“Schelling and the Dreyfus-McDowell Debate

Recently, there has been a debate between defenders of a normative understanding of knowledge (both practical and theoretical), who maintain that the primary dimension of human activity is its normative structure that goes ›all the way down‹, and defenders of an embodied engagement or non-conceptual coping who argue for a primary dimension of human existence in the world that is neither active nor passive, in which the subject does not yet distinguish herself from the object. Ac- cording to this second view, it is only by recognizing this dimension of openness that we can make sense of higher levels of self-conscious conceptual and normative activity. The non-conceptual ›coping‹ at the most fundamental level would thus be a precondition of higher-level conceptual cognition. Both sides of the Dreyfus- McDowell debate agree that the pre-conceptual level can only be explained retrospectively, from a conceptual stance. They also agree that the conceptual level requires a pre-discursive dimension in some way. However, what they could not agree on was the question which of these modes of activity was the fundamental human one.

This contemporary discussion reflects to a certain extent discussions that we can already find in classical German philosophy. In this paper, I want to suggest some parallels between Schelling’s notion of intellectual intuition and Dreyfus’s stance against McDowell which I think might illuminate Schelling’s position. I suggest that both Dreyfus and Schelling run into a similar fundamental problem (saving all historical and methodological distances), and that it is this problem that leads the late Schelling to reject his earlier notion. Embodied coping might be the condition for all ›higher‹ levels of engagement with the world, but from which perspective do we cognize that ›previous‹ dimension of being one with the world? Where to begin? Should we begin with pre-conceptual embodied coping in order to make sense of ›higher‹ levels or must we always begin at the conceptual stance and can only reconstruct, starting from this standpoint, what its conditions must have been? To state the general philosophical problem in other words: where is philosophy to begin? Is the starting point the subject, or consciousness? Or is the beginning the principle or condition of possibility of consciousness itself? And how can philosophy begin at the beginning?

In his own philosophical development, Schelling makes two important points that are worth exploring in relation to the contemporary debate between McDowell and Dreyfus: The first point is that the activity of synthesis that characterizes self-consciousness is itself grounded on a unity prior to any difference between subject and object, or between concept and object. The second point is to understand the self in such a way that it cannot be reduced to self-consciousness insofar as self-consciousness has a ›history‹, a process of coming to be. However, these two points make Schelling vulnerable to the same difficulties that Dreyfus encounters. Namely, as the late Schelling realizes, we can only look at previous, ›mute‹ stages, from the standpoint of what pronounces. Pre-conceptual stages are always in the past, in more than one sense. Schelling comes to realize that the model of an absolute as identity of being and thought corresponds to a mute presupposition that cannot be considered actually existent and cannot be thought to manifest or ›pronounce‹ itself. While Dreyfus’s arguments on the pre-conceptual (that is, pre-subjective and pre-objective) ground seem to take him in the direction of a sub personal level of interaction, Schelling makes the notion of ›person‹ central to his late philosophy in its striving to overcome the tensions between the subject and its non-subjective ground.

In what follows, I will briefly give an overview of the Dreyfus-McDowell De- bate and the problem which McDowell’s reply poses for Dreyfus’s position (1). Ten I will turn to Schelling and his notion of intellectual intuition as a grasping of a non-distinction of subject and object which must be the ground of all knowledge (2). I argue that this is not an immediate grasping of any actual existence, not even an absolute one, but rather of conditions of possibility that have always already been presupposed by knowledge. Ten I consider briefly one of the main problems Schelling encounters in his attempt to give the pre-subjective unity priority over the subject, and the possible parallels to Dreyfus (3). Finally, I mention the way the late Schelling comes to realize and seeks to avoid this problem through the notion of ›person‹ that is central to his late system (4).