Second Nature and Bildung

A tempting response to the problem of mind and world is bald naturalism: the claim that the mind is entirely a natural system, and that normative notions like truth, justification, and meaning are either reducible to natural-scientific notions or eliminable. McDowell rejects this response: normative notions are irreducible, and any account of mind and world that eliminates them has lost sight of the phenomenon it was supposed to explain. We need an account of mind that takes norms seriously without placing them outside nature.

McDowell draws on Aristotle's account of ethical character to introduce the concept of second nature: the capacities and dispositions that a human being acquires through upbringing, education, and initiation into a tradition of practice. These are natural — they develop through natural processes in a natural organism — but they are not simply given by first nature (the biological endowment). They are acquired through Bildung: the process by which a person is made into a member of a linguistic and practical community, initiated into ways of perceiving and responding to the world that are normatively structured.

Conceptual capacities — the ability to perceive, judge, and reason under concepts — are second-natural in this sense. They are not written into the genome but acquired through immersion in a language and form of life; they are not mere behavioural dispositions but normatively structured capacities for getting things right and wrong. By treating conceptual capacities as second-natural, McDowell aims to show that they are neither supernatural (outside the natural order) nor naturalistically reducible (explicable in terms that bypass normativity). Nature is richer than bald naturalism supposes: it includes the space of reasons that opens up when a second nature is formed.

Second nature and Bildung are introduced in Lecture IV of Mind and World (1994) and developed further in McDowell's responses to critics in the second edition (1996). The concept draws on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Gadamer's account of Bildung in Truth and Method.