View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/05/hubert-dreyfus/
The Times We are Living In
That's what we are now, a time in which everybody want to get the most out of their possibilities. Every country, every person. That's very bad because that means you don't really get deeply involved in anything. You stay at the level in which you can manipulate everything. You and other people too. And what they forget, it is a Kierkegaardian issue really. I mean Kierkegaard wrote a long article called 'The Present Age' and that's when he introduced this notion of nihilism that if you just try to maximize pleasure or try to be ethical or try to be mystical, religious, you miss what's really important about human beings: that they should be totally committed to some particular thing. Only then can you be a self that isn't in despair, to talk in a Kierkegaard way.
And we're in this age now where people are not committed. Think that that's unfortunate, you're going to suffer, you are. And if you live that way, you don't find anything in your life that's really, fully meaningful and satisfying. And Kierkegaard says that's the present age. And I think that's right. It is mainly the view of the present age. I think that's what the students come into the course thinking. Maybe if I teach it well enough, Kierkegaard is smart enough, which he certainly is, they come out understanding that they'd better be committed to something. And those are the ones who come up to me in the supermarket and say I've changed their lives. Of which there's many more than one would have thought. So for Kierkegaard anyway you get to go through the sphere of existence, that is the way of life, of keeping all possibilities open and then you go from there to a way of life in which you obey the ethical principles and feel satisfied that you're doing the right thing. And then you go through this mystical sort of religious phase in which you try to feel that in Dante "you're one with the love that moves the sun and the other stars." Kierkegaard has something like that, I forget what his is. And then you get to this thing, you become totally committed to some political cause or to some person or to some idea that tells you who you are, gives you an identity. You are the lover of so and so or the leader of such a movement or whatever. iPod Hero of philosophy.
Learning Through Commitment and by Taking Risks
So the question is "how's the way we learn through acting in the world different from the way we learn when we're reading a book, watching a play or the TV or blogging back and forth on the Internet?" How is it different? It's different because you're taking a risk. That's also got to do with what happens when you're teaching. I mean if you're not already convinced you know the answer and if you don't write out your lectures a kind of finished thing that you give the students because you've got it and they haven't got it, then you're sort of out on your own and you don't know where you're going to end up. And sometimes when you're engaged in the world, wonderful things happen for you and you're pulled into all kinds of interesting events and possibilities. That's how it happens when you're embodied and in touch with things. And that's totally different from when you're a kind of a spectator who's just safely sitting at home or in their book or, like Descartes, who went into a warm room and was free from emotions, he said, in order to write the most influential philosophy book ever, I suppose. Descarte's "Meditations".
And Descarte was, if this story is right, a bad influence, a very bad influence because his idea was that's what you should do, withdraw from the world and think and reflect and so forth. And you miss the positive thing you get if you're involved with the world, in taking the risks. But I'm trying to ask myself "why is that a good thing to take these risks?" Well, that's because if you believe you need something to get you out of despair and despair is this business of not ever having anything really important in your life, everything equally resources, which is the kind of world we're in, then to get out of that kind of world you've got to, Kierkegaard says, plunge into the stream and struggle and swim and only then do you live a life that's exciting and meaningful. And only then do you know who you are. Which is not the most important thing, to know who you are, I don't think. Well, it depends on what you mean by that. If you mean know who you are, know what is crucially important to you such that you can't give it up and still be you, that's the most rewarding way to be. Kierkegaard's the first to have said that, I believe. That is that you have to jump in over your head, swim over 20,000 fathoms in the deep water if you're going to have a life worth living.
Being in the World Investigating Embodiment
This getting the body story together with the commitment story is so important. I'm learning right now from your question that I have never really seen that these two different views I hold don't immediately fit together. I'm sure they fit together but it's not obvious. To say that the body is important and to say that commitment to some cause or to do science or to love somebody. If that's what's important then it's not obvious that the body is all that important. It's funny, Kierkegaard doesn't have much to say about being embodied. Heidegger, my other hero, has only one sentence about having a body in his big, fat book 'Being and Time,' the most important philosophy book of the 20th century, I think. He says "well, it's somebody else's job to think about having a body." Fascinating.
So, Merleau-Ponty does the job. And somebody else that I think is very important that nobody else has ever heard of, named Samuel Todes, whose thesis I think is so brilliant that I convinced MIT Press to publish it and it is called "The Human Body as Material Subject of the World." Todes is the one who has most thought-out the things that I've just been talking about. He never actually wrote a book but I took his thesis and got it published as a book. So anyway, nobody will see that book. He's the one who tries to bring together having a body and having these unconditional commitments.
Perception is important and your body is what you use when you perceive things. You don't need your body when you're thinking about things. But perception is absolutely basic. But it's a different level. Everybody's got perception, it isn't as each one having his own unconditional commitment. Without a body, of course, you don't perceive objects and you don't get a grip on them and having a grip on objects is very, very fundamental and important. That's Merleau-Ponty's discovery. That it's through a body that we get what he calls an optimal or maximal grip on reality. You've got to show, somehow, that the way you perceive and your body and coping with things gives you a sense of what it is to have a grip on things. As opposed to being outside sort of just looking in or looking at your computer or looking at the scenery. And it's your body that enables you to get a grip on things. And when you've got a grip on things you have, among other things, this sense of what's crucially important to you.
But how you get from your body grip and perception to the fact that there are things that are crucially important to you, I just don't know. There are so many things that that's the point, that's why I'm so eager to teach in a way that I learn. Some smart student, some future Todes in the audience, in the classroom, is going to tell me very important, very valuable things. My co-author Sean Kelly, of course, is one of the main ones. My brother, I haven't talked about yet but I will, is certainly another one of the important ones. And there's so much to be understood that isn't understood that I'm just eager to hear what comes up next in my own course. That's what's exciting.
Disclosing New Worlds and the Critic of Artificial Intelligence
We have to go back and think about what it is to disclose a new world. One of the things that will help us understand, perhaps, what this relation to authentic running forward into death, what that could be like is to ask about what people have when they have worlds. Animals don't have worlds. Heidegger says animals are 'world poor.' But we have a world, each of us. And there's a shared world too that we all have. Creative people can disclose new worlds, Heidegger thinks, and I think that's right. It's hard to understand what it is to be a creative person and disclose new worlds, but it's got to do with having a completely new take on something important that people have all got wrong and which you have this kind of moment of ah-ha if you get it right. One kind of example of that which I've been interested in, there's some sense in which Steve Jobs is disclosing new worlds when he opens up the idea of the iPhone and the iPad and the Pixar movies. He's invented about five totally new, different ways of having a world and having activities and that's pretty amazing.
That's what it would be like in a localish way to disclose new worlds. But there are big-deal ways to disclose new worlds. So people talk about Einstein or they talk about Descartes, for instance, though in a certain way he's a bad guy. In a certain way he's a big-deal discloser of modernity. It's just that modernity may not be such a nice thing to disclose. So, what am I saying? That you need to know about what it is to disclose worlds in order to understand what it is to lose worlds too. It's true that to disclose a world you've got to give up the previous one that was some kind of misunderstanding.
When I was something like discovering a world. That's different than my brother. We each did it. A different disclosing of a different world. So, with me at MIT, I came to MIT to teach at just the time when everybody was interested in computers and believed that we would soon have artificial intelligence where computers would be as smart or smarter than we are and so forth. And they made movies about it and they made speeches about it and then they thought they were the leaders of the discovery of the New World. But they weren't. They were exactly making the mistakes of all the traditional philosophers from Descartes on that believing that you're in a world when you can step back and reflect and disconnect and contemplate and so forth.
So my relation to MIT was to totally criticize what they were saying and say "no, that's not how people are." And, getting back to Kierkegaard, people are capable of unconditional commitments to define them. Nobody's going to ever have that in a level of artificial intelligence. Computers aren't self-defined individuals and never will be even if they wanted to play Jeopardy and become world chess champions. That's not the same as being a human being. I was sort of surprised at this conclusion. That's not the way to put it. I was drawn into the debate between whether there would ever be artificial intelligence the way they were trying to get it at MIT. Who knows what there could ever be? But the way they were going about it at MIT, trying to make artificial intelligence, I said they'll never be able to do it. And they tried to fire me at MIT for giving false plausibility to my stupid remarks. The fact that I make them as a professor at MIT. And my book on the subject, "What Computers Can't Do" got read by the experts all over the world and finally the President of MIT called me in and said no, they're not going to fire me they're going to keep me. And that was all interesting. It was interesting mainly because people say "boy, you were so courageous to fight against the people who could fire you at MIT" and so forth. And I want to say "no, I wasn't courageous at all" because I didn't say to myself this is risky but I have to do it. I just was outraged that they were sort of lying to themselves and to the general public about things that they didn't understand. Telling people that in 8 or 10 years there are going to be computers more intelligent than me. That just seemed to me so utterly wrong a thing to believe and wrong to go around telling everyone and giving constant interviews about it. And so I couldn't resist, this was the important thing, putting my career on the line to say "no, this is wrong." And to become identified this book "What Computers Can't Do" and my next book "What Computers Still Can't Do." Just take the risk of being kicked out of MIT and so forth.
The important thing is, what is to be courageous is to be open, to be drawn into something that you're commited to, even if it's risky. That's what happened to me with computers and artificial intelligence. I was drawn into something completely risky, I almost lost my job and I put all my energy into books that said they were wrong and tried to give reasons they were wrong. That's not courage, that's what really happens, I think. I don't think for a minute that it was anything about courage. There was something about not wanting to be lied to. That was, for me a big surprise, that you could get into this kind of risky situation and that it was really very rewarding, even if you turned out to be wrong and lost your job. At MIT they had a meeting every year where there were about 500 students and where they got me debating the AI people in front of those students and more and more I think I won over some followers.
The New Skill Model How to Master Actions
Everybody gets to be, if they're hard-working and take risks and so forth, an expert at something. Or a master if you really want to go all the way. And it's something that since everyone has had this experience, it's odd that philosophers never explained the experience, and worse, they totally misexplained it. That's why they misunderstood the computers and thought they could be intelligent. They thought being intelligent was having the right rules in your mind and the right descriptions in your mind and in fact it wasn't like that at all.
The first stage, it's true, you need rules. [Now pointing to chalkboard on video: stepped stages 1-Novice, 2-Advanced Beginner, 3-Competence, 4-Proficiency, 5-Expertise, 6-Master] I'll give an example from chess and from driving. Chess is very disembodied, I think. Driving is obviously very embodied. Both of them equally have this stream, five or six stage structure. I say six because (my brother doesn't like this stage, his work stopped at stage five and "master" [stage six] is really like world-discloser, being a mathematician he doesn't like something that's not very clear). Back here [stages one to three] all of this thinking is going to get in your way. Even here [stage four] your thinking isn't going to be the way an expert thinks. An expert [stage five] doesn't think, he just does what works, what has normally worked for him, at it will normally work.
So, in chess, a master chess player or expert chess player can make within a few seconds a high-level move. That's what's exciting about expertise. And, in driving, you just automatically your foot comes up from the gas or goes on the brake. If you start thinking about why you should do this or when you should do this, you stop doing it well. That kind of thoughtful reflection is in the way of expertise. Now that's important because that's what I consider sort of the breakthrough. For 300 years, at least, which is how long it's been since Descartes, or maybe even for 1000 years, philosophers have thought that the more thinking you do, the more analysis you do, the better the performance will be. And what Stuart, just contemplating driving and chess, two things he knows how to do like an expert, saw that that's extremely wrong. All this thinking about what to do and memorizing what to do is getting in the way of the spontaneous doing.
Of course you can't just start that way. You've got to have lots of experience, take risks, lose sometime/win sometime. But if you do all that and you do it a lot, then you can get to the point where you don't think anymore. And then you're really good. That's what the chess expert does, he just sees the right move and makes it. You can play blitz chess if you're a master. Which means you can make a move in three seconds or something after you see the previous move. And you'll still be playing at master level. And you won't be thinking at all. So there's something higher, namely intuition, that you have to have which is leading you to see the situation in such a way that it draws you immediately to do the appropriate thing. And then there's something harder to describe. This is the revelation: that philosophers have been 180 degrees wrong for the whole history of philosophy thinking that rules and facts and reflection was the way to become intelligent and expert. All you needed to do is just pay attention to your own experience.
The reason Stuart could do it is he's never read a philosophy book in his life at that point, he maybe has read some since. He was a mathematician, an applied mathematician. He had to just look at what he was doing when he was driving and what he was doing when he was playing expert-level chess. And he did. And he saw this. It didn't change the whole world but it did change a lot of the way people learned a lot of skills. That are now sort of devoted to repeating his views about these things. It sort of turned the idea about how the mind works when you're an expert upside down. That, to me from inside philosophy, was a big revelation. And then I realized that Heidegger was onto that. Heidegger talks about how you have to become skilled in dealing with the world and when you are, you're "absorbed," that's his word, you're absorbed in the situation. So if you're a carpenter, you could be an expert carpenter, but if you're really, really a good carpenter the hammer withdraws, Heidegger says. The hammer disappears and you sort of disappear into this activity. We are the kind of being that can be absorbed in what they're doing and when they are, it brings them out at their best. That's the moral of this skills story.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
