1. Intentionality without intentions

What does it mean for an object to fail at being, say, a hammer?

There are two intuitively available answers to this question. First, an object may fail to fulfill a purpose set by its creator: it was made to hammer nails but because of certain events (in the process of creation or afterwards, due to wear over time) it cannot be used to that purpose. Second, an object may fail to satisfy a standard set by its user: I thought I could use a frying pan to hammer in a nail, but it proved too unwieldy.

If pressed, one might come up with more answers, perhaps infinitely more. But what all the potential answers have in common is that they all imply the presence of intentional beings: agents who can set the standard for a hammer. In order to fail as X, an object has to be intended as X. And crucially, to be intended as X, an object has to be intended as X by someone. There are no purposes without purpose-givers; no standards without standard-setters.

The crucial part of the relationship between intentionality and normativity that Suther seems to largely ignore is that they both imply each other. Yes, intentionality always implies normativity—on this True Materialism is clear—but the opposite is also true: all normativity inevitably signals the presence of intentional agents. And it is crucial to stress that last part, “intentional agents,” as not to fall into one of Suther’s traps—the idea of intentionality as detached from actual agents possessing actual intentions: “By ‘intentionality’ I mean neither consciousness nor representation but the end-directed character of activity that is intelligible only in relation to the maintenance of the system that performs it.”1 Of course intentions are not necessarily conscious, but Suther’s vague understanding of intentionality leads to a contradiction: even though the “system” in question is not intentional in the sense of acting upon or expressing intent, its activities still count as intentional because we can purportedly only conceive of them as such (it is the only way for them to become “intelligible”). But this only begs the question: when we do conceive of such activities as intentional; who is it whose intentions we imagine to be in play? Or, to quote Michaels again on teleosemantics: “But does it make sense to think of survival as a purpose? Whose purpose is it?”2

Of course, True Materialism’s central claim is that we don’t have to answer such questions; we don’t have to imagine someone like this at all. In fact, even though the detachment of “intentionality” from actual intentions is what brings Suther’s proposition in line with Latour’s intentionless agency, it also brings to mind Richard Rorty’s response to the kind of intentionalism articulated in “Against Theory.” Against Michaels and Knapp, Rorty argued that the actual presence of authorial intent is irrelevant from the standpoint of interpretation because “anything—a wave pattern, an arrangement of stars, the spots on a rock—can be treated not only as language but as any given sentence of English if one can find some way to map its features onto the semantic and syntactic features of that sentence.”3 Famously, Michaels and Knapp agreed with Rorty that “anything that looks like English can be treated as language; anything that looks like any language can be treated as language,” while disagreeing on the implications of that fact. On their account, the crucial difference is between thinking that something is a speech act and just pretending as if it was; that difference cannot be arbitrarily suspended, as this would require one to stand outside of one’s own beliefs. “[E]ven pretending to believe something depends on believing something else.”4 In other words, Michaels and Knapp showed the issue to be reducible to the more general problem of belief: we can imagine an infinite number of beliefs that are not our own; we can often behave as if they were true, but none of this makes us actually believe in them, and by itself such mental operation certainly doesn’t erase the difference between the beliefs we actually have and the ones we can imagine someone having.

When Suther seeks to abstract from the question of the presence of an actual agent possessing intentions and rely instead on the fact that certain natural processes can be described in terms of purpose, he does something similar to Rorty: he asks us to ignore the difference between something we believe is intended by someone and something we could treat as if it was intended by someone. To put it in Suther’s terms, although it’s linguistically possible to redescribe processes that are not intended by anyone as intentional actions, it’s impossible to rationally conceive of them in such a way; we can only pretend they’re intentional by setting aside the question of actual intentions. And when Suther claims that a flower “is not just causally reacting to the presence of light but is oriented by the goodness of light as a means to photosynthesis,”5 it brings to mind the way Rorty generalised from his views on meaning and interpretation: “you can impute goodness to anything by imagining a desirable end to which it can be a means.”6

2. The circular logic of life

Large parts of Suther’s argument constitute a tautology. It starts with an assertion that living organisms must be conceived of as naturally purposive: this is because we know their parts may succeed or fail. But, we are told, the only reason to conceive of those parts as capable of failure is that otherwise we cannot grasp what they really are from the standpoint of the purpose of the system as a whole. We know that life has a purpose because our organs may fail, but we only know our organs may fail because we know they serve a purpose inherent to life. This tautological structure makes Suther’s argument nothing if not coherent; the question is whether it holds. It doesn’t: there is no reason to think of life as inherently purposive; we can easily conceive of growth, reproduction, metabolism, and similar in terms of purely causal chains.

Responding to such view, Suther claims that

Any account of life must explain why biological explanations distinguish between functioning and malfunctioning states of organisms, whereas physical explanations of inorganic systems do not. If living systems were nothing more than aggregates of matter governed by indifferent laws, no such distinction could be sustained: the withering of a plant and the rusting of iron would be describable in exactly the same terms, with no reference to dysfunction.

The point is that the notion of dysfunction, commonplace in biology, makes something like the purposiveness of life conceptually necessary; in this sense, the field of biology as such would support Suther’s position. There are a few responses to this. One is that even the biologists referenced by Suther caution against seeing “functions” of bodily organs as tied to something like a purpose, end, or telos.7 Moreover, there are many biological accounts of life that do not invoke purposefulness at all; famously, the NASA definition has life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Yet another possible response is that Suther’s account of life leads him to embrace a teleological account of evolution,8 which goes against the scientific consensus of the field. In other words, invoking practices commonplace in biology doesn’t necessarily support Suther’s position.

We often perceive animals as capable of acting upon intent, and further than that, as a matter of daily practice, we often use intention-related metaphors and terms of normative judgement even when we know intentions are not actually in play. We often behave as if objects around us were capable of intentions or agency, without actually believing it to be true. Similarly, to say that “a stone failed to survive the impact of a hammer” has nothing to do with the purpose of the stone itself: it is just an efficient way of describing what happened when the hammer struck the stone. These are conditional statements with a part of their structure simply omitted for convenience: assuming that the stone wanted to remain in its previous state, it failed when struck by a hammer.

These are precisely the kind of statements we make when we discuss the “failure” of various organs or life functions. We assume the purpose is survival, and we judge everything by this standard. Crucially, however, we set aside the question “whose purpose is it?”; it could belong to the organism in question, or God, or no one at all. The point is to stay agnostic in this regard. What we do instead is offer another conditional statement: insofar as the purpose is life, then an organ may be considered to “fail” if it does this or that. As a matter of everyday practice, including in fields such as biology, such approach may have practical upsides and allow for more efficient communication. But the same conditionality that makes statements of this kind useful renders them philosophically irrelevant.9

3. Multiple descriptions

The reason why the defense of life’s natural purposiveness is central to True Materialism is that it allows Suther to claim that the opposite position is epistemologically insufficient, thus leaving room for new “methodological imperatives.” By the opposite position, I mean the view that actions produce multiple descriptions of what happens by necessitating a unique type of explanation: the interpretation of intent. This doesn’t produce any duality in the world—instead, what is implied is the irreducibility of interpretation to a purely causal analysis that doesn’t necessarily make the latter irrelevant or invalid on its own terms.10

The essence of Suther’s doubts is perhaps best expressed in the claim that

The question Kaczmarski’s dualist approach cannot answer is not how intentional descriptions redescribe bodily movements but how human bodies can so much as constitute bearers of intentions at all. If a mechanical description of human life were merely incomplete from the intentionalist standpoint … but fully adequate as a description of our lives themselves, then intentional description would be optional in principle, a dispensable overlay on a self-sufficient physical story. (DE)

I certainly wouldn’t say that one can describe a person’s life without recourse to intent—Suther’s claim is false in one sense and true in another. It is false in that every interpretation always necessarily implies some answer to the question of how a body, human or otherwise, is a “bearer of intention”: it poses specific agents capable of intentions. And as long as we believe that some but not all happenings in the world constitute actions, we also necessarily pose bodies capable of performing them.

On the other hand, Suther is right in that the intentionalist position doesn’t logically entail any specific claims on why, or if, representatives of our species are capable of having, expressing, or acting upon intentions. But neither does Suther’s account. To put this in his own terms—from the standpoint of biology—similar questions obviously require biological, neurological, or perhaps psychological answers. To find a structure in the human brain that makes us capable of having intentions is a task very different from figuring out what we do when we act, and the former obviously cannot be achieved on a purely “conceptual” level. For Suther this poses a problem, as the crossing of the divide between the two levels is the point; in fact, his search for a bridge between the biological and the intentional resembles in many ways the search for a mechanism of mental causation (in reverse) and is bound to encounter the same issues. On the intentionalist account, the existence of various levels of explanation is not just acceptable but a direct corollary of the discontinuity between cause and intent.

In general, Suther’s approach leads to analytic imprecision, with Suther posing contradictions where none are present. One could agree with him, for instance, that the ability to see with our eyes does not precede our existence, as much as it is an integral and important part of that existence. But this changes nothing in the structure of the actions we perform with our eyes (like looking at something). “The eye is therefore not a neutral piece of matter awaiting functionalization by intention but an organic member whose existence … is intelligible only in relation to the perceptual activity it realizes” (DE). The latter is true in the sense that the “perceptual activity” in question is us using our eyesight, and we presumably define our eyes as the bodily parts we use for the purposes of that activity. (This is why our elbows can’t really fail at seeing.) But how does this make the eye different from a “piece of matter awaiting functionalization by intention”? These two descriptions are perfectly compatible: we use our eyes for certain actions, and the kind of actions we perform with them makes us conceive of them as “eyes.”

There is more substance to Suther’s claim that “intentionality is not a neutral ‘description’ under which the series can be subsumed but the constitutive principle that allows it to be—and be knowable as—a physical series at all” (DE). It is true that, whenever action is present, the only thing binding its components into the totality that it is is the intention of the agent. It doesn’t matter whether the components themselves are “physical” or not. In other words, we only know that an action started at X and ended at Y—or that it comprises a “series” of physical events A, B, C—because we refer back to the intention that gave it form.

In this sense, Suther is correct in pointing out that any description of what happens that invokes the formal boundaries of an action is already a description of that action. This much is a tautology: an action is only “knowable” for what it is as long as we recognise it as action. However, Suther is incorrect in suggesting that this is what I mean by the “other,” non-intentional description produced whenever actions happen. In fact, it is still perfectly possible to describe all the chemical, physical, biological processes that we would otherwise see as involved in an action in terms that are completely unrelated to it: in terms of causal chains, without reference to the action’s boundaries, or to a “series” delimited by the form of the intentional act. The moment we refer to them as components of a certain intentional totality, we enter the realm of interpretation, but the point is precisely that we don’t always have to do that.

4. Bases and superstructures

Suther’s misunderstanding of my last point is the reason why his reconstruction of my views on the Marxist notion of base and superstructure is the exact opposite of what I believe. According to Suther,

Kaczmarski insists that we can neatly separate “causes” and “meanings” in a way that tracks the division between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. This is to say that we can either describe a work in terms of the economic causes that produced it or describe it in terms of the meaning it embodies in virtue of an artist’s intentional act. But as I argued in the case of hand-raising and living systems above, we would lose the phenomenon: the economic description would abstract away from everything that makes art art, rendering materialist criticism impossible.

Here, the operative words seem to be “either” and “or,” but I am not certain what Suther’s point is. Is it that we can only ever use one of these two descriptions or explanations? This is obviously false: the point is that they are both valid in some sense, and it’s not a case of choosing one over the other based on some methodological preference. Is Suther’s point then that there is no real distinction between those two modes of analysis? This would erase the difference between interpretation and the description of factors that might have causally led to the creation of the work but are not part of its meaning. Is Suther trying to suggest that there is a way of interpreting the work’s meaning that goes beyond the consideration of the “artist’s intentional act”? That would place him on the side of common anti-intentionalism.

The point I make in relation to the base-superstructure metaphor11 is that it allows Marxists to reconcile two principles: that of one-way causal determination of certain “superstructural” phenomena by deeper structural factors and that of the irreducibility of interpretation to purely causal analysis. On my account, the superstructure is essentially a way for a certain type of analysis—one that concerns itself with “the base”, or causal determination—to account for its own blind spot, i.e., the form of meaningful acts, without necessarily giving up on any specific claims about causal determination. The point is not to “neatly separate” any two areas of human activity but to integrate the unique way in which meanings exist in the world into the kind of practical determinism essential to Marxism. Crucially, the problem of the base and the superstructure never arises on the side of interpretation: anything that is of interest to it is given in the meaning of the work itself.

Altogether, my account produced an essentially deflationary argument with no methodological ambitions. Suther’s goal is the opposite: he is not satisfied with the idea of multiple explanations and remains clear about his desire to establish new “methodological imperatives.” His way of going about it is characteristically inflationary in terms of proposing new notions, inventing new terminology, and redescribing life itself. But the real test for any new theory is not whether it can offer a structure of thought, but whether that structure has purchase on reality: that is, whether there are things that need to be conceived of in this way. On this front, Suther ultimately fails.