This book lives on the boundary between the philosophies of action, history and mind. It consists of twelve essays, eleven of which have been previously published, and marks the completion of an aborted philosophical project that began in 1967 with the superb Analytical Philosophy of History. Danto’s initial idea was to write a five-volume analytical philosophy of representations, encompassing the philosophies of history, knowledge, action, art and mind. Despite placing the concept of narrative at the centre of the philosophy of history (where it remains today), and introducing the highly influential notion of a ‘basic action’, this project fell apart in 1981, as Danto became progressively more disenchanted with ‘analytical’ philosophy. As a result, The Body/ Body Problem is all that remains of the never-written fifth volume on mind.

The book’s central claim is that people are essentially beings that represent; and that consequently human knowledge, action and history cannot be understood without the concept of representation. In making this claim, Danto joins hands with those cognitive scientists who maintain that our cognitive access to both our own actions and the external world is mediated by a realm of mental representations. As this is a profoundly Cartesian vision, Danto spends much of the book rebutting two central anti-Cartesian projects: the Eliminative Materialism of Paul and Patricia Churchland; and the ‘Wittgensteinian’ attempt “to reunite bodies with minds and ourselves with both”, which he associates with both Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Anscombe. His various arguments against these projects make for fascinating reading; and they are greatly enhanced by his lovely, langurous, often beautiful writing. However, although Danto’s motto is “The freer the voice, the better the philosophy” – and it would be nice if that were true – I must confess that his arguments left me unconvinced. The root of the trouble is the somewhat scientistic dimension of Danto’s philosophy, which sits uneasily with its aesthetic qualities (indeed, at times it is almost as if Marcel Proust had developed the sympathies of Richard Dawkins.)

The keynote essay of the collection is ‘Action, Knowledge and Representation’, in which Danto attempts to show that the ‘Wittgensteinian’ programme in the philosophy of mind has “failed, and failed definitively”. His target is Anscombe’s account of ‘practical knowledge’, and he contends that he can establish its “wrongness” and thus reveal “the need for their being intentions, whatever may be the problem of their vehicle and location, and whatever may be the philosophical price of countenancing them”. And the price, it transpires, is Cartesianism, for their vehicle is the mental representation. However, this is a price we do not have to pay, for Danto’s criticisms do not make contact with Anscombe’s account.

Practical knowledge, for Anscombe, is the “nonrepresentational and in some way immediate” knowledge that we have of our own intentional actions. What is so striking about Anscombe’s account is that it does away with the need for positing ‘intentions’, and thus the temptation to conceive of these as mental states causally responsible for my bodily movements. For what I have knowledge of is not my ‘intention’ – something in the mind – but rather my intentional action – something in the world. Her central insight is that this practical knowledge is not ‘derived from the object known’ but is rather the ’cause of what it understands’. In standard cases of (non-practical) knowledge, if it is not true that p then I cannot be said to know that p. But in this case, the order is reversed, for if I do not know that I am intentionally acting under description X, then it is not true that I am doing so. It is, then, my knowledge that I am cutting the butter that makes it the case that ‘cutting the butter’ is a true description of my intentional action. Thus practical knowledge does not offer representations of what I am doing but rather constitutes it. So, in this sense of ‘know’, we always know what we are doing, if we do it intentionally.

Danto thinks that this claim is easily refuted by the following example. When my eyes are closed I may think I am cutting the cheese, but because someone has replaced it with margarine, I am in fact not doing so. So, Danto concludes, I can do it without knowing that I am. But this will not do, for my action is surely not intentional under the description ‘cutting the margarine’, and Anscombe’s point applies only to actions that are. What Danto assumes is that I have knowledge of “the sensation of moving my hand in a special cheese-cutting way”; and hence that any claim to know what it is I am doing is liable to error, because this sensation will not always correlate with the action of cutting cheese (as opposed to margarine). However, Anscombe (who never speaks of ‘sensations’) does not understand practical knowledge claims as indefeasible, but rather understands the source of error as lying in the lack of fit between some ‘internal’ state (be it a sensation or whatever) and some ‘external’ state. Error arises when the agent does not perform the action in question and instead does something else that she did not intend to do, such as cutting the margarine instead of the cheese. Danto’s example is a good illustration of just such a case, where there is simply no intentional action (under the relevant description), and so nothing for an internal state to fail to match with.

So, it seems to me that Danto has not taken Anscombe’s claim that that we have non-observational and constitutive knowledge of our whole, embodied intentional action with sufficient seriousness. His talk of ‘sensations’ testifies to this, for the knowledge I have of these is representational and not constitutive.

Danto’s other main claim is that mental representations are necessary if we are to make sense of ourselves as historical beings. The problem is this: we live, as Danto puts it, ‘under different skies’ to those of our predecessors. “Nothing in Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne or Arnold would have prepared anyone for Cubism, or Dada, or German Expression” (nor, we could add, for a world of shopping malls, mobile phones, e-mails and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire). Yet despite this “the species has not evolved for a hundred thousand years”, because “from the perspective of the human genome, humankind has no history, since historical differences do no penetrate the genetic material, which changes only through mutation.” So, it seems at first glance that we are at once inside history and outside of it. The way to resolve this paradox, Danto suggests, is to recognise that although our bodies evolve and so are not in history, our mental representations do not evolve and hence are.

Yet, this conception of biological evolution as an ahistorical process of genetic replication is hardly uncontroversial. It has recently come under devastating attack from numerous quarters. The most impressive of these attacks, in my view, is that of Developmental Systems Theory (DST), which emphasises that from the point of view of the organism’s development, genes are only one of a range of causally efficacious factors. Of equal causal importance are (for instance) the extranuclear chemicals and organelles in the maternal cell, the mother’s reproductive physiology, and a variety of external resources, such as food, water, housing and schooling. All are necessary, and none is sufficient. Given this cascade of developmental factors, DST contends, there is little reason to see the gene as the primary causal factor, and still less to identify the human body with the human genome.

Although I cannot develop DST at any length here, it raises severe problems for Danto’s claim that, qua evolved species, we lie outside of history. By removing the motivation for equating evolutionary change with change in the species’ genetic endowment, DST allows us to accept that the species has been evolving (at a quite extraordinary rate) over the last 100 years. This undercuts his grounds for dualism, for there is now no need to posit a special realm to reconcile the fact that we have changed with the supposed ‘fact’ that ‘from an evolutionary point of view’ we have not. According to DST, we are historical beings not in spite of but because of evolution, for evolution itself is an historical process.

Finally, Danto attempts to save representations from a brand of scientism even harsher than Dawkins’; namely, so-called Eliminative Materialism, the brainchild (as it were) of Paul and Patricia Churchland. This is because the category of ‘representation’ is part of what the Churchlands disparagingly refer to as ‘folk psychology’, the categories of which (they maintain) do not pick out natural kinds, and hence should be replaced by the more robust categories of a future neurophysiology. Danto has to resist this strategy, for if folk psychology its ditched, so is talk of representations. His response is to deploy a motif that recurs throughout his work: a theory is only good if it can account for itself. Neurophysiological categories, however, will not be able to even describe the scientific research program of Eliminative Materialism, because it is of the essence of science to offer representations of the world. So even if the scientists of tomorrow represent themselves in the constrained idiom of a future neurophysiology, they will still have to be representing themselves that way – and representation is a category of folk psychology.

Leaving aside the question of whether this is a reasonable constraint to place on philosophical theories, this argument begs the question. For Danto assumes that certain folk psychological categories can successfully pick out natural kinds – in this case, the natural kind ‘scientific activity’ – when this is precisely what the Churchlands’ deny.

More seriously, however, Danto gives us an analysis of the concept of representation sufficiently reductive as to invite neurophysiological elimination. For many years Danto has distinguished between representations and their content; in other words, between what representations are and what they are of. Ontologically, representations are just brain states, and it is the signal mistake of much anti-materialist philosophy of mind to confuse these with their content. This content does not consist of brain states but rather of causal relations between brain and world. So, on this picture, my representation (my brain state) is genuinely of my house (as opposed to the illusion of it) only if my house is causally responsible for it. As nowhere in Danto’s story is there any indication that representation consists of anything more than this, the groundwork has been laid for replacing talk of representations with that of causal relations between brain states and physical objects. So, far from giving us reason to doubt the Eliminativist project, Danto offers grounds in its favour.

Finally, I should mention that the body/ body problem of the title refers to Danto’s unorthodox reading of Descartes, which questions standard interpretations of the Meditations wherein the mind is pictured as an immaterial substance existing in some as yet unspecified relationship to the body. Although Descartes might once have held something like this view, Danto draws attention to those passages where Descartes speaks of the mind as “so tightly bound up and united with [the body] that it forms with it what is almost a single entity”. This suggests to Danto that the so-called mind/ body problem is, in fact, the problem of how to reconcile two different bodies: the body as an embodied mind, an agent (the minded body); and the body as a physiological system that we lack control of but which nonetheless affects us (the mindless body). Danto offers us no kind of reconciliation, however. In his picture, the second is as distinct from the first as it was from the immaterial res cogitans. So, although Danto’s Descartes is a Materialist, he is still a Cartesian Materialist; in fact, he looks very much like a seventeenth century version of Danto himself.

Despite the worries I have expressed here, there is much of value in Danto’s book. His attempt to show how the philosophies of action, history and mind connect with each other seems to me just the right way to go. And there is plenty of good material here. In particular, there is a fascinating discussion of psychoanalytic explanation, where Danto shows that Freudian explanation does not simply explain action be means of reasons which the agent happens to be unaware of, but in terms of mental causes that, necessarily, are no kind of reason at all. This is an insight that philosophers and social scientists given to the postulation of ‘unconscious reasons’ would greatly benefit from.

There is, in addition, a discussion of the prospects for the philosophy of history. Although Danto gives the impression (in his essay ‘The Decline and Fall of the Analytical Philosophy of History’) that this branch of philosophy has no future, he is clearly talking about the philosophy of history solely qua the debate concerning the legitimacy of explanation by ‘covering laws’. The moment of this debate has no doubt passed, but this is hardly reason to think that the philosophy of history should not have a glittering future; particularly, I would add, if conducted in concert with the philosophies of science and action. The great value of Danto’s book, for me at least, lies in its demonstration of one way in which this project could be realised.

© 2001 Adrian Haddock

Categories: Philosophical

Tags: Personality