Anthony C. Adler

Nov. 23, 1998

(lightly edited: June 23, 2014)

The Ontological Neutrality of Language

as the Basis of McDowell's "Unboundedness of the Conceptual"

2

I

In his book "Mind and World," John McDowell tries to account for the relation of

experience to thinking without allowing the kind of dualisms that afflict both realist and

coherentist pictures. While he addresses himself primarily to such contemporary analytic

philosophy as Davidson and Quine, Hegel appears as one of the main influences on his

thought. This kinship appears most clearly if we compare McDowell’s "conceptual

unboundedness" with Hegel’s "absolute spirit." “Conceptual unboundedness” involves

both the claim that the space of rational relations cannot extend beyond the space of

concepts --- and thus that a non-conceptual content cannot rationally legitimate

conceptual judgements ---, and that the rational constraint to conceptual thinking which is

provided by receptive experience must belong within the conceptual. Through these

gestures, the form (rationality) and the content (empirical determination) of thinking

come to coincide absolutely. This brings us very near to Hegel’s absolute spirit or

absolute knowing, as it appears at the end of the Phänomenologie des Geistes. In a

similar fashion, absolute knowing, the last stage in the development of spirit, renders the

form and content of spirit coextensive. As Hegel explains; “This last shape of Spirit ---

the Spirit which at the same time gives its complete and true content the form of the Self

and thereby realizes its Notion as remaining in its Notion in this realization--- this is

absolute spirit; it is Spirit that knows itself in the shape of Spirit, or a comprehensive

knowing [das begreifende Wissen]” For Hegel as for McDowell, the conceptual is the

space within which all essential opposition between form and content disappear, without

however the two collapsing into a flat identity.

3

McDowell certainly recognizes the Hegelian implications of conceptual

unboundedness. At the end of the second lecture, he explains;

It is central to Absolute Idealism to reject the idea that the conceptual realm has

an outer boundary, and we have arrived at a point from which we could start to

domesticate the rhetoric of that philosophy. Consider, for instance, this remark

of Hegel’s: ‘In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other.” This expresses

exactly the image I have been using, in which the conceptual is unbounded;

there is nothing outside it.1

Yet even while McDowell agrees with what is perhaps the most far-reaching

consequence of Hegelian idealism, he has quite a different idea about what should be the

style, manner and goal of philosophy. McDowell sees his own work as a cure for

“philosophical anxieties.” He seeks nothing else than, in the words he takes from

Wittgenstein, “the discovery that gives philosophy peace.” Because he, like Wittgenstein,

denies that philosophy has any business in the pursuit of positive knowledge, and limits

its role to healing self-inflicted wounds in the fabric of thinking, he must then also deny

the need for a “constructive philosophy.” As he suggests in the preface, “constructive

philosophy” is nothing more than the misguided attempt to provide an answer for “how

possible?” questions “whose felt urgency derives from a frame of mind that, if explicitly

thought through, would yield materials for an argument that what the questions are asked

about is impossible.” Constructive philosophy, then, is always the result of a

misunderstanding. In the fifth lecture, McDowell gives a more comprehensive account of

the difference between “constructive philosophy” and his own approach. Both are

considered as attempts to find a solution to “dualisms.” Yet whereas the former begins by

standing on one side of the dualistic divide, and then tries to construct the other position

out of its own, providing in this way a “revisionist” picture in which the gulf seems to

1 John McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 44.

4

disappear, the latter leaves the dualism intact, but in such a way that it no longer appears

troubling or problematic, and no longer even calls for “constructive philosophy.”2

Hegel is certainly no less amenable to “constructive philosophy” than McDowell.

We might understand the Phänomenologie des Geistes as a demonstration of the

inadequacy of every one-sided manifestation of spirit, where one side of a dualism

conceives of the other in terms of itself. Yet Hegel also could not accept the modest and

"domesticated" role that McDowell assigns to philosophy. For even as the

Phenomenology shows the inadequacy of every explicit or implicit attempt at

"constructive philosophy," Hegel nevertheless insists on the importance of displaying, in

a systematic manner, the entire series of such failed attempts, going all the way from

"sense certainty," where the dualism between the form and content of thinking appears in

its most hopeless opposition, to "absolute knowing," the point of their reconciliation. In

the preface, and as part of an attempt to explain the place of the Phenomenology within

his system, Hegel explains the need to follow through these intermediate constructions.

The Phenomenology of Spirit, he claims, takes as its starting point the appearance of

science, "the crown of the world of Spirit," as a simple, not-yet-actualized notion.3 Its

task, then, is to describe the process through which the mere notion of science becomes

actual, explicitly realizing its content as for-itself rather than merely in-itself. As he

explains;

It is this coming-to-be of Science as such or of knowledge, that is described in

this Phenomenology of Spirit. Knowledge in its first phase, or immediate Spirit,

is the non-spiritual, i.e. sense-consciousness. In order to become genuine

knowledge, to beget the element of Science which is the pure Notion of Science

itself, it must travel a long way and work its passage.4

2 Ibid., p. 94-95. 3 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, New York, 1977, p. 12. 4 Hegel, p. 15.

5

In the next paragraph, he speaks of this process as Bildung. McDowell's theory of

"second nature" also draws directly on this untranslatable German concept. Yet the way

in which McDowell appropriates this concept only suggests all the more clearly the

difference between his approach and Hegel's. We can reject the need for constructive

philosophy outright, McDowell explains in the preface, because "The bare idea of

Bildung ensures that the autonomy of meaning is not inhuman, and that should eliminate

the tendency to be spooked by the very idea of norms or demands of reason." The "bare

idea," the wholly unrealized concept of Bildung already provides a sufficient inocculation

against philosophical woes. There is no need for it to realize itself as a process. It is a

point of rest, and peace, rather than departure.

For Hegel, the “unboundedness” of the conceptual makes it impossible to treat the

philosopher as an inessential moment outside of the texture of thinking. Instead, his own

Phaenomenology must assume the task of enacting spirit by bringing about its realization.

Since the development of spirit is itself the process of making itself explicit for itself ---

becoming not only in itself but for itself --- he cannot treat the philosophical explication

of spirit as inessential to spirit being what it is. McDowell similarly refuses what he calls

a “sideways on” picture, where the philosophical observer would have an outside view of

self-contained conceptual schemes confronting a non-conceptual reality. Yet this same

refusal leads him to see the philosopher as wholly inessential to, rather than identical

with, the texture of thinking.

Hegel indeed has sound philosophical reasons for making explicit the

development of spirit. McDowell does not give such compelling reasons for his own

position, nor does he even acknowledge the violence domesticization he imposes on

6

Hegel. Instead, he simply points to our “Wittgensteinean world,” as if it were a matter of

course that we must do things differently. Yet we cannot help feel that in a certain way he

is right in this, and that a certain immediate-felt “philosophical anxiety” peculiar to our

own age forces the philosopher to relinquish the more exalted garb of the German

Idealists.

It is troubling, though, that in this way an immediate philosophical anxiety seems

to force us to relinquish the Hegelian task of tarrying with the mediate moments that

constitute the immediate element of our philosophical thinking. We can only dismiss this

anxiety at risk of giving in to an anachronistic Romantic desire to restore philosophy to

its past greatness. Yet should we go along with this feeling, however, we are forced to

sever the ties that bind our present element of thinking --- the element in which all

traditional philosophical problems seem to dissolve --- with the past, and then go on to

posit it as an a-historical absolute.5 As a result, we find ourselves in a stalemate between

two kinds of philosophical thinking, one which has no relation to the present, and the

other no relation to the past. Without contact, they can go about their business

indefinitely.

In what follows, I hope to show one way out of this impasse. On the one hand, I

wish to provide a more satisfying philosophical account of McDowell's modest,

Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy. I will show that there is indeed a significant

difference between "absolute spirit" and "conceptual unboundedness," and that the latter

neither requires, nor could even allow, the dialectical work of explicating intermediate

moments. On the other hand, I will extract from the element of conceptual

5 Even a thorough going historicism can posit itself as an ahistorical absolute.

7

unboundedness a framework which will show both the need and possibility of situating it

within a history of intermediate formations.

II

The starting point of "Mind and World" is the fairly self-evident, though not

uncontroversial, insight that thinking is of a twofold nature. Its structure is spontaneous,

rational, and conceptual, but it also refers to a kind of experience which is different from

itself, receptive rather spontaneous, sensible rather than rational. This creates great

philosophical difficulties. How is it, we want to explain, that thinking can get outside of

itself, and establish a rational connection with what is not itself rationally structured.

"Bald naturalism" provides one way out of these difficulties by simply denying at the

outset that spontaneity is sui generis, and explaining everything through natural causality.

McDowell rejects this kind of approach. It is important for him that the functional

opposition between spontaneity and receptivity appears clearly, and that the philosophical

dilemma it generates come to the fore.

He develops this dilemma in the following way. First, he follows Davidson in

rejecting the Myth of the Given. The Myth of the Given is the claim that the space of

reasons extends beyond the conceptual sphere, and that, in this way, a non-conceptual

experience can provide a justification or warrant for a conceptual judgement. The

criticism of this position rests on the assumption that a non-conceptual causality, the kind

of causality that is necessary to explain how a non-conceptual given could constrain the

exercise of our spontaneous capacity for conceptual judgement, could only consist in a

brute impact from the exterior, and thus offer at most exculpation but not justification.

Such an argument might seem to enfold circular reasoning around the dogmatic

8

assumption, central to a subjectivist ontology, that reasons are necessarily conceptual.

Yet its crux is that, assuming reasons originate in the conceptual sphere, we can only

draw a limit around the conceptual at the price of also delimiting reasons; the very fact of

there being a boundary requires a causality of impingement, of brute impact from the

outside, rather than the causality of reasons. In this way, the rejection of the Myth of the

Given challenges a pervasive dogma of a subjectivist, or "mentalist" outlook --- namely,

the idea the "subjective" sphere of the conceptual could stand in a rational relation to the

non-conceptual, objective, realm of nature.

While McDowell accepts these arguments against the Myth of the Given, he

rejects Davidson's "coherentist" picture of a conceptual sphere which has "no rational

restraint, but only causal influence from the outside."6 Davidson, he believes, fails to take

seriously the concern originally motivating the Myth of the Given. This is the concern

that "if spontaneity is not subject to rational constraint from the outside… then we cannot

make it intelligible to ourselves how exercises of spontaneity can represent the world at

all."7 With this, the dilemma comes into clear view. On the one hand, the idea of rational

constraint from outside of the conceptual sphere is incoherent. On the other hand,

however, the idea of a conceptual sphere without rational constraint is equally

unsatisfactory. The way out, McDowell will claim, is to place the rational constraint

within the sphere of the conceptual, and thus not only deny the space of reasons as an

extension beyond the space of the conceptual, but deny that there is any non-conceptual

sphere beyond the conceptual. Or in other words, what is necessary is to deny that there

are any boundaries at all that define the space of thinking and separate the conceptual and

6 McDowell, p. 14. 7 McDowell, p. 17.

9

non-conceptual, spontaneity and receptivity. This is what is meant by the unboundedness

of the conceptual.

With this notion of "conceptual unboundedness" McDowell at once holds on to

spontaneity and receptivity as two aspects of thinking, refusing the temptation to collapse

one into the other, but at the same time maintains that there is no "ontological gap"

between the two that needs to be overcome. Even the passive experiences of the inner and

outer senses, "are already equipped with conceptual content."8 While the "element" of the

conceptual reaches everywhere, and has always already structured every kind of possible

experience, this does not mean that all experience is merely "conceptual" and

"spontaneous."

This tells us what "conceptual unboundedness" is supposed to do, but not how it

should do this. Perhaps it would seem as though McDowell's therapeutic and anti-

constructivist leanings must keep him from satisfying us on this account. How could we

explain how the conceptual actually structures different kinds of experience without

constructing a bridge from passive experience to the conceptual? Without an ontological

gap, nothing needs explaining. I would argue, though, that while McDowell's notion of

the conceptual precludes any genetic account of a mediating process through which it is

able to do what is asked of it, this doesn't mean that it is entirely philosophical neutral or

without presupposition. This point is less obvious than may at first appear. For indeed,

since "conceptual unboundedness" not only necessarily precludes a "sideways-on" picture

of the "thinking subject" in contact with the world, but also dismisses the need for a

process of mediation bridging over ontological gaps, it would seem then to preempt every

foothold we could have to render it explicit. It's not only impossible to render objectively,

10

but lacks movement within its element. In order, then, to explicate the philosophical

presuppositions of the element of "conceptual unboundedness," we must allow this very

immediacy to appear as a presupposition. This is what I now propose to do. Looking at

McDowell's solution to the problem of "inner sense," I will try to elaborate the conditions

under which this solution is possible.

For McDowell, the integration of "inner sense" into conceptual structures presents

special difficulties, and in this way serves as a litmus test for his theory. Unlike with

"outer experience," the object of "inner experience" does not seem to enjoy any

independence from experience. If we wish to hold on to this relatively self-evident

phenomenological observation, we are tempted to conceive of the objects of inner-

experience as "private objects" --- bits of given that are constituted entirely by the private

experience of the subject, and which thus can stand in no relation to a shared domain of

concepts. If, on the other hand, we follow Wittgenstein in rejecting such a picture, we are

compelled either to deny that "inner experiences" constitute any kind of awareness

whatsoever, or to regard them as referring in the end to objective states of affairs --- such

as body states. Both solutions are philosophically dissatisfying; the first because it

amounts, as McDowell puts it, to the "embarrassing philosophical strategy of 'feigning

anaesthesia'," and the latter because it is not a solution at all, but a surrender of the

original premise, and one which moreover requires a labored and artificial picture.

Because inner experience does not anticipate its situation within an objective reality, we

are forced to choose between its immediate objectivity for us and an objectivity

accessible to all.

McDowell's own solution to this dilemma is described in the following paragraph;

8 McDowell, p. 25.

11

We could not credit a subject with a capacity to use, say, the concept of pain in

judgements of "inner experience" if she did not understand how the

circumstance that those judgements concern fits into the world at large. What

that requires is that the subject must understand her being in pain as a particular

case of a general type of state of affairs, someone's being in pain. So she must

understand that the conceptual capacity drawn on in the relevant "inner

experiences" is not restricted to its role in "inner experience" and judgements of

"inner experience": not restricted, that is, to its first-person present-tense role.

This yields what we can think of as a limiting case of the structure of awareness

and object. We can understand an impression of "inner sense" in which the

concept of, say, pain is drawn into play as an awareness of the circumstance that

the subject is in pain. The structure of awareness and object is appropriately in

place just because the subject does not conceive what it is for her to be in pain --

- the circumstance that is the object of her awareness --- exclusively in terms of

an 'inner' or first-person angle on that circumstance that constitutes her

awareness of it.9

This passage points to the minimum that is needed for the proof of the integration of

"inner experience" into a non-private conceptual domain. Since "inner experience"

provides the greatest degree of apparent resistance to the conceptual, and thus gives the

most compelling reason to limit the conceptual, then the proof that even "inner

experience" can be integrated without a bounded thinking subject provides a sufficient

proof for "conceptual unboundedness" as a whole. All that we need in order to credit

someone with the capacity to apply a concept of pain in judgements of "inner experience"

--- and thus credit them with an objective awareness entailing the integration of

experience into the space of concepts --- is that they understand that their particular

experience is a case of a more general kind of experience. McDowell's argument depends

in this way on a special kind of understanding, and we would do well to ask what its

nature is.

It clearly cannot consist of an explicit philosophical knowledge. The explicit

philosophical knowledge of the capacity to subsume individual judgements about pain

under a more general form is by no means universal, yet it would be absurd to credit such

a capacity only to a small elite. It would contradict the very idea of "conceptual

9 McDowell, p. 38.

12

unboundedness" to make it depend on a private philosophical conviction, or for that

matter on any other private conviction, or some particular set of scientific, moral, ethical,

religious, or even common-sense beliefs. In every case, the integration of experience into

the conceptual would be a special, private ability, and in this way circumscribed by the

limits of the empirical subject. Nor, finally, can we take the way out of Plato's Meno, and

regard it as a universal but largely forgotten knowledge. It is necessary for McDowell's

argument that this be an actual, rather than merely potential capacity. If he restricted

understanding either to the universal but only potential conditions of knowing for all

rational subjects, or what is actual but particular and empirical --- the possession of a

merely a single private knowing individual --- McDowell couldn't make the kind of

argument that he does. I would suggest, then, that McDowell means nothing more by

"understanding" than simply the capacity to translate from one kind of expression to

another. The understanding that my being in pain is a particular case of someone being in

pain, and thus that the former entails the latter, needs no other proof, and has no other

basis, than my capacity to fluently translate from one kind of expression to another. There

is no special kind of knowledge and set of held beliefs that motivates this capacity; its

just the ability to move meanings across grammar. What we really mean by

understanding, here, is a capacity of language.

Were one to isolates a specific instance of this capacity, say the ability to translate

between first and third person pain expressions, it wouldn't be hard to account for it

through a particular set of beliefs, thus quieting the need to relinquish the term

understanding. If someone knew that "Every I is a somebody" they could derive from "I

feel pain" the conclusion that "somebody feels pain." Yet we can hardly help but sense

13

the absurdity of such a reformulation. The proposition "every I is a somebody" is hardly

self-evident, but hides so many philosophical difficulties that we might deny rather than

accept it, even as we continue to speak competently about pain. And children, strangers

to such abstractions, would not make heads or tails of such a tortured expression, yet they

also speak about pain with competence.

Yet such isolation isn't even possible. Each particular instance or enactment of a

particular capacity has for the condition of its possibility all such capacities. Consider

again McDowell's example. What are the conditions under which such a move would not

be possible? I will now suggest that there are an unlimited number of possible "road

blocks" to such a move, each consisting in an ontology which gets in the way of

translation. Examples of these include an "existentialist" ontology that regards the I as

essentially different than the "somebody," or a "Fichtean" ontology that considers all

statements about somebodies as really being statements about the I. Yet we might also

consider much quirkier examples. If an ontology insisted that all first person statements

be rendered in the active voice, and all third person statements in passive, then the further

claim that the active and passive voice --- to the extent that they are properly used

according to the first criteria --- are in fact incommensurable would bar the translation

between "I feel pain" and "somebody feels pain."

These "ontologies" involve in every case the refusal to allow the mutual

independence of semantics and grammar. This refusal can take two basic forms; either

the insistence that a certain kind of meaning take a certain kind of grammatical form (all

statements about the I take the passive voice), or the refusal to allow a translation

between one grammatical form and another. As idiosyncratic as this notion of "ontology"

14

may at first appear, I would argue that the more traditional philosophical sense can be

derived from it. Allowing that philosophical discourse draws most fundamentally on the

relational structures discovered within language when describing the kinds of relations

that abide among the totality of beings, then every attempt to conceive of the relations

among the totality of beings after the model of a much more limited set of relational

structures could be thought of as the translation of a set of propositions into a single

limited set of grammatical forms. A subjectivist ontology, for example, would entail the

translation of every single true proposition into a grammatical form which explicitly

indicates the fact that it is true for a subject. And similarly, we would be able to think of a

philosophical dualism --- the creation of an "ontological gap" --- in terms of the refusal to

allow translation from one grammatical form to another.

Through these two kinds of gestures, it would be possible to construct an

unlimited number of "ontological roadblocks" to a given translation from one expression

to another. Each of these roadblocks make semantics and grammar dependent upon one

another, creating an archipelago of isolated complexes of senses and grammatical

structures incapable of finding free application to each other. The gulf which sunders one

island of meanings from another, however, can exist anywhere in the entire system of

possible translations that constitutes language as the totality of semantics and grammar.

Thus, while a certain explicit knowledge of the sort "every I is a somebody" might

inoculate us against the most simple kind of ontological blockage, this would not be

enough the guarantee the translatability of "my pain" into "somebody's pain." If we seek

inoculation through explicit beliefs, we would need to have an unlimited number of

beliefs, covering every kind of "ontology," however absurd, that could keep us from

15

making the given translation. Yet even if it were possible for a being with a brain

consisting of only a finite number of neural connections to have an infinite number of

beliefs, we would have to interrogate such a being for an infinite amount of time before

acknowledging that it actually possessed this.

The kind of understanding that we credit someone with when we acknowledge

their competence to speak about pain cannot be adequately expressed through a set of

propositions. Instead, it consists in the capacity to translate immediately and

unhesitatingly --- which is to say, without the need for any backing by any set of beliefs -

--- across the entire field of grammatical forms, without ever considering the ontological

presuppositions latent in any given grammatical form as a roadblock to its translatability.

We might call such a capacity the "ontological neutrality" of natural language. Natural

language is structured around a grammar that allows for transformations from one

grammatical form to another. In English, for example, it is possible to transform verbal

constructions that take a direct object back and forth between the active and passive

voice. Likewise, it is possible to decline every verb across the range of tenses and

persons. There is also a great deal of freedom to render verbal and adjectival meanings in

a nominal form, and a much more limited freedom to move in the opposite direction. Of

course, there are also a limited number of highly idiomatic exceptions to such rules, and a

great number of things we simply can't do at all. Yet within these limits we move about

freely, fluently translating one kind of expression into another, unmoved by any kind of

ontological worries. This is not because we are all philosophical geniuses, capable of

instantaneously performing every sort of ontological transformation in our heads as we

speak. Rather, the "genius" belongs to language itself is a wholly practical capacity; its

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proof is nothing more and nothing less than the simple fact that we do it all the time, and

that any child who has grasped the basic forms of its mother tongue leaps with every

sentence over the crevices and icy sloops that have devoured millennia of philosophers.

Our derivation of "ontological neutrality" began with McDowell's discussion of

the problem of the "inner sense." Now we see why this kind of experience presents

difficulties which can't be solved by a traditional constructive scheme, but require a

notion of "conceptual unboundedness" understood, as I suggest, in terms of the

ontological neutrality of natural language. With secondary or primary qualities perceived

through the external senses, our experience is structured objectively in such a way that

places it outside of the mere experience and into a shared medium --- namely, the spatial

manifold --- from which it is then possible to construct a path to the space of conceptual

judgements. Since we are able, in this way, to construct a mediate solution to the

integration of receptive experience and spontaneous concepts, as for example Kant does

through the mediating role of intuition, there is no need to draw on the immediate

translatability in the element of language for our proof. The "ontological roadblocks" that

we mentioned only concern philosophical claims based first of all on our capacity for

language. They are not a problem for a philosophical language grounded in an ontology

already one step removed from natural language. For as long as our ontological

presuppositions are to some degree explicit --- as is always the case, when, for example

we are dealing with a mentalist model --- then we cannot admit just any arbitrary

ontological premises, but only those that are consistent with our picture. And without

having to face the possibility of countless different "ontological blockages," we aren’t

brought to the thought of "ontological neutrality." With the "inner sense," on the other

17

hand, the only way to uphold its integration into the space of concepts through a

constructive, mediated philosophical solution is by means of an ontology of private

objects, experienced in the wholly private space of the body or an "inner temporal

manifold" not yet interwoven with the shared space of objects. If such is the case,

however, we would have to give up the notion of conceptual unboundedness; if the space

of concepts isn't bounded, then it can't entertain a relation with an inherently private

experience. Thus we must resort, as McDowell does, to the immediate translation from a

private to a general application of a concept of the "inner sense" to explain the integration

of experience and concepts; or in other words, not try to explain it, but merely point to

the fact that it happens. Being immediate, this translation is without ontological

presupposition; we don't need an ontology to explain what happens. Without any

ontological presuppositions, however, there's no way to preclude even the most absurd

and distant ontological blockages. Since language contains in its grammatical structures

the inchoate elements of every kind of ontological picture, then any of these, no matter

how absurd, can raise its head and isolate meaning within grammatical forms, making the

translation of meaning across forms impossible. This "happening" can only happen if we

are immunized against every one of these possibilities, and for this no finite number of

beliefs would suffice, but only the "ontological neutrality" of language. In this way, then,

"ontological neutrality" --- which is just a fancy way of saying that the operation of

natural, ordinary language allows neither hindrance nor justification at the level of

belief10 ---reveals itself as the true element of McDowell's "conceptual unboundedness."

10 This does not in any way exclude the role that beliefs play in discursive practice as a whole. I only wish

to make the more or less tautological point that immediate functions of language cannot be mediated by

beliefs, as well as the slightly more interesting point that for McDowell such immediate functions provide

the necessary basis for his theory. I also wish to claim that a great deal of the most basic operations of

18

The conceptual space which is operative within every kind of experience should itself be

understood as the space of a language which allows for immediate translations of one

kind of expression into another. Every kind of experience, if it is in any way open to

language, is immediately open to language, and once it appears in language, is can be

immediately transformed from a private to a public expression.

By exposing McDowell's commitment to this notion of ontological neutrality, I do

not wish thereby to maintain that he actually, explicitly holds such conception of

language. Granted, the two kinds of philosophical moves that he opposes --- the

constructive flattening of one side of a dualism into another, and the leaving open of

"ontological gaps" --- correspond with the kind of moves which create "ontological

blockages." In this way he could be said to explicitly pursue ontological neutrality. Yet

by insisting, along the lines of Kant, that thought is an exercise of the spontaneous faculty

of the understanding, McDowell frames his theory within a specific ontology. His own

arguments ultimately betray these presuppositions. He can't keep them and still argue the

way that he does.

McDowell also, however, tries to develop a conception of language distinct from

thinking. This happens at the end of the sixth lecture, where he defends himself against

the charge that he's no longer doing analytic philosophy in the sense understood by

Dummett --- that is, as a philosophy that approaches questions about thought through

language. We should understand this in the context of McDowell's lengthy discussion of

"second nature." "Second nature" serves as a way of explaining how other thinkers could

have failed to land upon his own happy solution to their philosophical anxieties. What he

language (those kinds of operations that are the concern of a structural linguist rather than a philosopher

concerned with truth and reference and interpretation) are "immediate" in the sense of being entirely

19

then identifies as "the intelligibly powerful influence over the cast of our thinking that

tends to obliterate the very possibility of the right picture"11 is the dualism drawn by

modern science between nature, or the "logical space of law," on the one hand, and the

"logical space of reason" on the other. Modern science, he claims, has entirely divested

nature of the meanings which belong to the space of reasons. As a result of this, we are

unable to conceive of how conceptual powers could be operative in our animal, sensible,

receptive nature without collapsing one of the two domains into the other, as do the "bald

naturalists" when they deny that there is a sui generis conceptual sphere. McDowell's

solution consists, first of all, in refusing to equate the realm of nature with the realm of

law. Nature is a "second nature" that develops as an integration of our animal nature with

the space of reasons. Thus, without collapsing reason into law, as the "bald naturalists"

do, McDowell is nevertheless able to resist the "rampant platonist" desire to sunder

reason entirely from nature. What results is the idea of a set of dispositions through which

we deal rationally with the world and other rational beings. While the main model for this

is Aristotle's idea of "practical reason," McDowell also draws on the German notion of

Bildung.

In the sixth lecture, McDowell makes an explicit connection between Bildung and

language, and also draws on the same kind of themes that emerged in his discussion of

second nature. He writes;

Now it is not even clearly intelligible to suppose a creature might be born at

home in the space of reasons. Human being are not: they are born mere animals,

and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of

coming to maturity. This transformation risks looking mysterious. But we can

take it in our stride if, in our conception of the Bildung that is a central element

in the normal maturation of human beings, we give pride of place to the learning

of language. In being initiated into a language, a human being is introduced into

beneath the level of the beliefs. 11 McDowell, p. 65.

20

something that already embodies putatively rational linkages between concepts,

putatively constitutive of the layout of the space of reasons, before she comes on

the scene.12

Continuing this thread, McDowell states, in contrast to Dummett's position, that the

principle function is language is neither to serve as a "instrument of communication" or

as a "vehicle of thought," but that;

The feature of language that really matters is rather this: that a natural language,

the sort of language into which human beings are first initiated, serves as a

repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is

a reason for what. The tradition is subject to reflective modification by each

generation that inherits it. Indeed, a standing obligation to engage in critical

reflection is itself part of the inheritance… But if an individual human being is

to realize her potential of taking her place in that succession, which is the same

thing as acquiring a mind, the capacity to think and act intentionally, at all, the

first thing that needs to happen is for her to be initiated into a tradition as it

stands.13

Language is seen as a way of making the process of Bildung, through which human

beings develop a second nature, philosophically intelligible. Above all, it helps explain

how our Bildung can be handed down to us as a ready-made repository of traditions

which first allow rational orientation in a world and which are at the same time not only

subject to but demanding of constant rational revision.

There are two things in the picture of language that I believe McDowell gets

wrong. 1) First of all, I would suggest that it is a mistake to understand the traditional

element of language primarily as "a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what

is a reason for what." Wisdom about "what is a reason for what" suggests a set of beliefs

in the form of general propositions allowing us to draw conclusions in syllogistic form.

Yet as I have already argued, the most basic capacities of language cannot ever be

thought of as a set of beliefs. Drawing on the consequences of "ontological neutrality,"

our picture of the most basic capacities of ordinary, natural language could expand to

12 McDowell, p. 125. 13 McDowell, p. 126.

21

include all of the linguistic functions which can be performed immediately and fluently

and without the intercession of beliefs.14 Language would then appear as the horizon in

which things, peoples, actions, needs, and desires first become intelligible and

communicable. While it's not entirely wrong to think of this horizon as the convergence

of "reason" and "nature," we should remember that this convergence is at first so close

and exact, and thus, in this sense, immediate, that it is impossible to translate it into a set

of beliefs. Epistemological categories such as "belief" and "knowledge," even when

applied naively rather than philosophically, already require a certain withdrawal from the

immediate fusion of "mind" and "world." A child may speak perfectly well, and yet know

not what it speaks, and in this way most of us remain children with respect to most things

till our dying day. Maturity and wisdom --- in this most difficult sense --- is not the prize

of either Bildung or Weltgeschichte, nor least of all a family heirloom passed effortlessly

from parent and child. I do not wish, however, to suggest that there is not also a place

within language for McDowell's kind of tradition or the openness to revision and

reflexive critique that it entails. I only seek a more nuanced account of the different levels

of tradition that together comprise natural or ordinary language. The following is an

outline of how such an account might look.

14 I do not wish to suggest that such thought processes do not take place in language. Such mediation or

intercession comes from within language, and not beyond it, and may be said to take place whenever an

utterance reaches beyond itself towards other utterances in order to justify itself or find fulfillment to some

aspect of its truth, reference, groundedness, or meaning. This also does not exclude that there might be

"outward-bound" forms of mediation. Finally, I do not wish to suggest that there is any actual utterance

which is purely immediate and self-satisfying, but only that such immediacy takes place with respect to

certain aspects of language and, in so far it takes place --- and remember that the practice come before the

theory, and that it is not a presupposition, but a move that is taken before the philosopher comes on the

scenes --- can provide a viable element for a philosophical theory.

22

A. The most basic linguistic capacities that are common to all human

languages.

B. The grammatical contours of individual historically situated languages.

For example; the specific layout of the verbal system with respect to tense,

voice, number. The pronominal system. The "vocabulary" of spatial

relations of prepositions and noun declensions. The system of logical

connectives.

C. i) General vocabulary as it extends over the natural world, the body,

inner states, processes, and sensations, and actions.

ii) Vocabulary which encodes meanings built up within social forms of

life, such as systems of kinship, religious communities, tribal and political

structures, legal institutions, philosophical systems, but which nevertheless

can be used "immediately."

D. i) "Literary vocabulary" --- words whose meanings are so subtle that

they are often used with an explicit view to a dictionary-like definition, or

whose meaning has application to an outdated form of life existing only in

literary texts and historical imagination.

ii) Technical vocabulary --- words whose proper use requires some form of

technical competence.

There will clearly be much overlap among these different groups. A given word need not

be restricted to a single strata, but may enjoy many different kinds of uses. All I wish to

suggest with this chart is that within the fold of ordinary language, and without even

considering different kinds of discursive practices, we discover vast differences with

respect to both the capacity and need to integrate "beliefs" to justify our linguistic

practices. At level A, for example, it is almost impossible to give specific reasons for why

we do things the way we do. Try to explain, for example, why we use nouns and verbs

when we speak, and not something entirely different and without any analogue in any

human language. The best that we could do is either refer blindly to tradition, or make a

spurious and tautological reference to the nature of thought or reality.

At level B, things open a bit. Since we can now compare one language to another,

it is possible at least to articulate specific reasons why some grammatical structures are

more apt than others. Or if we had to justify our translation between the active and

23

passive voice, we might be able to give a tortured ontological reasons. We could invoke,

for example, an idea of efficient causality in order to explain that a cause causing an

effect requires that there is an effect caused by a cause. In the end we can't escape circular

reasoning, since our view of causality depends to a degree on language, but at least we

can articulate a longer series of reasons. Yet such explanations are unnecessary. They

contribute nothing to our actual use of language, and are quite artificial, requiring a

special philosophical subtlety.

At level C, where for the first time the open-ended system of vocabulary gets free

of grammar, things become even more complex. We seem, on the one hand, to possess a

tremendous capacity to use words immediately and without implicating beliefs. We speak

fluently and easily about cats and trees and pain and mothers and guilt and God. Yet our

use of these words, however immediate, commits us to knowledge of a closely integrated

set of beliefs. Should we be recognized as fully competent in our use of the word

"mother," for example, we must at the very least grasp the reciprocal relation of mother

and child. Such knowledge easily assumes a propositional form (i.e. "every mother is the

mother of some child. Every child is the child of some mother.) In this case, the most

obvious candidates for such knowledge appear to be what are often called analytic

propositions. Yet this need not be so; such words as "cat" or "tree," would require

commitment to a more diffuse set of empirical knowledge. At level Cii, these

commitments becomes even more complicated and rarified, and may even require

knowledge of the entire network of functional interrelations which constitute an

institution or system of beliefs. When a Christian or Jew or Muslim speaks of God, for

example, they are committed to knowledge concerning God's relation to mankind in

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general, the natural world, certain exceptional historical human beings, and also history.

Yet while the concept of God is so nuanced and complex, including within itself so many

attributes and interrelations with other things, that it is doubtful one could ever lay out all

of the beliefs it entails, this doesn't keep us from speaking immediately not only of, but,

above all, to God. Prayer, though, is only the most striking example of the chasm that

separates the immediacy of language from the world of beliefs.

Only at level D do we begin to find beliefs preceding, and preempting, the

immediate use of language. A skilled diagnostician, for example, may run through a long

process of judgements before he applies a given medical term to a complex of symptoms.

Even here, however, the priority afforded to belief is not unambiguous. He might, for

example, apply the no less technical terms for the symptoms with the same ease with

which we speak of "cats" and "trees."

By distinguishing between these different levels, we gain a more satisfactory

sense for how to understand both the "traditional" and "revisionary" potentials of

language. Language may indeed serve as a repository of traditions, yet these traditions

are conserved in language in as many ways as energy is conserved in nature. Only at the

periphery, at levels D, do we finds forms that are immediately translatable into beliefs.

The deeper we go, the more difficult it becomes to yield from these traditions an explicit

"wisdom about what is a reason for what." At the deepest level, the encrypting of

tradition belongs to the pre-history and pre-anthropology of the human species, perhaps

even to the genetic encoding of the neural pathways that first allowed for language. Even

then, tradition need not be wholly inaccessible to reason. But it is clear that we haven't

yet found satisfactory way of making this transition. Just as the scientists of this century

25

came to grasp the once wholly inexplicable, if often intuited, relation between matter and

energy, future philosophers might discover a way of explicitly grasping the translation

between "reason" (or better, evolving systems of neural networks) and "nature" (or better,

the extra-organistic reality confronted by a species) at the very point where, in our pre-

history, they first fuse together in the mutual interpenetration of language.

In upholding the claim that language is at every level traditional and thus

historical, even if at its depths only as a "natural history," we must also allow that it is

open to revision. Again, the openness to revision, and the explicit rationality of the

process, varies considerably, and is correlated with the ease of translation into beliefs. At

level A, we must regard the particular genetic determination of the human species as a

practical roadblock to any change. At level D, on the other hand, we find sub-systems of

language that are so closely guided by explicit belief that they are open to radical and

total revision. This is what enables the "paradigm changes" that take place in the

sciences. Here, tradition can offer little resistance to change; reason acts as a dictator,

assigning to concepts whatever meanings and interrelations it wishes. Between these two

extremes, the situation is more complicated. If we can still speak of revision as

"reflective" --- and in many cases, it may be in fact completely accidental --- it is still

most often impossible to place this reflection within an individual or collective

consciousness reflectively aware of its actions. Instead, we might situate it within a

community constituted through the mutual interactions of its members yet lacking any

explicit awareness of a common will. Such a notion of community is misleading, because

it suggests a single, empirically describable, entity --- a people or nation --- for example.

In truth, however, different changes must be situated within different kinds of

26

communities, and these may vary considerably with respect to their reach in time and

space and their internal texture. Making use of the Romantic idea that artistic production

is more unconscious than conscious, we might also see the artist, poet, or prophet as a

source for such changes. Here, however, the work comes first, already containing

implicitly those changes which are later realized in the more ordinary language of a

community. In such a way, we are able to understand how a community can live within a

work, and thus how a written work, like Homer or the Bible, could suddenly open up a

vista of inexhaustible possibilities. This would also provide a model accommodating

more sudden, revolutionary changes at this level, without however equating them with

the more explicitly rational paradigm shifts of the sciences.

2) It may now seem as if I have entirely discarded McDowell's commitment to the

space of reason as sui generis, and have reverted to an extremely strange form of “bald

naturalism.” The very idea of the immediacy of language might seem to preclude genuine

spontaneity. Indeed, to the extent that something is immediate it is groundless (or in other

words, in its immediacy it must appear groundless), and that which is groundless can't

have a faculty of freedom and reason for its ground. Yet for the same reason it must also

be independent of all external causality, and could belong no more to the “space of

nature” than the “space of reasons.” This brings us to the second point where my

conception of language differs from McDowell’s. Despite his rejection of the modern

dualisms in their invidious form, McDowell still conceive of “second nature” as a

medium through which our sui generis spontaneity and our beastly nature grow together.

The picture I suggest works the other way around; language is first of all the immediate

27

fusion of “reason” and “nature.” The philosophical conceptions of “reason” and “nature”

only appear after they explicate themselves at great labor out of fold of language.

This is not to deny that there is some truth to thinking of “reason” and “nature” as

sui generis. I merely wish to suggest that their philosophical conceptions have meaning

primarily with respect to language, rather than anything outside of language. This is not

meant just as a consequence of the now hackneyed claim that there is “nothing outside

the text.” Indeed, the very notion of “ontological neutrality” makes such a thesis

indefensible; language lets us speak of the things of which we speak as existing outside

of language. What I wish instead to assert is that “reason” and “nature” in their

philosophical usage develop out of aspects of the original immediacy of language. Thus

far we have understood language as the immediate, groundless praxis of translating from

one kind of expression to another. Through language, the world appears as the possibility

of endless mediation; through the facility of immediate translation, it allows everything to

be brought into relation to everything else. In this way, for example, everything that

appears as a cause in the natural world can also appear as an effect; in the element of

ontological neutrality, relations of cause and effect can never be pinned down and

restricted. The praxis of language, on the other hand, is itself groundless and immediate,

and thus cannot be the effect of anything, nor a spontaneity grounded in freedom. The

action of language is itself an exception to the actions which it discovers in the world. If,

then, language should bear down upon language, and try to make its action accessible

within language, it has nothing to draw on but its own possibilities, and yet all of these

are inadequate. Its first solution then is to posit itself as either pure cause and pure effect,

28

“nature” or “reason.” Or in other words, it tries to conceive of its exceptionalness through

an exceptional version of the relations found in nature.

According to this picture, philosophy begins with language brought to bear upon

language, yet without comprehended this as language. The dualism between “nature” and

“reason” which results instead is wholly unsatisfactory, above all because there is no way

to explain the relation between the opposed terms. In order to explain this relation,

language must draw deeper into its own native ontological resources. Yet every new

picture begets new problems, as it cannot account either for the groundless immediacy of

language, or for the fluency with which language, as the “ontological neutrality” of this

groundless immediacy, is able to translate between ontologies which, on their own terms,

are mutually exclusive. At each step along the way, “reason” and “nature” are given new

formulations, and enter into a new complexes of terms, and yet they still retain something

of the stubbornness of the original dualism. Language remains unable to say what it does.

At every point, philosophy thinks through a certain medium. This medium

consists in a way of conceiving the relations that abide between things and through which

they are knowable. In discovering this medium, it draws on the relational structures

implicit in its own grammar, and then tries to translate everything that it knows into these

terms. This dialectic would only come to a point of resolution when philosophy

discovers, as its explicit medium, the “ontological neutrality” which allows it always, in

everyday usage, to translate effortlessly between different ontologies. Within this

medium, all of its traditional problems --- which are of essence problems of translation ---

would evaporate. Or in other words, at this point it would realize that it is the very

immediacy of language, and capable of leaping over every ontological gap. Language

29

reflected upon language would for the first time recognize the immediacy of language as

the medium of this reflection.

III

In the last section, I first tried to show how McDowell's arguments require as their

element the immediacy and ontological neutrality of language. I then developed from this

a framework within which to understand philosophy as a process taking place above all

within language. Now that the pieces are in place, let us very briefly compare Hegel's

"absolute spirit" with "ontological neutrality."

Whatever its purpose and method and meaning may be, the Phänomenologie des

Geistes seems to describe a movement from one kind of ontological picture to another,

with an internal critique of each impelling the forward development. These different

pictures appear not as sets of beliefs but as relational structures, or modes of the relation

between the form and content of knowing; each presents a different way in which the

relational structure of knowledge can be conceived, from the most simple model of

"sense certainty" to "absolute spirit." With absolute spirit, the particular problems that

plague these preceding relational structure are overcome and yet also preserved as a

negativity which is itself essential to the process through which spirit becomes what it is.

This suggests a great affinity between "absolute spirit" and "ontological neutrality." Both

present an element in which the philosophical problems which are attached to specific

ontological, or rather relational, structures dissolve. And both involve the possibility of

translating from one picture to another. Yet while in the case of "ontological neutrality"

this possibility is wholly groundless and immediate --- it is possible simply because it

happens --- the translations which take place in the Phänomenologie are mediated and

30

motivated by absolute spirit. A particular formation appears in its immediacy, --- positing

itself as the absolute ---, and then realizes, as it were, its failure to live up to this premise,

and it is then this failure which seems to push on to the next formation. And absolute

spirit is itself not ontologically neutral, but has its own very specific relational structure.

The word "specific" may be misleading, as what I mean by it won't make sense in

purely Hegelian terms. For Hegel, the relational structure of spirit --- the mode of the

relation of the form and content of knowing --- must not be determined either through a

specific content opposed to a form, or a specific form opposed to a content, since in either

case this would contradict the absolute identity, or co-extension, of form and content.

Thus we cannot speak of determination at the level of form or content, but only at the

level of the relation between the two. Here, however, we discover a very specific kind of

structure --- that of self-reflective self-hood. The nature and significance of this self-

reflective self-hood is evident in the following passage, which describes the double

movement necessary for the objectification of spirit to be overcome in the transition from

religion to absolute spirit;

Spirit itself as a whole, and the self-differentiated moments within it, fall within

the sphere of picture-thinking and in the form of objectivity. The content of this

picture-thinking is absolute Spirit; and all that now remains to be done is to

supersede this mere form, or rather, since this belongs to consciousness as such,

its truth must already have yielded itself in the shape of consciousness.

This surmounting of the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly to

mean that the object showed itself as returning into the Self, but is to be taken

more specifically to mean not only that the object as such presented itself to the

Self as vanishing, but rather that it is the externalization of self-consciousness

that posits the thinghood [of the object] and that this externalization has not

merely a negative but a positive meaning, a meaning which is not only for us or

in itself, but for self-consciousness itself. The negative of the object, or its self-

supersession, has a positive meaning for self-consciousness, i.e. self-

consciousness knows the nothingness of the object, on the one hand, because it

externalizes its own self --- for in this externalization it posits itself as object, or

the object as itself, in virtue of the invisible unity of being-for-itself. On the

other hand, this positing at the same time contains the other moment, viz. that

self-consciousness has equally superseded this externalization and objectivity

too, and taken it back into itself so that it is in communion with itself in its

31

otherness as such. This is the movement of consciousness, and in that movement

consciousness is the totality of its moments.15

Here the movement of consciousness, as a self-reflecting self-hood which posits itself

outside of itself and then enters into a communion with its otherness as such, is conceived

as the movement of absolute spirit.

Self-reflection is relatively ontologically neutral, in that it contains within itself

the possibility of all the other relational structures described within the Phänomenologie.

All of these, are, as it were, inadequate accounts of the self-reflection of absolute spirit.

In this way the work as a whole could be said to contain a progressive translations up to

the final absolute instance which alone justifies these translations. Yet self-reflection is

still but one grammatical structure among all of those between which ordinary language

allows fluid translation. Thus it still must be considered as a specific ontology. If then we

are to take "ontological neutrality" as our starting point, we must dismiss the privilege

that Hegel grants to selfhood.

The element of Hegel's thought is therefore a kind of "ontological neutrality"

which is not absolute --- absolved from all dependence upon particular ontology --- and

immediate, but relative and mediate; it allows for the translation between ontologies, but

only under the mediation of the relational structure of selfhood. In this respect, the

underlying element of McDowell's philosophy and, moreover, the "Wittgensteinian

world" which he invokes, is inexplicable in the terms of the Phänomenologie, and

represents a new development and a deeper look into the root of thinking which we

should not try to conflate with past forms. Once we fix our attention on this deeper

insight at work in McDowell's thought, it becomes all the more necessary to ask whether

15 Hegel, p. 479.

32

his modest conception of philosophy can make good on this insight. For him, as we saw,

the true task of philosophy is therepeutic --- it strives for no higher good than to make our

philosophical anxieties dissapear. Such therapy, moreover, need only aim at the surface,

as the anxieties themselves are seen to have no other cause than philosophy itself. Since

this no longer has any legitimate positive function, there is no need for a dialectical

method which makes mediate moments explicit. The idea of "Ontological neutrality"

does indeed provide an element within which all the problems that rest on ontological

gaps and incongruity immediately dissapear, and would seem therefore to make a strong

case for abandoning the traditional claims of philosophy. And since it involves an

essential immediacy, it would also give reason to fully discredit such a dialectical

conception.

Yet I believe a case can be made against such philosophical quietism. To begin

with, even if the task of philosophy is primarily therepeutic, it is still not enough to point

out the mere possibility of solving our problems, but we must make explicit the element

within which such a solution is possible. If the element is to serve not as an escape from

but as a therapy for our past difficulties, it can't be considered merely as a fantastic

hypothesis. We must regard it as what was always the element of our thinking. Only in

that case could we say that the past difficulties should not have arisen. In this case,

though, we need is to account for our mistake, and explain how our thinking led us into

difficulties. We are then led to the conclusion that this was possible because we failed to

make the element explicit, or, in other words, take our thinking for what it was. If we

again fail to make this element explicit, we can only hope to fall back into the same

troubles as before.

33

The positive task of making our relational structures explicit and the negative task

of eliminating philosophical anxieties should not be opposed to each other. That they

appear to be so is more the sign of a passing malaise than an irradicable disease at the

root of things. It suggests a period of transition, when the approaches from before have

become threadbare and inplausible, while the future element appears only as the dim

promise of solutions. Unable to make the grounds of their thinking explicit enough to

yield a satisfying theory, those heeding the future are likely to take refuge in a one-

sidedly therepeutic conception of philosophy. Those, on the other hand, who remain

devoted to the past find it increasingly difficult to think in an element which even they no

longer take wholly seriously. Thus they latch on to its problems as if they had more truth

than the solutions, and are even tempted to treat these in a tragic manner as the utterly

ineradicable difficulties at the root of our thinking, which one can hope at best to

understand but never to cure. Since neither side really grasps what is at stake, they come

to see their disagreement as an opposition between different styles of "doing philosophy"

and "philosophical temperaments."

Even granting that we can't stay content with a mere intimation of "ontological

neutrality," but must try to make this element explicit, it is still not clear that this should

or can take the form of a "dialectical approach." Since "ontological neutrality" is to be

understood in the most general sense as the possibility of immediate translatability

between different ontological frameworks, shouldn't it be enough just to make this

immediacy explicit? Why would we need to go further than this? And where is there to

go? How, moreover, could we return to a dialectical approach without repeating Hegel's

privileging of selfhood?

34

These are difficult questions, and the answers which I propose are schematic at

best. I would suggest, first of all, that "ontological neutrality" not only allows for the so-

called "ordinary langauge" of everyday life, but also for the extraordinary language of

philosophy as well as science. There is no way to draw a limit around ordinary language

without excluding the immediate possibility of certain kinds of ontological

transformations, and this would contradict the very idea of "ontological neutrality." We

must accept, in other words, that philosophical language is an equally legitimate and

genuine possibility within ordinary language. As said earlier, Philosophical language

involves privileging a certain ontology and putting this at the center of a theory of the

kinds of relations that hold between things and make knowledge of them possible. In this

way, the manifold relational structures (or ontologies) within language are systematically

translated into a much more uniform picture. This stands in the way of the original

"ontological neutrality" of language; it now becomes impossible to get from one place to

another. But if "ontological neutrality" forces us to accept every "ontological bigotry" of

philosophy, then it would seem to come into contradiction with its own position, in which

case it cannot be regarded as a very dependable solution to anything. It is this

predicament, I believe, which necessitates a "dialectical approach." What we must do first

of all is show that it is possible to translate out of these ontological dictatorships and into

the element of ontological neutrality. Because of the historical and systematic nature of

philosophy, these individual islands are often many steps removed from the immediacy

of language. They are, as it were, clusters formed through a series of often complexly

interrelated translations, some having taken place within the historical development in

which they are situated, and others more explicitly present within the system itself. While

35

each move is immediately possible --- and has no other ground than the neutrality of

language as such --- nevertheless a translation from one to another may often be mediated

through a series of immediate leaps. In this way, then, to show how every ontology can

be brought back to the neutral element requires conceiving of the history of philosophy as

the possibility of getting to the position of ontological neutrality. Yet this is not yet

enough --- for at issue is not simply what is possible, but what happens. Or moreover, if

we dealt just with what was possible, we would then have to conceive of an infinite

complex weave of possibilities to counter an infinite number of possible impossibilities.

We must limit ourselves to the actual roadblocks which philosophy puts in the way of

language. Yet then we can't simply show that there could have been a way out; if this

never actually happened, we remain stranded. Thus it is necessary to show that "history is

moving in the right direction" --- that it is actually moving towards our position, and not

verging ever farther from the path. Since every step along the way is a leap, there can be

no talk of strict causal necessity. Yet even if nothing in this history is either fully

determined by past moments, or justified by a ground within history, we can still speak of

it as having a disposition or inclination, a downward slope, which makes leaps in one

direction easier, and more likely, then leaps in the other.

Making explicit "ontological neutrality" means showing how philosophical

discourse becomes ever more fluent in its ability to translate from one kinds of picture to

another, or in other words, ever closer to realizing the possibility of immediate translation

as its element. This is a learning process; it learns what it is capable of doing by doing it,

and learns that this capacity is groundless. The language in which philosophy takes place,

however, does not exist in isolation, but weaves into its own fabric the relational

36

structures drawn from the discourses of science, mathematics, literature, religion and

theology, and politics, just as these in turn draw on each other and philosophy. We might

even suppose, then, that all these discourses, taken as a whole, would undergo a similar

learning process, and that, at the same time as the niches of human endeavor became ever

more specialized, and the corresponding beliefs even more at discord with each other, we

would nevertheless improve in our capacity to translate from one discourse to another.

The learning process through which language becomes explicit is practical rather

than theoretical. It does not acquire some kind of descriptive knowledge of its essence,

but rather an ever greater confidence in carrying out what it is capable of. Thus it no

longer follows the model of reflective self-hood. It is not a question of making itself

known to itself and becoming certain of its inner essence, but of becoming more sure-

footed as it moves across the rough terrain of reality. It explicates its capacities out into

the open, and thus gains confidence about what it is capable of.