Huenemanniac

Daniel Dennett, I’ve Been Thinking (Norton, 2023).

Daniel Dennett died last week, and I took the occasion to read his autobiography. I don’t know how interesting the book would be to anyone who didn’t know Dennett, or anyone who hasn’t read at least 3 or 4 of his books and been captivated by them. I didn’t know Dennett, but his worldview is the one I have more or less adopted, due entirely to the way he writes and explains (“dansplaining”, I’ve called it). His books give me the same wonder and thrill and “aha!” that got me into this business in the first place. His view is plausible to those of us suspicious of any grand style of philosophizing that issues proclamations that can’t somehow get measured or tested by some plausibly flat-footed, objective method. You might call his philosophy grounded in verificationism or behaviorism. “But science is a sort of behaviorism,” he replies; “once you’ve got a scientific explanation of all the behavior, inner and outer, large and microscopic, of any phenomenon, there’s nothing else to explain—except why some people are so uncomfortable with your explanation!”

Dennett’s life’s story is one that makes you wonder what you have been doing with your life. He lived large: traveling everywhere, meeting interesting minds from many diverse fields, building an impressive philosophical career filled with accomplishment, inventing new questions and experiments, all while also sculpting, sailing, music making, and rebuilding an old farm in Maine. As I say, I didn’t know him, but I can’t imagine anyone seizing life’s many dimensions more eagerly.

Most intellectual fields are construction sites, or landscape projects, in which progress is made routinely, and everyone’s work is fitting into some larger scheme. Philosophy, though, at least the way Dennett practices it, is more like a multi-dimensional playground of objects no one has yet figured out. We pick up this and that and wonder what it’s for, or whether it is a part of something else, or whether it actually isn’t anything. We mess around trying to figure things out, and if we have any success, then part of the playground becomes someone else’s construction project. Dennett was able and eager to pass off big chunks of the playground to construction workers—which sounds bad, doesn’t it? But it’s bad only if in the process of doing so one is rushing the construction and unjustly ignoring genuine perplexities. And that is the main variety of criticism Dennett has received over the years: “It’s not Consciousness Explained but Consciousness Explained Away!” and so on. It is a delicate matter to behold a perplexity and convince oneself that, in fact, the perplexity one feels is an illusion. We shouldn’t lightly discard our perplexities; but sometimes they are indeed illusions, after all. Dennett was masterful in engaging in the dialectic between being in the grip of a perplexity and allowing it be explained.

I enjoyed reading about his life and coming to know a bit more about the man who’s had such a dominant sway over my intellectual life.