Abstract
In recent debates about the nature of non-conceptual content, the Kantian account of intuition in the first Critique has been seen as a sort of founding doctrine for both conceptualist and non-conceptualist positions. In this paper, I begin by examining recent representative versions of the Kantian conceptualist (John McDowell) and Kantian non-conceptualist (Robert Hanna) positions, and suggest that the way the debate is commonly construed by those on both sides misses a much broader and more important conception of non-conceptual content, one for which resources can be found in Husserl’s later thought. Husserl’s account of the object as “transcendental clue” [Transzendentaler Leitfaden] in the context of his later genetic phenomenology suggests a less reductive account of non-conceptual aspects of experience that respects central insights of Kant’s transcendental idealism but does not reduce the role of the non-conceptual to a mere formally determined, not-yet-conceptualized “fodder.”
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- 1.
This is not to suggest that McDowell supports a non-conceptualist position in opposition to such coherentism. His explicit goal in Mind and World is to develop a middle position with regard to spontaneity which avoids both coherentism and the “myth of the given.”
- 2.
As Walter Hopp has put this point, “there must be something that the experience possesses that the mere thought lacks, and this feature, far from being a mere sensation that attaches to a propositional content the experience shares with the belief […] is what distinguishes experience epistemically” (Hopp, 2010, pp. 13–14). As Hopp goes on to argue, the appeal to demonstratives—a very common response to such objections in the literature—does not actually answer the objection, since I may perceive two phenomenologically or epistemically distinguishable states of affairs which have identical demonstrative content.
- 3.
As McDowell characterizes it, “the idea of the given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere. The extra extent of the space of reasons is supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from outside the realm of thought. But we cannot really understand the relations in virtue of which a judgment is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts: relations such as implication or probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual capacities. The attempt to extend the scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere cannot do what it is supposed to do” (McDowell, 1996, p. 7).
- 4.
See the introduction to Crowell, 2001, especially pp. 13–19.
- 5.
Cf. McDowell, 1996, pp. 70–72.
- 6.
Although McDowell attributes his conception of Bildung to Gadamer, he does not to my knowledge offer an account of Bildung in terms of constitution anywhere in his own work.
- 7.
McDowell claims, for instance, “human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons, or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of that by noting that the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orientation to the world” (McDowell, 1996, p. 125).
- 8.
For more on this point, see Gail Soffer’s critique of Sellars’ position against non-linguistic intentionality in Soffer, 2003.
- 9.
For an account of the problem of the term “representation” in Kant and Husserl, see Julia Jansen’s contribution to this volume.
- 10.
Cf. Hopp, 2010, p. 13.
- 11.
This would seem to be a version of the position McDowell critiques as Davidson’s conception that “experience can be nothing but an extra-conceptual impact on sensibility” (see McDowell, 1996, p. 14), but a discussion of this critique is outside our scope here.
- 12.
Cf. Luft, 2007, p. 381.
- 13.
Cf. Lohmar, 1998, p. 263.
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Rump, J. (2014). Kant, Husserl, and the Case for Non-Conceptual Content. In: Fabbianelli, F., Luft, S. (eds) Husserl und die klassische deutsche Philosophie. Phaenomenologica, vol 212. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01710-5_19
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