Abstract
This chapter argues that traditional philosophy of mind turns on misrepresenting the I-you-relationship as a subject-object-relationship. This leads to interminable paradox and makes accounting for interpersonal understanding, the heart of human intelligibility, impossible. Detailing the absurdity of inferentialist accounts of understanding others, I show how this understanding is an essentially moral matter, that is, in itself a form of openness to and engaged caring for the other. For example, the very perception of suffering as suffering is already a form of compassion. Failures to act compassionately and, more generally, apparent failures to understand others, are forms of repressing one’s own caring-understanding, rather than mere absences of understanding. The confused subject-object-perspective in philosophy arises from and mirrors the moral-existential confusion in everyday life created through repression.
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- 1.
Nykänen (this volume) argues that the subject-object problematic provides the form of philosophy as such—that is, of philosophy as almost exclusively conceived in our tradition—and that this form is morally determined precisely by the exclusion of the I-you-perspective. Leoni (this volume) underlines how the ‘subjective’ is always ‘objectified’, and vice versa, rendering the oscillation between them simultaneously inescapable and illusory. In my view, the deadlocks Leoni describes, which tend, as he notes, to turn comprehension into incomprehension, arise because the I-you-perspective is excluded, as Nykänen explains. My chapter aims to bring out aspects of this manufacture of confusion.
- 2.
‘For the first several weeks after birth, the majority of the baby’s awake alert time is spent in and around feeding … What will he see? It turns out that … during feeding, mothers spend about 70 percent of the time facing and looking at their infants. Accordingly, what he is most likely to look at and see is his mother’s face, especially her eyes’ (Stern, 1977, p. 36). I don’t pretend to decide philosophical questions by appeal to empirical evidence; philosophical puzzlement concerns not what the facts are but how one understands them. Nonetheless, reminders of simple facts sometimes help loosen the grip of apparently ‘natural’, but actually quite crazy pictures.
- 3.
I avoid the standard philosophical term ‘intersubjectivity’, for insofar as ‘subject’ and ‘object’ mutually define each other, one cannot conceive a ‘between’ subjects with no object involved. When ‘I’ and ‘you’ meet, we’re (primarily) neither subjects nor objects.
- 4.
Philosophers have typically treated eyesight as a model for all perception and cognition, including the ‘vision’ of philosophical truth itself (cf. the essays in Levin, 1993), but I know of no extended philosophical discussion of the phenomenon of meeting someone’s eyes. The experience of looking at, and being looked at by, others, has been discussed, notably by Sartre (1966, pp. 340–400), who brilliantly reveals the aporias arising from trying to conceive interpersonal relations on the subject-object model. Seeing no other way of conceiving the matter, however, Sartre declares these aporias to be inherent in the human condition, rather than arising from confused philosophical fantasies about it. This illustrates the dominance of the quasi-solipsistic subject-object paradigm, or rather delusion, in philosophy, in which encounters between ‘I’ and ‘you’ are reduced to games the ‘I’ plays with ‘its’ perceptions or objects or meanings. For another illustration, consider that Plato, on the (to my knowledge) only two occasions when he mentions the phenomenon of looking into someone’s eyes (Alcibiades I, 133a; Phaedrus, 255d—both in Plato, 1997), fastens on the same curious feature, that when looking into your eyes I may see a small reflection of myself in your pupil!
- 5.
- 6.
For mainstream approaches, see, for example, Apperly (2010), Carruthers and Smith (1996), Davies and Stone (1995), Goldman (2006). There is of course also a diverse literature critical of the inferentialist mainstream, for example, Hutto (2008), Leudar and Costall (2009), and Ratcliffe (2007). Some of these critics—for example, Gallagher (2008), Krueger and Overgaard (2013)—think of themselves as presenting alternative, ‘direct social perception’ accounts of interpersonal understanding; see Spaulding (2015) and the other articles in the same journal special issue for a sense of the current state of this debate. As I’ll explain below, the crucial difference between this literature (further references below) and my approach, some obvious similarities notwithstanding, concerns its general neglect of the morally determined nature of interpersonal, and therefore also of philosophical, understanding.
- 7.
Cook (1969) makes a similar point.
- 8.
Indeed, the very idea of ‘colourless behaviour’ or ‘mere bodily movements’ is perplexing. It isn’t just that we don’t normally see it; it is hard to know what ‘it’ would even be. Cf. Ebersole’s discussion (1967) of the apparent impossibility of finding or constructing examples of ‘mere’ bodily movements that wouldn’t be involuntary, like spasms, and even a spasm is a particular kind of movement, not ‘mere’ movement. Summarising his discussion, Ebersole underlines the abstraction and specificity—contradicting the supposedly basic character—of the philosophical idea of the ‘body’; ‘A domino is a piece of wood seen from a special point of view. A person is not a body seen from a special point of view. Rather, a body is a person seen from a special point of view’ (1967, p. 303).
- 9.
For further analysis of the ‘private language’ considerations, see Read (this volume) and Toivakainen (this volume).
- 10.
- 11.
This is a crucial theme in Wittgenstein’s later writings, as is well brought out in Nykänen (2014b, 2018), with whose radically ethical understanding on the I-you-perspective I essentially agree. Let me note that the point about understanding not ‘consisting’ in anything, and my whole discussion, might seem to be (but isn’t in fact) ‘disproved’ by the fact that computer-programs are, apparently, to some extent able to discriminate facial expressions, for example, to distinguish different kinds of smiles, telling smiles masking frustration from smiles of delight (Hoque, McDuff, & Picard, 2012). This is quite a feat of engineering, but hardly surprising as such, as there are certainly characteristic (although not exceptionless) differences between typical cases of different kinds of smiles; polite or frustrated smiles don’t usually include ‘smiling eyes’, for example, and the latter can be coded in terms of the movement of muscles around the eye. But the salient point is that it is only because we understand and care about each other, are moved by each other in all kinds of ways, for example, to smile, that we make, and can make, these distinctions, and that some of us may then be motivated to build machines that can simulate something like our ability here. And even if the machine tended (as reported) to be more reliable than untrained human observers in distinguishing certain kinds of smiles from others under certain conditions, that doesn’t show that it understood anything about smiles or people. How (on what criterion) did the experimenters decide the machine was more reliable than human subjects in discriminating between different kinds of smiles? By using their own understanding of the people smiling, obviously. And that the machine was programmed to discriminate cases (not: understand them) based on various measurable indications of muscle-movement etc., doesn’t mean that our understanding works in the same way; my earlier discussion should have shown the hopeless paradoxes one gets into if one tries to conceive understanding of others as built up from discreet pieces of information of this kind.
- 12.
This isn’t mere social decorum; people are often determined not to lose their cool, not to allow themselves to feel too much, even in situations where no one would mind, or where there is no-one to witness it.
- 13.
This critical literature includes authors inspired by Wittgenstein, for example, Cockburn (2009), Hertzberg (2009), Overgaard (2007), and authors in the phenomenological tradition, starting with Scheler (1954) and Merleau-Ponty (2002) and comprising the ‘direct social perception’-theorists referred to in endnote 6 above. For further ‘intersubjective’, ‘interactional’ or ‘second personal’ approaches in philosophy, cognitive science and developmental psychology, see De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), Foolen, Lüdtke, Racine, and Zlatev (2012), Hobson (2002), Reddy (2010), Satne and Roepstorff (2015) and the other articles in the same journal special issue; Thompson (2001), Trevarthen (1979), and Zlatev, Racine, Sinha, and Itkonen (2008).
- 14.
Kristjánsson (2004), for example, distinguishes ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ in this way, but there’s no well-defined standard use of these terms in the literature.
- 15.
- 16.
In repression, ‘collective’ and ‘private’ aren’t opposed, but two faces of the same depersonalising movement. One repressively privatises one’s responses, distancing oneself from the other by reducing her to the ‘object’ one ‘subjectively’ reacts to, but one does this precisely by representing the situation in general terms collectively available in the culture. For example, I turn viciously on someone and excuse my brutality towards her by saying ‘I couldn’t help myself [1]; when a person behaves so rudely [2], one just gets so angry [3].’ I thus [1] privatise/subjectivise my response, [2] objectivise the other, and [3] refer to collective ‘understandings’ of how ‘one’ responds in situations of particular kinds, and in each moment I disclaim responsibility for how I responded to the other; [1] claims that I can’t help my responses, [2] that the other was the cause of my response, [3] that everyone responds in the same way. For more on repression, depersonalisation and collectivity, see Backström (2014), Backström and Nykänen (2016), Nykänen (2009, 2014a) .
- 17.
For further discussion of the pervasive hostility to truthful communication and understanding, see Backström (forthcoming).
- 18.
- 19.
For more on such essentially misfelt/misrecognised responses, see Backström (2019).
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Backström, J. (2019). Philosophy of Mind and/as the Repression of Interpersonal Understanding. In: Backström, J., Nykänen, H., Toivakainen, N., Wallgren, T. (eds) Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_9
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