Some critics of intellectualism argue that perception cannot be conceptual, because if perception were conceptual, then perception would be a form of judgement. But the idea that perception is judgement over-intellectualizes perception.[13]
This is how I understand Gareth Evan’s (1982) argument in connection with the Müller-Lyer illusion. You can experience the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion as different in length, even when you know, and so have not the even the weakest inclination to deny, that the lines are the same in length. The visual experience is one thing, and judgement another; hence experience is not conceptual.
Now, this is an example of an apparent disagreement between what you know to be the case (judgement) and how things look (experience). Things look precisely the way you know they are not. Experience and the judgement are in conflict. This shows, I would have thought, that experience, and the corresponding content, share the same kind of content. The fact that they are in apparent conflict shows that they are not somehow incommensurable. So if the one is conceptual, then so is the other.
But more important, for our discussion here, is that Evans seems to assume that concepts can only be in play if they are applied in judgement. Since experience is not judgement, there is no way for concepts to gear in. But that’s to accept the basic claim of the intellectualist—judgement is the only way for concepts to get into the act—not to challenge it.
So Evans’ argument against the idea that perceptual experience is conceptual—what we can think of as Evans’s anti-intellectualism—actually takes what I am calling intellectualism for granted. It takes for granted that there is only one genuine and legitimate mode of exercise of conceptual understanding, namely the judgemental.
HubertDreyfus (e.g., 2013) is responsible for a widely-influential criticism of intellectualism that is crypto-intellectualist in just this way.
Reasons, principles, and explicit knowledge guide perception and activity, according to Dreyfus, but only in the case of the novice. The expert, in contrast, is one who is engaged, in the flow. The expert, having mastered the rules and the concepts, has no further use for them. The expert is able to respond to the solicitations of situation and environment with no need for conscious thought or deliberate judgement.
A favourite example is that of the lightening chess player. There is literally no time, claims Dreyfus, for the chess player to analyse the situation and decide how to move. Moves are made in a flash. To suppose that the move is guided by reasons or judgement is to fall prey to a myth of the mental, according to which a mind-faculty, a faculty of judgement, say, accompanies our doings and is responsible for them being expressive of competence, intelligence, and understanding. For Dreyfus this idea is a dead giveaway of a distinct type of intellectualist psychologism. Yes, Dreyfus grants, if you ask the expert afterwards, why he or she made this move and not that one, he can give you a reason. But we have no more ground to suppose the reason was in operation before the player switched into the intellectual mode in response to the question than we do to suppose that the refrigerator light is always on because it is on whenever you open the fridge to look.
According to Dreyfus, understanding or reason operate only if there are explicit acts of rule-following, or judgement, that accompany, or even precede, every act. But why believe that? The baseball player doesn’t need to be thinking about the rules for it to be the case that what he does is subject to them and is carried out, so to speak, in their light. The rules are there—in the form of umpires and rule books, and also dictionaries and courts of law, and earnest disagreement among participants—and we have access to them as need arises. The fact that we can use them, and that we care about their correct use, is all that is needed for it to be the case that we act under their influence. The influence is not causal. It is normative.
Dreyfus goes further and insists that whether or not it is always legitimate to demand that the phronesis, as he calls the expert, invoking Aristotle, justifies his or her actions, it will not in general be possible for him or her to do so. You can’t make explicit the myriad rules governing how we stand or react or explore or decide because, as a matter of fact, there are no such general rules. There is nothing to be made explicit. At best the chess master is likely to point to the situation on the board and exclaim, look! This situation requires this move!
But why is not this exactly the kind of reply that is required? Recall Wittgenstein’s (1953, §88) example of “Stand over there!” This can be a perfectly precise command, as exact as rationality can require, even when it is not the case that one can specify, to the millimetre, say, where it is one is supposed to stand. For certain purposes, in certain contexts, one may need more precision. But in other contexts the demand for precision on the order of millimetres would be unreasonable. And so my thought here is that it is to set too high a standard on what it would be to have a reason for acting to demand that one can frame it independently of the situation one is in. It is precisely an over-intellectualized conception of what it would be to have a reason, or to make use of a rule, to suppose that rules and reasons need to be context-free and situation-independent, known in advance and applied, as it were, from outside one’s engaged play[14]—just as it would be to over-intellectualize the intellect in general to suppose that concepts only gear in in the setting of judgement.
Here’s the point: the use of rules themselves—which for Dreyfus is the hallmark of the detached attitude of the intellect—is itself an activity that admits of mastery and expertise and so also flow. And so we cannot insist that rule-use marks the boundary between engagement and detachment.
But once we allow that rules are used, and reasons proffered, from the standpoint of our engagement—from the inside—, then we need not fear that we have committed ourselves to an over-intellectualized conception of what it is to be engaged, just because we allow that we understand and can reflect on what we are doing.
Notice again that Dreyfus’s picture—a picture he may take over from Heidegger (1927) and Merleau-Ponty (1945)—only counts as evidence against the idea that concepts and reasons and rules gear into perception and skilled action if we suppose that the intellectualist is right, that there is only one way for understanding to get into the act—namely, in the form of explicit deliberate judgement.
And notice that this way of rejecting intellectualism—on the part of Dreyfus, and other existential phenomenologists, and perhaps also Evans—pays a high price. For it must reject the idea that understanding and reason have any place at all outside the range of explicit deliberative reason, and so it has to give up the intellectualist’s insight, namely that in our engaged, perceptual, and active lives, even when we are experts, even when we are skilled, our performance gives expression to knowledge, intelligence, and understanding. By accepting the intellectualist thesis that judgement alone is the only true way for concepts to gear in, Dreyfus and co. feel they are compelled to reject the idea that our lives as a whole, beyond the confines of deliberate exercise of reason and understanding, can be, or are, at one with our intellects.
What existential phenomenology may find difficult to appreciate—at least in Dreyfus’s version of the position—is that conflict, disagreement, and disturbance of flow are themselves business-as-usual; they are normal moments in the way that even the expert carries on. We saw this in the language case. Expertise is not immunity; if anything, it is an evolved opportunity for new forms of vulnerability. Engagement is, as I shall put it, always manifestly fragile. That is, the liability to slip up, to get things wrong, is a built into the nature of the undertaking—of any undertaking. To go wrong is not, as a general rule, to stop playing the game—it is not the game’s abeyance—it is rather a moment in the development of play. But let’s go back to language. We don’t stop communicating when we fail to understand each other. At least that is not usually the case. Misunderstanding is an opportunity for more communication. Clarifying, reformulating, trying again, like criticism, are things we use language to do. The fragility is intrinsic and manifest. It doesn’t mark out the game’s limits. It marks one of its modalities.
I stated earlier that understanding in the active and perceptual modes leaves no room for the application of understanding in the judgemental mode. I suggested this was a reason for thinking that judgement can’t be operating behind the scenes when we perceive and act. But we can amend this now in light of our consideration of fragility. It is internal to the very character of our perceptual and active involvements that they are liable, not so much to breakdown, in Dreyfus’s sense, as to error, confusion, and other stutter-steps that require precisely that one now think about what one is seeing and what one is doing. Judgement and thought can, in this sense, live cheek-by-jowl with perception and action without, therefore, getting in their way.
In any case, Dreyfus’s criticism of intellectualism fails. But it does so precisely because he fails to break with the over-intellectualized conception of the intellect at the heart of intellectualism. Dreyfus’s anti-intellectualism fails because intellectualism fails. It is, in reality, a species of intellectualism. Neither Dreyfus, nor his would-be opponent, can do justice to the ways in which understanding operates outside the narrow domain of explicit reasoning. Both sides fail to accommodate the phenomenon of fragility.