. (1967c). Science and Ethics. In W.  Sellars (Ed.), Philosophical Perspectives. Charles C. Thomas. Sellars, W. (1981a). Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process. The Monist, 64, 3–90. Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty. Blackwell.

Index1

A Allostasis, allostatic, 68, 211–215, 231, 232 Analytic philosophy, 1, 2, 2n1, 19, 22, 38, 59, 115, 160, 171 Anti-realism, 83, 113, 114, 114n2 Autonomy, 3, 7, 10, 11, 21, 36, 46, 96, 108, 162, 241n13, 244, 249n1, 259, 268, 274, 276, 284, 286, 291, 292, 297, 311, 313n22 B Becoming (processual), 8, 40n7, 141, 142n20, 145, 151n3, 209 Bio-conservativism, 300 C Categorical imperative, 273, 274, 277 Categories, 2, 6, 11, 16, 20, 29, 30, 32, 35, 38, 39n6, 50, 51, 54n14, 55, 59, 60, 70–72, 71n8, 81, 82,

101, 101n8, 103, 104, 106, 117, 122, 123, 128n10, 129–131, 131n12, 133, 133n13, 140, 142, 149, 158, 160–162, 169, 170, 177, 205, 206, 206n22, 208, 222, 223, 227, 228n4, 229n6, 237, 260, 263n4, 264n6, 266, 274n2, 310 Causal closure of the physical, 37, 73n9, 268 Causal principle, 136, 137, 139, 140 Ceteris paribus generalizations, 44, 235 Conceptual realism, 225, 226 Continental philosophy, 7–9, 12, 22, 27, 114, 115, 117, 145, 257, 258 Contingency, 118–121, 118n5, 124, 125, 141, 142, 142n20, 197, 277, 309 Correlationism strong, 115–120, 122, 122n9, 123, 126

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Christias, Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0

317

318 

INDEX

Correlationism (cont.) weak, 117 Creativity, 155, 156, 168, 169, 171, 274, 274n1, 310

natural, 246–247 normative, 164, 246–247, 249, 313n22 Free will, 3, 10, 13, 243–254

D Dasein, 75, 76, 84, 85, 114, 122, 123 Depersonalization, 2, 72, 261, 262n3, 263, 264n5 Determinable-determinate structure, 230 Determinism, 244 Disenchantment, 2–5, 9, 257–270, 280, 281n8, 301n15, 306, 307, 312, 314n24 Dynamic systems theory, 71, 100n7, 133n13, 229n6, 230, 289

G German idealism, 99, 117, 160 Goods moral, 274, 274n2, 275n3 non-moral, 172, 274–276, 274n1, 274n2, 275n4, 284, 286, 308

E Emergence, 2, 71–73, 73n9, 93, 94, 97–101, 99n6, 103, 104, 115, 127, 153–155, 157, 159n6, 168, 252, 261, 262, 265, 268, 290, 311 Enactivism, 63–87 Enframing, 80, 294, 296 Explanation causal, 73n9, 136–140, 136n16, 139n19, 288 Darwinian, 83, 290 deductive, 83, 285, 286 Galilean-Newtonian, 37, 40n7, 50, 292 layer-cake picture of, 285, 287, 292 subsumptive, 286 F Finitude, 75, 113, 309, 310 Freedom

H Homeostatic equilibrium, 203, 212–214, 235n10 I Ideology, 171, 191, 268, 281, 286, 291, 296, 297, 311 Imagination productive, 203–206, 206n22, 247, 253, 308n19 subtractive, 253 Individual, individuation, 1, 7–9, 9n5, 10n6, 30, 31, 68, 70, 73, 73n10, 81, 93–102, 93n2, 128, 128n10, 133, 146, 147, 159, 163, 172, 172n11, 173, 183–185, 190, 193n10, 194, 200, 205, 213, 214, 221, 223, 227–233, 232n8, 234n9, 243, 250, 251, 253n4, 259, 264n5, 274, 275, 275n4, 284, 290, 301, 304n17, 306, 308, 311–313, 313n22, 314n24 Inference material, 39, 133 non-monotonic, 39 In-itself, 32, 51, 103, 114–121, 124–140, 142, 143, 153, 154

 INDEX 

Intensive, intensity, 53n12, 149, 152–155, 154n4, 158, 159, 170, 191, 231, 250, 308n19 Intentional, intentionality collective, 8, 30, 95 pre-reflective, 64, 65, 102 embodied, 64, 65 Intuition categorial, 55, 107 eidetic, 7, 293 intellectual, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 141, 167, 168n10, 258n1 K Kant-Sellars thesis about modality, 5, 222–224, 226, 238 about identity, 224 L Lifeworld categories, 32, 38, 54n14, 55, 59, 310 experience, 6, 8, 28, 39n6, 50, 52n11, 82, 208 Logical space of reasons of causes, 192, 262, 267 of motivations, 198, 198n14 M Manifest image, 5, 6, 9, 11, 16, 22, 27–35, 41, 42, 42n9, 44–46, 52, 53, 55, 59n15, 67, 70–72, 70n6, 96–98, 100, 100n7, 101, 102n9, 103, 104, 107, 127, 129–132, 134, 151n3, 152, 154, 178, 180–182, 185, 190, 199n16, 207, 208, 209n24, 210–212, 211n26, 222–225, 229, 231,

319

235, 237, 248, 257–263, 258n1, 263n4, 264n5, 264n6, 265–267 Metaphilosophy, metaphilosophical, 1, 4–6, 9, 166, 167, 257–267, 264n7, 269, 270 Modality, 5, 18, 34, 134, 136, 141, 142, 222–224, 226, 238–241, 267, 269 Moral point of view, 10, 273–277, 275n3, 282, 296, 298, 302, 305, 307, 314 Myth of the Given categorial, 15, 17, 21, 22, 268 epistemic, 15–17, 34, 35n5 semantic, 15–17, 34, 35n5 N Naturalism nominalistic, 14 pragmatic, 109 scientific, 10, 11, 13, 20–22, 121, 126, 273, 274, 276 self-diremptive, 253 Natural kind, 71, 161, 231, 300, 314n23 Necessity, 20, 97, 115, 116, 118n5, 119n6, 120, 122, 125, 135, 135n14, 136n16, 137, 141, 142, 142n20, 161, 226, 246, 309, 313n22 Nominalism language, 233 ontology, 8, 147 Normative, normativity, norms attitudes, 7, 81, 108, 172, 188n4, 205n20, 225, 240, 241, 241n11, 241n13, 250–252, 251n2 freedom, 4, 7, 8, 13, 160–170, 172, 185, 243, 244, 246, 249–252, 304n17, 308, 313n22

320 

INDEX

Normative, normativity, norms (cont.) functions, 11, 96, 99n6, 116, 122, 137, 161–163, 168, 169, 178, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193n10, 205n20, 250, 253, 269, 308n19, 313n22 statuses, 240, 241, 241n13 Novelty, 13, 142n20, 151, 156, 157, 164, 168–172 O Objectification, 143, 273, 276–279, 294n10, 296 Object-property framework, 96, 222–224, 226, 229n6, 231, 232, 235, 236, 238, 269 Ontology descriptive, 37, 55, 152 process, 9, 13, 14, 141, 148, 152, 155, 155n5, 156, 173, 212, 221, 232n8, 296 substance, 73n9, 291 Original image, 6, 98, 104, 262–264, 263n4, 264n5, 264n6, 265n8, 266

revisionary, 6, 28, 60 transcendental, 33, 34, 48, 63, 64, 73, 74, 84, 85n16, 113, 114, 200 Picturing, 20, 51, 53n12, 98, 101, 102, 105n11, 131–133, 133n13, 196n11, 203, 205n20, 211–213, 211n26, 234, 234n9, 241, 241n12 Post-human, 10, 264n5, 276, 303 Post-Sellarsian philosophy, 1 Pragmatism, 94n3, 105, 109, 160, 171, 293 Principle of sufficient reason, 116, 120n7, 124, 133–140, 136n16, 138n18, 139n19 Process naturalism, 12, 147–160 ontology, 9, 12–14, 141, 147–152, 155, 155n5, 156, 173, 212, 221, 232n8, 296 self-correcting, 134, 166, 179, 188, 191, 193n10, 206, 207, 207n23, 239, 275, 301, 307 Promethean, prometheanism, 10n6, 311–314, 314n24

P Person, personhood, 1–3, 5, 6, 7n4, 9–11, 9n5, 10n6, 14, 16–18, 21, 29–32, 42, 54, 57, 59, 70n6, 72, 99, 100, 102n9, 108, 149, 151n3, 178–181, 185, 187–193, 189n5, 192n7, 192n8, 221–241, 243–246, 248, 249, 251, 258–263, 263n4, 264n5, 264n6, 266, 269, 276–278, 283, 284, 299–301, 299n14, 301n15, 305–314 Phenomenology descriptive, 28, 207

R Rational, rationality cooperative, 268 instrumental, 193n10 Realism modal, 126, 141, 224 scientific, 6, 12, 21, 38, 47–48, 51, 52, 54–56, 58, 59, 82, 91–102, 126, 140, 282 speculative, 114n3, 126 Recognition, 2, 3, 91, 100n7, 102n9, 168, 169, 179, 188, 241, 249n1, 277, 299n13, 309, 311, 314n24 mutual-reciprocal, 309

 INDEX 

Regulative ideal, 7n4, 11, 12, 54, 108, 178, 179, 187–189, 196, 200, 212, 222, 281, 304n17, 305–311, 313n22, 314 Reification, 86, 267, 269, 296 S Scientific image, 1, 5, 8, 9, 11, 20, 21, 27–60, 63, 66–73, 75–77, 86, 87, 91, 97–101, 100n7, 107, 126, 127, 139, 151n3, 178–182, 185, 190, 191, 194, 206–208, 209n24, 211n26, 212, 213, 222, 237, 245, 246, 248, 249, 257–270, 275n3, 277n5, 284, 287, 289, 291–293 Scientific instrumentalism, 12, 29n2, 36–39, 52, 59, 67, 77, 107 Self-determination, 7, 163, 172 Self-organization, 94, 245 Semantics non-representational, 12 representational, 19, 140 Skillful coping, 8, 12, 95, 177, 179, 195–202, 197n13, 198n14, 204–207, 290, 294 Social science, 71, 100, 100n7, 206n21, 267, 269 Stereoscopic fusion, 6, 8, 177–182, 185–194, 198–201, 206n22, 208–215 of the manifest and the scientific image, 6, 8, 13, 139, 177, 179, 185, 194, 200, 206n22, 208 Suffering, 109, 250, 274, 310 Synoptic vision, 13, 38, 53n12, 140–143, 177–215, 264n5 of the manifest and scientific images, 6, 13

321

T Technology, 78–81, 79n12, 294, 294n10, 295, 297, 298, 304n18, 312 Techno-science, 81n13, 294 Time, temporal (τ-dimension of), 149–151, 155 Topology, 229n6, 230 Transcendentalism, transcendental correlationism, 115–126 critique, 63, 114, 121, 269 hermeneutics, 63, 84–87, 85n16 investigation, 85, 86, 115, 127, 128, 293 subject, 74, 75, 127 U Universals, 16, 21n3, 28, 31, 37, 68, 72, 97, 117, 122, 133n13, 148, 159–161, 160n7, 168, 185, 202, 223, 225–228, 229n6, 230, 232, 233, 283, 285, 286, 289, 290, 296, 312 V Virtual, 147–151, 155–160, 164, 170, 209n24, 229n6, 230, 295n11 W We-attitudes, 9, 9n5, 101, 205, 205n20, 206, 206n21, 221, 222, 240, 241, 241n13, 269, 309, 311 Welfare collective, 162, 275, 275n4, 304n18, 309 epistemic, 96, 311 general, 210, 240, 241, 268, 274, 276, 278, 284, 303, 303n16, 304n17, 309, 311