Review Essay ROBERT D. HESLEP

HAUGELAND’S NEW EXISTENTIALISM

A review of John Haugeland, Having thought: Essays in the philosophy of mind, 2000, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In “Truth and Rule-Following,” which is the last in this collection of thirteen essays by him, John Haugeland distinguishes between two kinds of commitment (p. 341). Deontic commitment is a socially grounded obligation; it is a duty that one has “in virtue of one’s relations to others.” By contrast, an existential commitment is not a duty of any kind. It is, rather, like a “dedicated or even a devoted way of living: a determination to maintain and carry on.” It arises not from any social status but from “a resilient and resolute first-personal stance.” Thus, if the marriage of two people establishes a deontic commitment for each to the other, the love that two people have for each other establishes an existential commitment by each to the other. There is no question that Haugeland is existentially committed to philosophy. His efforts to identify and resolve profound issues, his respect for the contributions of other philosophers, his cautiousness in making claims, and his striving to make his arguments clear indicate that this is a person who is devoted to doing philosophy. While this is not to say that Haugeland’s volume is beyond criticism, it is to say that the work has many admirable qualities, including the ones just intimated. The pieces making up the book are essays in the strict sense of the term: Each is an effort to discuss a topic from a somewhat incomplete point of view. None of them pretends to be exhaustive, and most of them are somewhat tentative. Moreover, the pieces, which were written and published individually over a period of about twenty-five years, are collectively unsystematic in logical structure. Despite the book’s title, the essays ostensibly are grouped under the headings of matter, meaning, and truth as well as that of mind. Moreover, the essays deal with their respective topics in a fragmentary way at times. For instance, two of the three in the “Mind” section concern artificial intelligence while the third concerns Hume on personal identity. Of the three pieces in the “Meaning” section, the first, “The Intentionality All Stars,” is a taxonomy of modern positions on intenStudies in Philosophy and Education 21: 505–516, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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tionality with the metaphor of baseball as the article’s organizing principle (Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida are way out in left field, of course; but Derrida positions himself a bit closer to the foul line!). The second discusses genera, or kinds of representation, while the third critiques the customary divisions between mind and body and mind and world. In fairness, however, it must be noted that the four essays in the “Truth” section have an engaging logical sequence. The reader interested in philosophy of education should know that none of the thirteen essays discusses anything explicitly related to education. Even so, as I shall attempt to show later, they do have significance for the matter. Haugeland might have included these thirteen articles because he viewed them as the peaks of his philosophical thinking. But if he did include them for that reason, he did not include them for that reason alone. In his introductory remarks, titled “Toward a New Existentialism,” Haugeland declares: “Understanding – making sense of things – is the mark of the mental” (p. 1). Intentionality, rationality, objective knowledge, and self-consciousness might be marks too; but each of them, “properly understood, presupposes understanding and is impossible without it” (p. 1). But in identifying understanding as the mark of the mental, Haugeland is not interested in analyzing mind in its generic sense. He is interested, rather, in discussing the human mind and thus the understanding that is special to that kind of mind. To explain that understanding, Haugeland specifies what he takes to be the mark of the human, namely, existential commitment, whose emergence Haugeland claims to be more recent in the course of human history than even language and cities. In putting forth his claim that existential commitment is the mark of the human, Haugeland does not intend to defend the claim; he wants only to articulate it. Such commitment, as already suggested, is “precisely a capacity for individual freedom: the freedom, namely, to take responsibility for the norms and skills in terms of which one copes with things” (p. 2). The ability to assume such responsibility is the necessary condition for the understanding and thus the knowing of objects. Existential commitment, Haugeland mentions, is closely related to what Heidegger meant by authentic care, what Kierkegaard meant by faith, and what Nietzsche meant by autonomy. At any rate, Haugeland’s “new existentialism” is the theoretical framework, however shadowy, surrounding the essays of this volume; and some details of this structure become disclosed as each essay appeals, frontally or obliquely, to understanding and existential commitment. A couple of examples will have to suffice. In “The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism,” Haugeland defends cognitive psychology against the charge that the field, unlike behavioral psychology, has not modeled itself after physics, traditionally regarded

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as the paradigm of scientific research. He readily grants that research in cognitive psychology has substantial differences from that in physics; at the same time, however, he holds that these differences do not prevent cognitive psychologists from conducting worthy investigations. Nevertheless, he has reservations that cognitive psychology can provide adequate accounts of several mental phenomena, one of which is understanding. To be sure, Haugeland acknowledges, a cognitivist can study understanding as an input system for the use of language. That is, the researcher can study human understanding as a matter of appropriate responses to certain language inputs. But while Haugeland allows that this is a legitimate sense of understanding, he holds that it is far from being the most important. “Paradigms of understanding are rather our everyday insights into friends and loved ones, our sensitive appreciation of stories and dramas, our intelligent handling of paraphernalia and institutions” (p. 39). Such insights, appreciations, and dealings might not be governed by fully explicable rules. But that some human understanding might be ineffable is not an insuperable obstacle for Haugeland. As he quips: “In the economy of understanding, words are merely money” (p. 40). In “The Intentionality All Stars,” Haugeland identifies three positions on intentionality, which roughly is one matter being related to another as “as a representation of or a reason for” that other matter (p. 128). First, intentionality resides in language-like internal representations in virtue of the processes that use and modify those representations. Second, it resides in situated agents in virtue of the interactions of such agents with their environments. Third, it resides in the social practices of a community in virtue of the norms sustaining and governing those practices. In his introductory essay Haugeland states that at the time of the writing of the baseball-inspired article, he more or less identified with the third position but since then has changed his thinking on the matter. Still agreeing that social institutions and their norms have been critical in shaping human existence, he concedes that they are necessary for “genuine” intentionality, which comprises human understanding and commitment. “But existential commitment is crucially not social; and, as such, it makes possible a kind of normativity that goes beyond anything merely institued” (p. 5). It is in “Truth and Rule-Following” that Haugeland describes that kind of normativity. “The governing or normative ‘authority’ of an existential commitment comes from nowhere other than itself, and it is brought to bear in no way other than by its own exercise – that is, by self-discipline and resolute persistence” (p. 341). Haugeland’s project of using his articles to help explain specific aspects of his new existentialism can be successful in only a very limited way. Indeed, the disjointedness among the essays renders the disclosures of

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the theory somewhat like the highlighting of faces and bodies in a disco club. Accordingly, I propose to raise some questions that perhaps need to be answered by Haugeland in a future explanation of his theory. The questions are immanent in the new existentialism in that they appear in some of its practical implications. With an eye on John Dewey’s maxim that education is the laboratory in which philosophical theories may be tested, I will address questions about the book’s content that are revealed by its educational implications, at least, by what I think those implications are. On the assumption that a plausible general end of education is to enable human beings to live in the world as free individuals and in view of Haugeland’s conception of existential commitment, one may venture that the chief purpose of education is to enable human beings to acquire the capacities to take responsibility freely for the respective norms and skills in terms of which they individually cope with things (cf. p. 2). In view of this aim, the curriculum should consist of content and opportunities organized in such a way that they enable individual students freely to develop norms and skills by which to cope with things and freely to assume responsibility for those norms and skills and the results of acting by and with them. Teachers, then, are individually to develop their respective norms and skills for helping students to learn and to accept individual responsibility for their respective successes and failures. Each will make adjustments to overcome his or her failures, and each will persist in his or her work despite its obstacles and lack of social recognition. Students individually will freely acquire the norms and skills ingredient to ways of life to which they respectively will commit themselves will learn to take responsibility freely for their successes and failures in acting by and with their norms and skills. They too will learn to correct their respective mistakes and to persist in their respective ways despite obstacles and lack of social recognition. It follows that the educational milieu must be supportive of existential commitment. There must be legal, social, familial, religious, cultural, economic, and other institutions that maintain and extend conditions favorable to the individual’s learning to be an authentically caring person. It follows that the milieu must not impose educational goals, must not impose curricula, and must not impose standards for teaching and learning. Where an educational milieu fails to support existential commitment, it presumably must make adjustments; it presumably also must persist in being supportive despite failures in and obstacles to education for existential commitment. But if Haugeland’s philosophical framework leads to the educational position just described, it also opposes any education oriented only to

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deontic commitment. That kind of education has a purpose, curriculum, and pedagogy that are matters of social obligation. It is strongly reminiscent of what Dewey called “traditional” education, of what critical theorists have called “hegemonic” education, and of school policies put forth by communitarians, conservative religious leaders, and right-wing politicians. One also may infer that Haugeland’s new existentialism is at odds with the kind of education variously advocated by Bertrand Russell, A. S. Neill, Paul Goodman, and Carl Rogers – what Dewey called the “new” education and others have variously labeled “extreme” progressivism, “child-centered” education, and “nondirected” education. This inference is defensible ultimately, I believe, because the student who does simply whatever he or she wants to do might not care about anything in an authentic way. More specifically, a student-centered education might not teach the student the objectivity that he or she needs as an existentially committed person. Any existential commitment depends on a kind of responsibility, namely, a responsibility “for the conditions on which the sustainability of the commitment itself depends” (p. 342). In a certain way, the standards and skills involved in an existential commitment are constitutive of its relevant conditions. Hence, the entailed responsibility calls for “responsiveness to the constituted phenomena, in particular with regard to their compliance with the standards in accord with which they are constituted” (p. 342). If, therefore, a student chooses to become a lawyer simply because of what he or she fancies the career to be and not because he or she wants to devote him- or herself to living by the standards and having the skills making up the career, the student will not have an understanding of the phenomena on which that career depends. The educated person as a person freely devoted to an understood way of life is a very attractive idea. It seems resonant with Socrates’s notion of the examined life, with Aristotle’s conception of the life of wisdom, with Kant’s idea of the rational being, with Dewey’s notion of life as growth in intelligent experience, and with Alfred North Whitehead’s conception of the specialist with breadth of understanding. Even so, one wonders what educational policy or policies might support the principle that the educated person is one who has learned to be existentially committed. The most obvious policy for education with existential commitment as its foremost end is to enable the student to explore the standards, skills, and phenomena related to a wide array of life careers. As a part of this policy, the teacher and curriculum also would enable the student to see how the phenomena relate to the standards and skills and how the standards and skills constitute their respective ways of life. The policy arguably may be implemented in early childhood when children are capable of

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learning the standards, skills, and phenomena related to family life, to nursery school, to class rooms, to games, and to incipient friendships. Subsequently, the policy may be extended into the existential development of the student in middle school, high school, and beyond. Academic subjects, of course, need not be neglected; for they can be taught some place along the line, with their integrity intact, as resources for perceiving, knowing, and understanding standards, skills, and phenomena connected with ways of life. Moreover, slow, reluctant, and recalcitrant learners can be accommodated with patience and special programs; for they need, just as much as other students do, to learn to develop lives to which they are devoted and which they understand. In any event, they cannot be forced to become existentially committed persons. Unfortunately, there are several difficulties with this policy. One is that it does not clarify whether or not some ways of life will be proscribed from being possibly considered by students as candidates for existential commitment. Haugeland supposedly would exclude any, such as murderer or slaver, that does not entail respect for every other person’s capacity for existential commitment. But what about the life of a beach comber, a libertine, a prostitute, or a seal hunter? If any of these is to be excluded, by what principle of the new existentialism will it be? This problem leads to another. It is that educational practice will restrict the freedom of students to choose lives and thus to take responsibility for their respectively chosen lives. Even if such practice is totally dedicated to the new existentialism, it inevitably will determine to some extent, through curriculum and pedagogy, the ways of life that students will explore and the methods that students will employ in exploring those life opportunities. By virtue of this control, education quite possibly will influence which ways of life students will come to choose and how students go about making sense of their life chances. But this point might be misguided. I am willing to concede, and perhaps Haugeland is too, that in the actual world the ideal existentialist education is impossible. What else is new about ideals? More importantly, however, the policy fails to explain what should be done with students who show no promise, either for lack of necessary biological or cultural background, for lack of interest, for personality difficulties, or for some other reason, of attaining adequate development as prospective autonomous beings. The long-standing average of 50% for the drop-out rate in the large-central-city high schools of the United States strongly suggests that many students in reality will not achieve such development. And the impression, given by school and college counselors, that many high-school and some college students have no interest in committing themselves to a specific way of life, whether from psychical inertia,

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from the comforts and pleasantries provided by the parents, from existential dread, or from some other reasons, causes one to suspect that many students simply will not want to become existentially committed people. In other words, it is likely, as Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Lawrence Kohlberg acknowledged, that many students will not want to become full-fledged human beings. The policy that we entertained above simply does not indicate if such students are to be left to fend for themselves or not. Another policy comes to mind. It incorporates Haugeland’s conception of deontic commitment as a principle as well as his principle of existential commitment, but it also includes behavioral conditioning and clinical supervision as principles. According to this policy education will do what it can to help students develop into existentially committed beings but in addition will do what it can to help those who cannot or do not want to become autonomous beings to become beings governed by their social obligations. Such beings in effect will internalize their social duties, thereby acquiring a social conscience, which, as the etymology of “conscience” suggests, is their basis for social knowledge and understanding. This policy, even though it allows for different curricula and different faculty, permits comprehensive or special schools. Regardless, by holding that the social obligations applying to students will be compatible with authentic caring, the policy will help produce people who will get along with and respect each other, albeit from specifically different points of view. In addition, the policy will call for the use of behavioral conditioning and clinical supervision for those students who fall short of becoming deontically committed. Both measures will encourage, where feasible, behavior that is consistent with conduct grounded upon existential commitment but at the very least will prevent behavior that is detrimental to such conduct. While readers initially might suspect that this entertained policy as a betrayal of Haugeland’s existentialism, they should recognize that it alludes to a related aspect of Kant’s ethical theory, the basis of which Haugeland occasionally speaks of favorably (e.g., p. 6). That theory holds that because purely rational beings are committed to acting as rational beings, they do not have duties as rational beings. They know what rational beings do, and they will do it. Unfortunately, few if any of us are purely rational; virtually all of us suffer tensions between desire and reason. Hence, we have moral duties – but duties, nevertheless, that are compatible with reason. So, to relate Kant to Haugeland: Where we are not capable of being existentially committed, we should be deontically committed. Some deontic commitments are compatible with existential commitments and

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some are not. The former, I believe Haugeland has to admit, are preferable to the latter and, moreover, are preferable to no commitment at all. Moreover, where we are neither existentially nor deontically committed, it is nevertheless preferable that we act, even if from conditioning or clinical supervision, in ways that are compatible with conduct grounded on existential commitment. As indicated earlier by my reference to Dewey’s maxim about education as a laboratory for testing philosophical theories, I have not attempted to specify the educational implications of Haugeland’s new existentialism in order to see if the theory can be the basis of a solution to the problems of education today. Rather, I have done this in order to see what questions for his theory are precipitated by these implications. There are three that I regard as very serious. The first question is whether or not Haugeland’s new existentialism is elitist. When discussing the two educational policies that we entertained above, we distinguished between students who will become existentially committed to some way of life and those who will not; we also indicated that those who will not should at least learn to act in ways that are compatible with conduct grounded on existential commitment. More specifically, our discussion sorted our three levels of students: those capable and willing to be authentically caring, those capable and willing to be only socially bound in an existentially compatible way, and those capable and willing to be only behaviorally appropriate in such a way. Strictly speaking, Haugeland has to allow, only the students with a capacity for existential commitment are human; the other two levels are occupied by homo sapiens but not by human beings. These three levels look suspiciously like the three classes of citizens in Plato’s republic: the people of gold (reason), those of silver (will), and those of brass (appetite). They also look as though they could be arranged on Jean Piaget’s schema of the three levels of moral development. Accordingly, it seems implicit in Haugeland’s theory that a life of existential commitment is superior to any other kind and thus that people who live such a life are superior to those who do not. At this point, my acquaintances laboring at the Critical Theory Watch Tower are probably expostulating: “Aha! We told you that existentialism, despite its plea for humanity and the freedom of the individual, is nothing more than a closeted way to support the preservation of the establishment. Who do you think are going to learn to be the people with existential commitments? Look at the statistics dating since the Coleman Report of 1966. With few exceptions, the usual 20% of the population: those with dominant-family backgrounds!” But I am not accusing Haugeland of constructing, wittingly or not, an ideology to defend the social estab-

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lishment. What I am doing, rather, is suggesting that the elitism that seems to be revealed by a practical implication of his existentialism is a sign that he needs to reconsider his claim that existential commitment is the mark of the human. Because of this claim Haugeland is logically committed to maintaining that only those people with the capacity for existential commitments are human and thus that all others are nonhuman. This logical implication carries with it an additional one: The only people who are equal to one another as human beings are those with the capacity for existential commitments; all other people may be equal as social beings or as homo sapiens but not as human beings. This implication, of course, raises critical eyebrows because of its importance for ethical theory, specifically, the possibility that there will be three tiers of rights: human, social, and homo sapienal. Actually, Haugeland can have his existentialism without making it the mark of the human. By connecting existentialism with being human in only an approximate way, he can select a broader mark of the human and then show how existential commitment fits in with being human. In truth, it is not readily apparent that he, in developing his theoretical framework, has to connect existentialism with being human in a conceptually proximate way. He could begin, for instance, with an analysis of agency and show how its criterial features ultimately lead to existential commitment. This approach would then allow for equality among agents, freedom and understanding pertinent to them, equal rights and duties for them. But the approach also would allow the position that existential commitment is the best form of the life of agency. Ultimately, Haugeland could apply this framework to human beings, independently conceived, so as to show how human beings compare and contrast with existential agents. The second question is whether or not Haugeland’s new existentialism logically entails a species of deontic commitment. When discussing, above, the educational policy that was initially entertained, I speculated that Haugeland would want students to consider as serious candidates for existential commitments only those life careers that do not imply any violation of any person’s capacity to make an existential commitment. If this hunch is correct, it means that Haugeland has implicitly laid a duty upon each and every being capable of making an existential commitment: Every being making an existential commitment must not commit to a way of life that threatens any other being’s capacity for existential commitment. This, I submit, is not a responsibility to oneself; it is, rather, a social obligation. Every human being, in Haugeland’s sense, is equal to every other. Each has the freedom to follow the life to which he or she has committed himor herself; hence, by virtue of this equality relationship each human being

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is committed not to violate the existential commitment of any other human being. This commitment is social because of the equality that human beings have among themselves: Because of their common nature, they have a bond with one another; they constitute the society of existentially committed beings, which is reminiscent of Kant’s kingdom of ends. Thus, while I agree that the responsibility of a human being for his or her particular life arises from his or commitment to that life, I believe that there also is a responsibility incumbent upon any individual human being that arises, not from his or her commitment to his or her own life, but from his or her relations to all other human beings. This specter of a human duty brings with it that of a human right: The right of every human being to commit to a way of life that does not infringe upon any other human being’s freedom to commit to a way life. At any rate, as the legend on the wall of the Metaethical Customs House declares: “Freedom is not duty free.” The third, and last, question is whether or not Haugeland’s new existentialism is simply a kind of hypothetical commitment, namely, the counsel of means about alternative objects of possible existential commitment. When indicating how education might help students develop as prospective existentially committed beings, I said, in view of what Haugeland writes about constitutive standards and skills and the conditions to which they relate, that students well might explore the standards and skills that constitute various life-style possibilities and also investigate the conditions that these different standards and skills respectively are likely to involve. Thus, if a student is considering the respective lives of a lawyer, a clergyman, an engineer, and a musician as possible ways of life, the student must learn about the standards, skills, and conditions pertinent to each of these ways of life. Subsequently, if the student commits to one of these life chances, he or she will continue learning more and more about these standards, skills, and conditions until he or she is capable of living this life without formal educational guidance. Some place along the way, of course, students should learn the concept of an existential commitment, which involves the subconcepts of being, existential freedom, self-assumed responsibility, standard, skill, and condition, so that they will have at least a general notion of what their actual existential commitments will be like. But their learning about various specific ways of life also includes the learning of concepts. Those are the concepts of each of the specific ways of life under consideration, each concept of which consists of subconcepts of the standards, skills, and conditions relevant to the given way of life. In other words, when students consider their alternatives, they consider what it means to make an existential commitment to each alternative way of life.

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Each student’s consideration of a way of life, therefore, is a hypothetical commitment based on the logical implications of the concept of that way of life: “If I existentially commit to being A, then I will live by standards B and employ skills C and deal with conditions D, which are constituted by B and C.” This hypothetical commitment, I believe, is essentially what Kant referred to as a counsel of skill, or art: what one must do to obtain E whenever, and if ever, one wants to obtain E. The crucial point here is that there is nothing impelling with regards to the subject of different counsels of skill. While such counsels tell the subject what he or she must do if he or she wants to commit existentially to W, X, Y or Z, they do not tell the subject to commit existentially to any of those options or any other. Hence, a student seemingly may stand on the edge of existential commitment and review his or her alternatives forever or just stand there and cease reviewing them, effectively withdrawing from that edge. It might be objected, however, that I have ignored one of Haugeland’s fundamental tenets. According to this possible criticism, I should remember that the students who are learning to live as free beings have the capacity to become free beings. Thus, they have the capacity to learn to make choices and assume responsibility for them; and as soon as they transform that capacity into the capability to live as free beings, they will make existential commitments. But will they? Is not a person who is capable of freely choosing a life also capable of not choosing a life? Otherwise, the person has to choose a life and therefore is not free. This counter objection, Haugeland would correctly insist, confuses logical necessity with metaphysical or empirical necessity. That a free being will make an existential commitment is not a matter of divine or physical law. It is, rather, a matter of logical implication of what it means to be a free being. The argument that seems to support this claim runs like this: Freedom means freedom of choice; to be a free being is to choose a life in which one acts autonomously; the only way to choose such a life is to make an existential commitment to it; ergo, any free being logically must make an existential commitment. Thus, the student who recognizes that he or she is a free being and comprehends that free beings, by conceptual necessity, make existential commitments will necessarily make an existential commitment but in so doing will not violate his or her freedom. If a teacher regards a student as capable of making an existential commitment but finds that the student will not make such a commitment, the teacher logically regards the student erroneously. In any event, it follows that the thrust of education grounded on Haugeland’s new existentialism is to enable appropriate students to develop as free beings, to recognize that they are free beings, and to comprehend fully what it means to be a free being.

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Nevertheless, this appeal to the logical implications of the concept of a free being might not enable Haugeland to escape another charge that his new existentialism still entails a hypothetical commitment, although not a hypothetical existential commitment. The kind that is of present interest is a hypothetical conceptual commitment: If A recognizes him- or herself as free in Haugeland’s sense and is committed to Haugeland’s conception of a free being, then A logically will make an existential commitment in the sense that Haugeland intends. If Haugeland’s new existentialism does contain this hypothetical commitment, his theory of existential commitment is logically dependent on a commitment to his conceptual analyses. In other words, Haugeland’s possible truth is in his definitions; the rest is commentary. This observation is not intended to be cute only. It is meant, in addition, to remind Haugeland that he has made, in articulating his new existentialism, an uneven case as to why anyone should commit themselves to his conceptual meanings as opposed to other conceptual meanings. There are times when he is compelling in his conceptions; for instance, he dialectically reaches a conception of understanding as committed stance by a close comparison and contrast between Daniel Dennett’s and John Searle’s respective ideas of intentionality (p. 304). On the other hand, he does not attempt to show why this is a better or worse notion of understanding than some other, for example, Plato’s, Aquinas’s, Locke’s, Dewey’s, or that of ordinary language. If in further articulation of his theory Haugeland undertakes a justification of the meanings of his major concepts, he might want to reconsider his quip that “in the economy of understanding, words are merely money.” Like money, words are a medium; and like money, words may be sound or unsound. At times central bankers have to defend their currencies, and at times philosophers have to defend their definitions. In any event, it may be observed that in justifying his conceptual analyses, Haugeland will not have to abandon the articulation of his new existentialism. As far as I can tell, there is no better way for him to spell out his theory than to point out to the free beings who his readers are how the theory’s conceptual meanings not only differ from but are more defensible than the conceptual meanings of other theories. One hopes, of course, that in further explanation of his new existentialism, Haugeland will address also the above questions about elitism and deontic commitment. School of Leadership and Lifelong Learning The University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602 USA