Body and Horizon: Kant, Husserl, and the Nonconceptual Content of Experience.

摘要

The debate that took place between Herbert Dreyfus and John McDowell a few years back concerning the nonconceptual content of experience was in many ways disappointing. The question addressed in the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell, in its most basic form, is why we should think embodied cognition is a more compelling account of our motor engagement with the world than one that casts it in terms of concepts. A question that is not addressed is why we should find the justificatory grounds provided by either thinker more or less compelling than the other. To answer this question, I reframe their debate in terms of the apperceptive content with which both Kant and Husserl are concerned. Apperception is best defined in terms of holistic structures which logically precede and order cognition, whether this cognition proceeds via intuition or concepts. For instance, to grasp a concept is to grasp it as possibly a predicate of judgments other than the one in which it is featured or as part of a conceptual holism. Intuitions, on the other hand, are structured by a part-whole relation in which the wholes of space and time always logically precede their parts. Slices of space and time are always first presented as situated within an indeterminately extended whole. The difference between these two kinds of apperceptive content marks the difference between conceptual and nonconceptual content in the transcendental tradition.;With this distinction in hand I make three major arguments. First, because the part-whole relationship governing space and time is different from the part-whole relationship governing concepts, we can only indicate, but not fully cognize the intuitions by way of concepts. Secondly, though we have good reason to be suspicious of Kant's particular way of justifying his claims about concepts and intuitions, his arguments against the idea that experience is wholly determined by concepts can be reframed as reductio arguments that apply beyond the scope of his project. Finally, the distinction between nonconceptual content and conceptual content can also be carried phenomenologically, or through a detailed account of lived experience. Here we find that the kind of cognition proper to the intuitions is housed in the body, in the relation between perception, action, and Husserl's own take on the part-whole relation governing space and time, the horizon.