Phronesis

Carl H. Flygt

October, 2005

We are animals whose natural being is permeated with rationality.

John McDowell

John Searle’s criticism of phenomenology is that it explains next to nothing. It gives rationality no scientific inroad into consciousness and intentionality; it merely describes what it is like to function pre-rationally. I have heard Dreyfus concur with this assessment, and then go on to lobby for what is essentially a political agenda, to promote collaboration in showing how Kant’s pure categories of the understanding grow up out of perceptual a priorities. Presumably, Dreyfus thinks that because most of consciousness is preoccupied with nonconceptual wisdom, philosophy, if it is to be accurate about what it tries to understand, should likewise be so preoccupied.

I think both philosophers have important points which need to be placed in alignment, but I favor Searle’s politics. The point of human institutions, which are something to which we are all committed in a primary way, is to make human being-in-the-world more comfortable, more progressive and more humane. A rational understanding of human consciousness cannot play second fiddle to a perceptual understanding of that consciousness. Our rationally constructed institutions, moreover, will always play a causal role in how we experience our perceptions, but our perceptions will never play a causal role in creating our institutions.

With the primacy of the conceptual thus established, however, one can hardly overstate the importance of the discovery that most of our waking thought is preoccupied with nonconceptual experience, with experience on a lower level of processing than the conceptual. In Aristotle, this sort of thinking is called phronesis. Consider an expert chess player confronting a middle game. The position before him is complicated, nothing he has seen before. How does he think? What are his conscious maxims of action?

Basically, these maxims are a series of conjunctions between a conditional and an effort at universal quantification. “If I put my knight there, he will attack my queen because, all things considered, that will be his best move.” This species of reasoning is not subject to truth conditions (NTC), and thus does not rise to the level of judgment. It is actual reasoning on a pre-conceptual level. The maxims of action, although represented linguistically by means of words, are not full-fledged concepts.

One way to argue for NTC with respect to practical maxims is to summon Jonathan Bennett’s (2003) argument that indicative conditionals lack truth values, and to remember that chess is engaged in an indicative mood. Subjunctive conditionals, which do have truth values, are simply not used in tight situations. If the chess player said to himself, “If he were to move there, I would respond with this,” he would be taking a conceptual liberty not generally available to the coping consciousness. However plausible on the face of it, we must assert that the coping consciousness is confined to indicatives and directives. Coping consciousness is simply not reflective.

An additional way to make the NTC argument is to invoke the fact that the modal predicate “best” has problematic truth conditions. It is generally difficult to represent the logic of “‘x is good’ is true” in the way we can easily represent the logic of “‘x is white’ is true.” The claim that x is white has objective truth conditions, but the claim that x is good does not. Under a conjunction, moreover, no truth conditions for either conjunct renders the whole maxim outside the space of true/false reasoning.

Now, as any existentialist will affirm, all phronesis takes place in tight situations. The world continually forces us to play along with its laws. As worldly engaged beings, we function through perception, not through reason. We act rationally because the game we play is itself rational, not because we represent it under conditions of truth. In phronesis, we are permeated by rationality, but not by our own rationality.

The rationality of the world makes itself known to us through its universalizability. Situations demand of us the best action, all things considered. I’ll stay in bed a little longer because my body appreciates the rest. I guess I’ll get up now because I need to. We continually make a universal object of the world we confront because we set particular situations off against all the possibilities the world affords. Individual objects themselves are likewise universalized. The watch I wear, the pen I use, the hammer I grip represent what they afford me in the moment because they cannot be substituted in that moment by anything else.

Universalizability is a feature of practical reasoning, whereas universal quantification is a feature of formal reasoning. To the best of my knowledge, these two modes of reasoning are incommensurate because the common universal cannot be collapsed. Now I may have something to say about this question of collapsibility, because I have a general theory of conversation. Conversation, on my terms, requires a simultaneous, or at least a rapidly alternating application of both modes of reasoning. X is a conversation if and only if everyone present is in possession of exactly the same mental content. To meet this definition, any conversational content must be produced out of a good (universally constituted) will, and thus be subject to the law of practical reason. Simultaneously, or immediately thereafter, this content must be recognized as true, universally acceptable, and thus be subject to the standards of logic and theoretical reasoning. To accomplish this unification of phronesis and theoretical reasoning, a yet higher level of consciousness must be brought into play.

Phronesis is the form of everyday consciousness. Most of our energy is employed in skillful coping with the objects and contents of the world. What my theory of conversation  purports to do is render imaginative contents and imaginative objects (mental events generally conceived) in themselves as subject to skillful coping as to theoretical reasoning. It does this by enumerating and indexing the a priori conditions on any conversational speech act, and subscribing this theory as a social contract. This is a way of permeating the conversational world with a new order of rationality with which one must cope. What people who take this contract seriously discover quickly is that archetypal, universalized conversation requires much more energy, perhaps an order of magnitude more, than mundane coping. Moreover, it seems only reasonable to suppose that the evolution of consciousness and the brain depends crucially on the intelligent use of energy, and that the more energy that is involved in consciousness, the higher the consciousness will be.

Neural network models of the mammalian brain suggest how levels of representation function in the neocortex. Each level in the cortical hierarchy forms a kind of belief (actually, a temporal percept) about what is going on in the level immediately below it. At the highest level are percepts of the highest type. Consciousness presumably is crucially mediated by the percepts at the highest level. Each level, moreover is highly self-regulated. Anatomical measures show that 80% of the synapses at any cortical level comes from cells in that level. This could help explain the significance of altered states of consciousness and drug-induced hallucination, spiritual dreams and higher mystical consciousness, as well as the threefold increase in the size of the hominid brain over the past three million years. Each level appears highly buffered, and able to absorb a great deal of bias coming from lower levels without destabilizing. But once this buffering is overcome, the system stabilizes in a new and higher modality of representation and function, such as the form of consciousness humans enjoy today. Today’s altered states of consciousness probably contain something of the future form of everyday consciousness.

A theory of conversation is indeed a form of Hegelian rationalism, but it fully recognizes the way in which perception supports self-conscious experience. It is, in fact, primarily interested in producing interesting perceptual phenomena. But it clearly insists that institutional factors outside the agent cause perceptions, and that these institutional factors are the place to intervene if we are to get a science of consciousness.