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Nature in Our Experience: Bonnett, McDowell and the Possibility of a Philosophical Study of Human Nature

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Abstract

Michael Bonnett has long attempted to rehabilitate the concept of nature, thereby challenging us to reconsider its profound implications for diverse educational issues. Castigating both ‘postmodern’ and ‘scientistic’ accounts of nature for failing to appreciate that nature is at once transcendent and normative, Bonnett proposes his phenomenology-inspired view of nature as the ‘self-arising’, which is bound up with the notion of ‘our experience of nature’. Despite its enormous strengths, however, Bonnett’s argument might obscure the ways in which the real issue involved in nature is addressed: the issue of our nature, which enables our experience of nature in the first place. In this paper, after reviewing Bonnett’s view of nature and considering his criticism of Richard Rorty’s assault on the reality of nature, I will try to show how the Aristotelian notion of second nature that John McDowell has reanimated can supplement Bonnett’s project and render plausible the idea that the naturalness of our sensibility is unique to human beings; through this approach, the issue of human nature can be (re)located in discussions of nature at large and, connectedly, brought again within the scope of the philosophical study of education in the present-day intellectual climate that increasingly marginalises non-scientific, intellectual endeavours. I will also briefly reflect on the relevance of the notion of second nature to Stephen Boulter’s recently proposed idea of ‘education from a biological point of view’.

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Notes

  1. Indeed, Bonnett closes his 2007 paper ‘Environmental Education and the Issue of Nature’ with the statement that ‘[h]uman well-being remains a central concern, but its interpretation is not restricted to the economic, and its achievement is understood as involving an understanding of our own nature and an appreciation of nature’s value that truly transcends the instrumental’ (p. 720, italics added). My claim is not that Bonnett has completely omitted to pursue the relationship of our human nature to nature but that he has explored some themes relevant to it under other signifiers such as ‘human essence’, thereby making it harder to capture a continuity existing between the two.

  2. Note, however, that Bonnett does engage, albeit briefly, with McDowell’s account of nature as being largely in line with his own views (Bonnett 2007, pp. 714–716). While certainly finding an apparent echo in their respective views of nature, I will, in this paper, go into analytical detail of their views.

  3. That nature is transcendent and normative is the key to grasping Bonnett’s overall argument. As one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper points out, ‘transcendent’ is a term that does not stand on its own with clear and agreed upon significance. Bonnett’s usage of this term denotes that nature has an ontological otherness to those in our world, which is linked to ‘epistemological mystery’. His usage is thus not burdened with the Kantian use of the term ‘transcendental’, but rather, as noted, allied with a Heideggerian framework. Bonnet (2004b) claims that ‘ontologically, we are not the author of things but, in Heideggerian vein, the occasioner of things’ (p. 124, italics in original). The crucial point is, as the text that follows clarifies, that for Bonnett the ‘postmodernist’ ideas miss the significance of the (human independent) transcendent dimensions of nature and the scientistic views miss that of the (human related) normative aspects of nature. On the other hand, McDowell often deploys a Kantian sense of transcendental argument, but this is not the direct focus of this paper. I am thankful to the reviewer for raising concerns about how ‘transcendent’ is being used in the relevant context.

  4. This is because such attempts will leave us trapped with the unprofitable dualism between realism and anti-realism. While Bonnett sometimes—especially when arguing against ‘postmodern’ retreat from reality—appears to commit himself to the ill-formulated dualistic framework (e.g. Bonnett 2004a, pp. 54–55), he wisely acknowledges that what is most at issue is the nature of reality.

  5. Bonnet (2012) claims: ‘there is a distinction to be drawn between the “thing in itself” conceived as what is beyond perception, incapable of being experienced at all (as with Kant) and the ‘thing itself’ as what has its own existence that might or might not be experienced, and in a variety of degrees and ways’ (p. 291, italics in original).

  6. Note, however, that not all who are generally regarded as advocates of scientism identify ‘the natural world’ with the world as it really is. W. V. Quine, the leading proponent of scientific naturalism in the contemporary sense, is a case in point. For instance, Quine (1980a) writes: ‘We can improve our conceptual scheme, our philosophy, bit by bit while continuing to depend on it for support; but we cannot detach ourselves from it and compare it objectively with an unconceptualized reality. Our standard for appraising basic changes of conceptual scheme must be, not a realistic standard of correspondence to reality, but a pragmatic standard’ (p. 79, note deleted; cf. Igashira 2017, pp. 190–192).

  7. Bonnett (2017) employs the epithet ‘metaphysics of mastery’ to signify ‘the ways in which Western culture increasingly frames issues in terms that are deeply human-centred and manipulative’ (p. 341).

  8. Naturalism is a philosophical term used most eminently in analytical philosophy as one closely associated with scientism. Although some think the nineteenth-century positivism of Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Mach was indeed ‘the first fully fledged scientific naturalist movement’ (De Caro and Macarthur 2004, p. 8) while others see its current usage as originating in debates among American pragmatists (including John Dewey) in the first half of the twentieth-century (Papineau 2015), it is hardly possible to pin down the exact definition of the term ‘naturalism’. However, naturalism in the sense of scientific naturalism, whatever the details may be, is practically a synonym for what Bonnett means by scientism, and it is, if at all, the philosophical ideology in contemporary analytical philosophy (Kim 2003, p. 83).

  9. I have illustrated this point by drawing an extensive comparison between Rorty’s and McDowell’s views in Misawa (2019a).

  10. To put forth his minimal empiricism complemented by the notion of second nature, McDowell draws heavily on Sellars’ (1997) conception of ‘the logical space of reasons’, which was originally introduced in the following context: ‘The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says’ (p. 76, italics in original).

  11. McDowell, exploiting Sellars’ and Gadamer’s ideas, connects the ability to use language with the ability to occupy positions in the logical space of reasons: it is ‘by acquiring command of language’ that ‘one comes to inhabit the logical space of reasons—to have conceptual capacities in the relevant sense’ (McDowell 2000, p. 7). McDowell (1996) employs the term ‘Bildung’ to give expression to the way that ‘we arrive at the notion of having one’s eyes opened to reasons at large by acquiring a second nature’ (p. 84).

  12. The actualisation of rational-conceptual capacities in perceptual experience is, McDowell (2008) claims, ‘not just passive, but receptive’ (p. 224, italics in original). I think McDowell’s conception of experience provides a clearer grasp of our experience of nature, where human significances abound than Bonnett’s ‘receptive/responsive-poetic’ account does, for experience can, according to the former conception, ‘be seen as enabling the world itself to be present to a subject’s rationality’ (McDowell 2008, p. 224) without disconnecting it from our biological roots.

  13. The distinction between ‘genus’ and ‘species’ applies, for example, to feeling pain and experiencing pain (the latter of which can occur only in rational animals) (e.g. McDowell 2002, p. 288). Such a distinction is liable to be considered inconsistent with the (natural-scientifically supported) commonsense view that human and non-human animals share perceptual sensitivity. Yet, it does not contradict common sense in terms of genus. The whole point here is that human beings do not have pain in two steps (feeling pain as non-conceptual content first and then experiencing it as conceptual content second); we simply experience it. McDowell (1996) argues: ‘We do not need to say that we have what mere animals have, non-conceptual content, and we have something else as well, since we can conceptualize that content and they cannot. Instead we can say that we have what mere animals have, perceptual sensitivity to features of our environment, but we have it in a special form. Our perceptual sensitivity to our environment is taken up into the ambit of the faculty of spontaneity, which is what distinguishes us from them’ (p. 64, italics added). Bonnett treats ‘feel’ and ‘experience’ as virtually equivalent in meaning in relevant contexts (e.g. Bonnett 2019a, p. 39); his failure to draw the conceptual distinction invites the question of his outlook on human unique naturalness vis-à-vis non-human animals.

  14. Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent page references in this section refer to this paper.

  15. I have also provided a detailed discussion of an essential interweaving between the social, the natural and the educational in Misawa (2019b).

  16. This treatment might be a little unfair to Boulter, for he clearly defines the paper under consideration as ‘a position paper’ (p. 171, 179).

  17. David Bakhurst’s works merit mention. For the last decade or so, he has prominently amplified what he calls McDowell’s ‘transformational view’ of human development and learning with an emphasis on the notion of second nature that illuminates the significance of education in the living of our human lives (e.g. Bakhurst 2008, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016). An important symposium on his 2011 book The Formation of Reason is included in the first issue of the 50th anniversary volume of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (2016). For a good overview of the current state of the debate about the transformational view, see C. J. An (2018, esp. sections 13); I have also discussed each symposium contribution in Misawa (2017).

  18. The upshot of Bonnett’s ‘ecological’ consciousness thesis is that ‘consciousness is the place where things occur—show up, are beheld. And they show up most fully—are most themselves—when the receptivity of such consciousness is as open as possible. This is to say that it is the essence of reflexive consciousness, to allow things to be, and in this sense to sustain them’ (Bonnett 2019a, p. 41, italics in original); and so, ‘sustainability is integral to human being’ (ibid.).

  19. McDowell’s resistance requires us to reconsider exactly what his (1996) proposal of ‘partial re-enchantment of nature’ (p. 88, italics added) means. The text that follows in this final section can be taken as a beginning attempt to address this intricate topic.

  20. The researcher who has advocated this scientistic view, perhaps most impatiently, is the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker (e.g. Pinker 2002). I have argued against the Pinkerian view of human nature at some length in Misawa (2019c).

  21. ‘Bald naturalism’ is McDowell’s coined term to designate a common naturalism that aims to domesticate phenomena and intelligibility belonging in the space of reasons within nature in the modern, disenchanted sense.

  22. Many thanks to C. J. An for corroborating my initial thoughts on this resonance.

  23. A series of works by, for example, Noë (e.g. 2012) and Gallagher (e.g. 2017) make explicit reference to McDowell’s argument and to his debate with Hubert Dreyfus, his phenomenologist critic.

  24. Bakhurst (2005), in a paper that focuses on the Russian philosopher Evald Il’enkov’s views on education, drawing remarkable parallels to the work of McDowell, contends fittingly that: ‘Philosophy is now supposed to be open to matters empirical, and philosophers can no longer ignore work in developmental psychology and cognitive science that casts philosophically thought-provoking light on human development. So it would seem that the time is ripe for a renaissance of the philosophy of education, seen no longer as simply a branch of applied philosophy, but as a discipline concerned with the questions of human nature’ (p. 264, italics added).

  25. In the eyes of Bonnett (2019b) though, ‘“enactivist” ideas of agency, cognition and learning’ as they now stand do not seem to be attractive enough to sufficiently incorporate nature’s ‘self-arising otherness’ (p. 2).

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2019 Annual Conference of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain at Oxford. I am indebted to the audience members for their comments and questions. Thanks also to Michael Bonnett for helpful comments on the version.

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Kakenhi [Grant Number JP16K21323].

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Misawa, K. Nature in Our Experience: Bonnett, McDowell and the Possibility of a Philosophical Study of Human Nature. Stud Philos Educ 39, 135–150 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09700-0

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