response to Shaviro on Metzinger

While looking for something else this morning by accident, I ran across THIS OCTOBER POST by Steven Shaviro in response to MY ARTICLE ON METZINGER.

Steven is largely in agreement with what I said there, aside from the points where we disagree philosphically as usual (such as the theme of “process,” which Steven appreciates much more than I do).

I started to type a response, but then realized that no one would ever see a response from 10 weeks after the original post, so decided to put it here instead.

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Hello Steven-

I just ran across this post again by accident, and think you give a very fair treatment of my review of Metzinger. As you already know, most of the points where you disagree stem from our wider philosophical disagreements, which have been aired in public several times by now (and quite fruitfully, in my opinion).

There are just two points where I want to respond– belatedly, I realize.

1. You write:

“But I am not convinced that Metzinger is wrong when he argues that mental states ‘intentionally contain an object within themselves.’ I am more inclined to think that this is indeed what happens — as Whitehead puts it, ‘an actual entity is present in other actual entities’ (PR 50).”

I (not Metzinger) was the one saying that mental states intentionally contain an object within themselves, as does the phenomenological tradition. Granted, this isn’t quite the same as what you and Whitehead mean by it. But Metzinger doesn’t even accept my sense of the phrase. Indeed, he is completely dismissive of the notion of intentional objects being present in consciousness. The “intentional” for him, as for many others, means what lies outside consciousness, which is not what it meant for phenomenology.

2. At one point in the post you seem to imply faintly that I’m nitpicking Metzinger for not using the word “intentionality” in the same way as Brentano and Husserl, and that there may be another valid way to use it.

To this I say…

a. Metzinger made an explicit claim in the book about what Brentano means by intentionality, and in doing so he misrepresented Brentano’s view. I simply pointed out that fact. It is part of the job of book reviewers to note factual mistakes. That doesn’t mean that one factual mistake torpedoes an entire argument (we’ve all made them, no doubt). It just means they need to be noted.

b. Metzinger does have his own concept of intentionality. But as I tried to point out in my article, it involves an almost magical “pulsation” beyond the sphere of autoepistemic closure. Metzinger never remotely explains how such pulsation is possible; I don’t even recall his making any efforts at neurological speculation on the topic, even though that’s usually his preferred route.

The interesting thing about Being No One, for me, is that I might actually have *loved* the book if it had simply been pitched a bit differently.

For example, what if the book had been called something like The Complexity of the Cogito, and had focused on how the supposedly simple pole of consciousness is actually filled with all sorts of subtle dimensions that are occasionally tampered with by involuntary neurological problems, and which might easily be modified in the future by new technologies. And that for this reason, the future of the human species might involve all sorts of now undreamed-of personality aberrations, deliberately selected by future humans for whatever reason. Now that would have been a sympathetic book.

Where he loses me (and it happens on page 1 and never stops) is the way he decides to hitch his wagon to the eliminativist, nihilist, punk rock noir approach to the mind: “there is no self,” “do not have children because the world is nothing but suffering,” etc. These seemed to be nothing but temperamental prejudices of Metzinger grafted onto a framework that by no means entails such darkness. For what is useful in Metzinger is his positive side: his insistence on all the multiple entangled constraints that generate what we often falsely assume to be an ontologically simple res cogitans.

This is why the use of case studies is the most interesting part of his mammoth book (I realize that for neuropsychologists all these cases are well-known, but for most philosophers they are not). But the supposedly ominous philosophical conclusions do not follow from anything he says, and I see no fresh ground broken for themes such as selfhood or substantiality. He really does seem to assume that something can’t be autonomously real if it has causal antecedents. It’s been a year and a half since I read the book, but I can’t remember his even arguing that point.

There is certainly some interest to the book, but the apocalyptic manner in which it was first spoken of in continental circles is a somewhat comical memory for me in retrospect. As Morton once put it about Churchland: “there’s supposed to be scary music playing in the background.” But when you actually watch the movie, it isn’t that scary. You can actually see the wires during many of the special effects.