John McDowell’s writing is one of the reasons that I am
an antireductionist across a range of issues: why I do not think that physics,
for example, very impressive though it is, is an exclusive metaphysical
benchmark of what is real. There are more things in heaven and earth than are
contained in, or reducible to, fundamental physics. Now although philosophy is
explicitly driven by arguments, is a product of reason, they tend to be in play
downstream of some initial commitments which are not, themselves, the product
of explicit reasons. That is not to say that those initial commitments are not tested by
arguments concerning their implications downstream. But I don’t think that anyone arrives
at, say, a sympathy with reductionism through argument. It is more aesthetic
than that. In accord with that, I was, as they say, ‘learning ready’ for
McDowell’s anti-reductionism but his arguments helped crystallize the form it
took.
The other attraction of McDowell’s philosophy is its
therapeutic aim: to dissolve philosophical problems rather than to construct
substantial answers on the basis of what might prove to be dubious premises.
McDowell seemed, and still seems, to me to be the best reader of Wittgenstein
around. But more broadly, he is sensitive to unnecessary assumptions that
distort the philosophical context. That may not be all there is to therapeutic
philosophy but it is, I think, fairly central.
The idea of returning to McDowell raises two points of
interest for me. More importantly, the way I try to think about the philosophy
of mental healthcare draws more broadly on other and perhaps more central areas
of philosophy. So a return to writing about McDowell is a pretext for further
thought in that central area of philosophy. A bit like returning to a capital city from the provinces. In particular, his recent neo-Anscombean work on intention in
action and his debate with Dreyfus seem to be key extensions of his
broader picture of an extended notion of rationality in the life of those in
the space of reasons. This seems important to me for subsequent thinking about illness and recovery in mental
health to pick just one application. (By the way, one feature of McDowell’s philosophising is his ability to
suggest that some possibilities just make sense. For example, the idea that a
prior intention to act might simply become an intention in action when the time
is right and then 'shrink' as aspects of the action are completed. Once
suggested, this seems a perfectly fine way to think of things but it would be
hard to realise that there was this point within the space of logical
possibilities.)
The other (and frankly much less significant) challenge,
though, is returning to my own writing. Which words to retain and which to
change? I don’t know how it is for others but I always find a bizarre tension
between two things. On the one hand, I am never particularly proud of anything
I write. Rationally, I know the arbitrariness of any particular sentence. It
could always have been otherwise. There is never time to work very hard on
style, for example. But on the other, once the words are written, a strange kind of conservativeness
strikes me. By virtue of being written, words take on a kind of fixedness, sub
specie aeternitatis. It is always much easier to criticise students work than
my own.
