The Dreyfus-McDowell Debate and the Limits of Reason

Abstract

In the Dreyfus-McDowell debate, John McDowell makes the claim that what makes us distinctively human is our all-pervasive conceptual rationality. Hubert Dreyfus, on the other hand, argues that we are, at our best, absorbed in the world and only ‘part time’ rational animals. Who is right? I appraise the debate, and proceed to then focus my analysis on two core issues: the Linguistic Community of McDowell, and the non-qualitative phenomenology of Dreyfus. I conclude that Dreyfus and McDowell cannot explain how we ‘step back from’ and ‘step in to’ the world, respectively. I propose a mediatory account between Dreyfus and McDowell’s claim through Helmuth Plessner’s concept of ‘eccentric positionality’. In employing psychopathological research, providing Plessner’s eccentric positionality as an instructive model, I suggest that we can see the disruption of eccentricity as a cornerstone of the ‘ontological confusion’ of personhood found in people with schizophrenia. Furthermore, I will propose that in this disruption of eccentricity, we are led to similar issues found in Dreyfus’ non-qualitative phenomenology, and the issues faced with McDowell’s linguistic community. This suggests a need for a reconciliation of both of their claims, which can be made through Plessner’s eccentric positionality. Therefore, I will suggest that both Dreyfus and McDowell are describing reciprocal aspects of the nature of the human being, which are in fact complementary and necessary to one another. However, these two positions need to be consolidated through Plessner’s eccentric positionality to account for the human being, for, to be the human, is to be eccentric.