BOOK REVIEW

John McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard University Press, Cambridge/

Mass. and London, 1994, 191 pp., $ 32.95 (cloth), $ 16.95 (paper).

In his published John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford University

McDowell wants to take account of the fact that experience is some-
thing which presents itself without any mediation as experience of an
independent reality. He therefore wants to propose an understanding of
the relationship between mind and world which establishes both that the
content of our empirical knowledge is the actual world, and that the actual
world is at the same time independent of our thoughts. McDowell attempts
to provide a cure for the diagnosed philosophical anxiety resulting from
our “mental block” (69) in conceiving the connectedness between mind
and world without dismissing the “friction” between them. Experience as
acquisition of knowledge by way of perception serves him as a key to
reconceive the relationship between mind and world. He describes two
inadequate solutions which his reconception has to confront: the falling
back to what he calls the “Myth of the Given” on the one hand, and a coher-
entist account of our thoughts and concepts on the other. Neither of these
two options allows to think the relationship between mind and world in a
way that the world rationally governs our thoughts, i.e. that we empirically
experience the thought-independent world.
The “third option” he proposes is geared to accommodate Kant’s idea of
empirical knowledge as the ‘co-operation of receptivity and spontaneity’
without falling into the predicament that ‘thoughts without content are
empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’. His method is astonishingly
hermeneutic, in that he jumps into the circularity of mind and world, trying
to grasp their meaning through their connectedness, instead of resorting to
analytical tools which would separate the supposedly inseparable.
The challenging questions McDowell wants to address in his therapy
are both how to see 1. rational constraint from the world and spontaneity as
free conceptual activity and 2. spontaneity as something which permeates
our lives, even to the extent of structuring those aspects that reflect our
naturalness, i.e. how autonomy and nature can cooperate. The review of
arguments from both classical as well as contemporary epistemology serves

Erkenntnis 48: 113–118, 1998.

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him as a foil against which he puts forth his “naturalized platonism” or

“relaxed naturalism” which supposedly makes sceptical questions obsolete.
Unlike empiricism or coherentism, McDowell wants to infer from
observational concepts and their more direct “infusion” with empirical
substance how experience is linked to concepts, even in cases where the
concepts are further removed from experience. Davidson’s coherentistic
view denies experience any justificatory role, confining us within the space
of concepts without providing any basis for empirical knowledge, thus
leading to “shallow scepticism” (17). On the other end of the spectrum,
Sellars’ idea of the given according to which the “space of reasons” is
wider than the space of concepts (i.e. where our rational connection to the
world embraces our conceptual reference to the world) is flawed, since we
can only make sense of justificatory relations within our own conceptu-
al sphere. As a result, empirical matters actually remain exterior to that
space of reasons, thus the latter does not qualify as a justification of our
conceptual connection to the world at all.
McDowell claims that world and mind are not in opposition to each oth-
er, since our mental concepts are already “possessed” by impressions, i.e.
sensory experiential intake. However, he pictures experience to be passive,
in that what we experience is not something we choose. Nevertheless this
passivity is a “case of receptivity in operation” (10) in which conceptual
capacities are already at work. In an attempt to circumvent the ontological
gap between thought and world, McDowell’s concept of experience “open
to the layout of reality” (26) serves as a medium which allows reality to
exert influence on what and how we think. He maintains that it is only
when experiences already have conceptual content, that we are able to
coherently credit to them rational relations to judgment and belief. He now
has to face the problem how this rational connection between experience
and judgment can be conceived.
McDowell gives an account of the intelligibility of our experience in
the active exercise of judgments where this experience comes into view
as belonging to a whole “network” of capacities for active thought that
rationally govern comprehension. Our judgments are rationally linked to
a whole system of concepts “within which their possessor engages in a
continuing activity of adjusting her thinking to experience” (47). Since
judgments are active conceptual capacities, and hence exercised with crit-
ical self-control of what one thinks, they can be readjusted in the light
of new experience. To see experience at all as “a seeming glimpse of the
world” (54) is only possible against this “background” of understanding
how experience and world are already related. In order to save our spon-
taneity that is active in judgments and to ensure at the same time friction
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with the empirical world, McDowell suggests a revision of our understand-

ing of nature. Due to our distorted concept of nature, we have not been
able to make sense of the relationship between mind and (natural) world.
In Reason and Nature, the fourth and most original chapter of his
book, McDowell revives the idea of a “second nature” in order to provide
the rational connection between passive experience and active judgment, to
reconcile the world here viewed as our experiential nature, with the freedom
of our judgments. Taking conceptual capacities in the Kantian sense of
spontaneity allows McDowell to view them mainly in light of the idea
of freedom. This connotation requires a reconciliation between freedom
and nature, thus accommodating a moral realist position. McDowell urges
that “we need to see intuitions as standing in rational relations to what we
should think, not just in causal relations to what we do think” (68) in order
to make sense of the very idea of thinking itself.
In order to reconcile freedom and nature, McDowell wants to recon-
ceptualize nature. He maintains, that the view of nature as governed by
natural law can be attributed to the rise of natural science. Therefore, nature
appears to be empty of meaning and bare of any idea of freedom. McDowell
draws our attention to the fact that our experience has conceptual content
“precisely as whatever natural phenomenon it is” (76). He understands
that nature is as much a part of our being as spontaneity is something that
belongs to our “mode of living” (77), such that freedom belongs to our way
of actualizing our nature: “To see exercises of spontaneity as natural, we do
not need to integrate spontaneity-related concepts into the structure of the
realm of law; we need to stress their role in capturing patterns in a way of
living.” (78) In reviving Hegel’s image that “the conceptual is unbounded
on the outside” (83), and Aristotle’s notion of a second nature, McDowell
wants to capture the idea that reason and sentient nature come into our view
as already reconciled, thus at least partially re-enchanting nature. Through
“Bildung” and upbringing we mature into a space of reasons which we then
come to understand, a development in which potentialities we are born with
are actualized. McDowell’s notion of Bildung also implies that we are ini-
tiated into a language as “a prior embodiment of mindedness” (125), a way
of thinking which almost recalls Heidegger’s concept of language as the
‘house of being’.
“Bildung” ensures that the space of reasons comes into view as part of
our human nature. It presupposes our immersion in a tradition as a mode
of access to reality, wherein reason is operative in states or occurrences of
passivity. Interestingly, McDowell sees in the passive attitude toward the
world a peculiar condition of our human nature as opposed to animal life.
Our human orientation to the world involves “in part acquiring the capacity
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to conceptualize the facts that underlie this already available behavioural

possibility” (118), while animals have a different mode of orientation to
the world altogether, and thus a different sort of content.
Being at home in the space of reason through our wordly orientation
doesn’t preclude our critical rethinking of it.
The strength of McDowell’s study lies not only in his illuminating
analysis motivated by his explicit search for common ground of empir-
ical knowledge and conceptual freedom, nature and reason of the most
influential epistemological arguments with regard to mind and world. It
is also characterized by his hermeneutic method which simply dismisses
the question of how mind and world as singular entities can cooperate.
Such a cooperation cannot be made intelligible without sacrificing one
or the other, yielding a “frictionless spinning in the void” (67). Instead,
mind and world come into view as always interconnected. The putative
impossibility of analytically separating experential content and conceptual
capacities opens the way to the hermeneutic notion of understanding and
making intelligible that which already appears to be a cooperating unity.
However, the step McDowell takes from the analysis of our experience,
where our conceptual capacities are supposedly already drawn into oper-
ation, to the notion of second nature, according to which we only come
to view by way of “Bildung” our immersion in a space of reasons, is only
vaguely cashed out. The linkage consists of the Kantian idea of spontaneity
as freedom operative in the cognitive realm, in the experience of empirical
matters, and in the moral realm, in the actualization of our nature through
a process of maturation.
I am not sure, however, whether McDowell subsumes under the link
of spontaneity two rather different faculties which diverge into conceptual
capacities of our mind and into practical judgment. While the former relates
to the material world, the latter refers to human interaction. McDowell’s
distinction between passivity in experience and activity in judgment does
not necessarily entail a clarification of how the relationship between the
two can be understood. How experience exactly translates into judgments
is therefore not a matter to which McDowell devotes much time. His focus
is on how empirical knowledge and human nature is possible provided that
our independent conceptual capacities are seen as human autonomy.
The hermeneutic strategy that leaves us with the assertion that mind
and world, subject and history, freedom and nature, scheme and content,
spontaneity and receptivity are always already connected when we come
to think about them bears the risk of serving as an exculpation for having
no other means to explain how they relate to each other. The feeling still
remains that there is a decisive difference between perceptual experience
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and judgments which no assertion to the contrary can outsmart. McDowell

does not tackle the question how this difference could come into view as a
difference, since his emphasis lies on the cooperation between experience
and concepts, nature and reason. Further, the various notions he uses to
describe the dualism between mind and world are not self-explanatory in
terms of their comparability.
With his Hegelian fallback to “Bildung”, McDowell also leaves the
inherent elitism of that concept – not to mention Hegel’s absolute dialec-
tic – unquestioned. It does not seem to him problematic to see human
infants before having gone through “Bildung” as “mere animals” (123),
thus implicitly picturing our ‘first’ nature as a rather deplorable status. He
risks becoming trapped in the terms and metaphors he uses, which as in
the cases of “Bildung” and “second nature” have far reaching connota-
tions. The cure he proposes against the diagnosed philosophical anxiety
also seems to consist in juggling certain terms: that conceptual capacities
are seen as spontaneity gives McDowell a cue for linking experience with
human nature by having them both being permeated by spontaneity. This
focus on spontaneity, however, sweeps under the carpet how other mental
states like emotions and desires figure in our reasoning. They seem to
have a great deal of bearing on our judgments, even though they might
not fall under what McDowell conceives as spontaneity. Would that mean
that emotions and desires, as part of our human nature and part of our
conscious or subconscious experience, are not rationally connected to our
judgments? I would find that conclusion hard to accept.
Here we have the hermeneutic circle that wishes to explain problems
away by asserting that they are not problems, thus leaving a lot of questions
about the justifiability of the origin of these problems.
There are, however, important insights on which any philosophy con-
cerned with contextual relationships should build: the idea of second nature
could serve as a basis for a social epistemology, as well as for any theo-
ry concerned with aspects related to social identity. His emphasis on our
development into the space of reasons leaves room for the accommodation
of different developmental experiences related to gender, class, and cul-
ture. Particularly fruitful in that respect is McDowell’s attempt to integrate
the body and our bodily presence in the world into a philosophy of mind.
McDowell has not only presented an impressive strategy to fight reduc-
tionist accounts of the relationship between mind and world. His reception
of hermeneutic philosophy has also opened up the possibility of recap-
turing a prephilosophical state, safe from gnawing scepticisms. Moreover,
McDowell’s idea of passive experiential intake with conceptual capacities
drawn into operation accommodates neuroscientific knowledge about the
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functioning of our brain better than any purely analytic theory of the mind
ever could. He has therefore provided ground breaking basics for a new
philosophical way of thinking about social identity and scientifically com-
patible theories of mind, while at the same time re-enchanting our being
in the world.

Manuscript received March 30, 1997

Harvard University MONIKA BETZLER