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Liberalizing Second Nature: McDowell, Dilthey, and the Sociality of Reason

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5 Liberalizing Second Nature
McDowell, Dilthey, and the
Sociality of Reason

Eric S. Nelson

5.1. Introduction
John McDowell in Mind and World and the essay “Gadamer and David-
son on Understanding and Relativism” embraces several theses from Hans-
Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method. Gadamer’s principal
assertions concerning the priority of tradition and language, adopted by
McDowell, are explicitly developed through sustained critiques of Enlight-
enment rationality, the notion of judgement in Kant, particularly in the
Critique of Judgment, and the ostensive “individualism” of nineteenth-
century hermeneutics, specifically, that of Friedrich Schleiermacher and
Wilhelm Dilthey.1
McDowell rejects reductive “bare” naturalisms in Mind and World
for the sake of a liberalized naturalism that recognizes the social and cul-
tural constitution of mind and world through language and tradition.2
In doing so, he appears to commit himself to a version of the priority
of the social. This overemphasis, specifically in its Hegelian form, has
been interrogated – without presupposing an asocial definition of the
individual – by philosophers such as Dilthey in his anti-metaphysical and
liberal reappropriation of Hegel, Hannah Arendt in the Human Condition
(Arendt 2013), or (more radically) Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and In-
finity (Levinas 1961). Dilthey, a philosopher who both strongly influenced
and was extensively criticized in Truth and Method, provides a signifi-
cant modification to the Hegelian–Gadamerian model of the sociality of
reason adopted by McDowell. Dilthey recognized the merits of Hegel’s
social critique of Enlightenment individualism but espoused a relational
and structural individualist alternative to the overly robust interpretations
of objective and absolute spirit articulated in Hegel’s idealism and its suc-
cessors. Dilthey’s strategy can be extended to the coherence and unity of
tradition, prejudice, and language promoted in Gadamer’s hermeneutics,
which itself was developed through criticism of Dilthey’s lingering commit-
ments to liberal individualism and the Enlightenment.3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003314356-6
 Liberalizing Second Nature 91

Dilthey rejected, as evident in his later liberalization and pluralization of

Hegel’s categories of ethical life and objective spirit (Dilthey 1965, 1990),
the paradigm of “social idealism” that continues to resonate in McDow-
ell’s analysis. In Dilthey’s liberalizing reinterpretation, “objective spirit”
is pluralized as the “manifold forms in which the community existing be-
tween individuals has been objectified in the world of the senses” (Dilthey
1965, 208). It is in this sense that I propose a strategy of further liberal-
izing not only the “first nature” of bare naturalism but also overly strong
interpretations of “second nature” that haunt Mind and World (McDowell
1996, xx). The overly robust social idealist interpretation is visible in Mc-
Dowell’s argument that the formation of second nature entails the very
sociality and intelligibility of reason and cognition.
This proposition is presupposed throughout McDowell’s discussions
of Gadamer. Whereas Michael Friedman was concerned with problems
of the subjective idealism of consciousness and relativism with respect to
the facts and reality of being-in-itself in Gadamer and McDowell in his
review of Mind and World (Friedman 1996), and – to introduce an ad-
ditional problematic – Jürgen Habermas questioned Gadamer’s “linguistic
idealism” as ignoring material and power relations (Habermas 1982, 287),
this essay takes a different approach by questioning the very categories of
objective spirit, language, and tradition for the sake of a different relational
model of sociality inspired by the liberal hermeneutic lineage of Wilhelm
von Humboldt and Dilthey. I will accordingly explore in this brief contribu-
tion the extent to which McDowell’s adoption of this “Gadamerian” strat-
egy fails to resolve the problems of idealism and relativism as he proposes,
and whether an alternative hermeneutical strategy is called for: a “critique
of historical reason” that moderately embodies and situates (or historicizes
and relativizes) without excessively forsaking rationality, judgement, and
the individuality and plurality of the human condition in accepting either
the priority of language and tradition or, conversely, a radical relativism
that isolates worldviews and perspectives from one another and the world.

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