Time and Normativity (Heidegger Naturalized, Division II)
Joe Rouse, Wesleyan University
DRAFT: Please do not cite, quote or circulate without written permission of author.
“If someone makes predictions and wants to check them himself, he must count on changes in the system
of his senses, he must use clocks and rulers.” Otto Neurath, Philosophical Papers, p. 55
“A time-reversible world would also be an unknowable world. Knowledge presupposes that the world
affects us and our instruments, that there is an interaction between knower and known, and that this
interaction creates a difference between past and future.” Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty, p. 153
I. Introduction and Review
My talk is part of a continuing story, which I began here last year, in my paper
“Heidegger Naturalized (and Vice Versa).” For those of you who were not here, or who have
somehow forgotten the particulars of that talk, I will briefly recapitulate the key points. Before
doing so, I should note that the need to continue the story in this way was brought home to me by
Rebecca Kukla, in a longer unpublished version of her review of my book How Scientific
Practices Matter, and in several of her own important papers on normativity. I thank her for the
inspiration, even if by the end you find my response either underinspired or overwrought.
My talk last year suffered from the attempt to encompass four points, each needing a
paper in its own right. I nevertheless must now summarize them far more briefly:
1) Heidegger’s effort to pose the question of the being of entities, of how they are
intelligibly manifest as entities, is not so distant from the naturalistic tradition. Heidegger
rejected any attempt to ground the intelligibility of entities, and its associated normativity, in
anything extra-worldly or purely formal/structural, such as transcendental consciousness,
ahistorical norms of rationality, formal logic, or the structural relations among possible worlds.
A rapprochement between Heidegger and naturalism is further aided by the recognition that we
must think through more carefully, and not simply take for granted, our sense of what it is to be a
“naturalist.” Naturalism read through Heidegger may differ from extant versions of naturalism
much as Heidegger’s Kant differs from Kant.
2) Although Heidegger rejected both realism and idealism in philosophy, he gave a
methodological priority to idealism in his rethinking of Kant’s and Husserl’s conception of a
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“phenomenon” in section 7 of Being and Time. Last year, I proposed an alternative, naturalist
route to the question of the intelligibility of entities as entities through reflection upon a sense of
“natural” phenomena developed in recent work in the philosophy of science. A “phenomenon”
in this sense is a local configuration of the world that allows entities to show themselves
intelligibly. Phenomena, I argued, are not, and cannot be understood simply as more complex or
encompassing entities, but must instead be something more like a “mode” of Weltlichkeit.
3) I then looked more closely at the phenomena embodied in the ways-of-life of
organisms-in-environments. The crucial point here is that an organism (and similarly with other
levels of biological organization, from organelles to clades) is the entity it is only through its
characteristic responsiveness to an environment; yet an environment in the relevant sense is only
defined through relevance for the continuing reproduction of the organism’s way of life (which is
not a fixed pattern, but accommodates extensive phenotypic and ontogenetic plasticity). In this
sense, an organism’s “way of life,” that is, the mutually intra-active configuration of organism
and environment, is not an entity but the opening of an existentiell world of possibilities. Yet the
way of life of an organism does not yet disclose its possibilities as possibilities, or entities as
entities, because the intelligibility made manifest through that way of life is ineliminably vague
(Okrent), not telling (Haugeland), not capable of the stance-attributive stance (Brandom), or
world-poor (Heidegger 1995).
4) I finally argued that the discursive articulation without which there can be no being
toward possibilities-as-such and hence no intelligibility, can be understood biologically as an
extension of familiar modes of niche construction, such that we live in and continually
reconstruct a verbally-articulated world. To do so is not, however, to reduce disclosure to the
possession of language, or even to conflate discursively articulated disclosure with the
availability of language as a distinctive entity. I cannot express this point, the priority of
disclosure as a naturalistically-intelligible phenomenon over languages as intraworldly entities,
more succinctly than I did last year:
Who we are, what we can be, and what is at stake in our becoming are not free-floating
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possibilities, because we are bound to an organic way of life that is already practically
and discursively articulated. We only “have” possibilities through our intra-active
belonging to a world; there are no articulable possibilities except within that setting.
Thus, it is not in virtue of our having language (let alone “mind”) that the world becomes
articulately intelligible, for that would require an independent norm for identifying what
it is to speak a language (and a magic language in which to express that norm). We have
no such criterion apart from the ability to make sense of what is said and done within our
own discursively articulated world. Thus, performances and practices only become
“linguistic” through the larger pattern of intra-actively dealing with things and with one
another that holds those performances normatively accountable. For similar reasons, my
emphasis upon the difference between our discursively articulated world, and the world
as disclosed through the ways of life of other organisms, should also not be
misunderstood in terms of the humanism still characteristic of early Heidegger.
Disclosedness is not an essential structure of “our” way of being; rather, this intra-active
patterning of the world as a “whole” is what allows us to be what we are.
So much for review.
The Achilles’ heel of most extant metaphysical naturalisms is their effort to make
intelligible semantic, epistemic, moral and/or political normativity as an aspect of their preferred
conception of nature. With much waving of hands, they either account instead for some more
anemic substitute for genuine normativity such as biological functionality or social regularity,
OR they simply fail to account for the phenomenon of normative authority or force, OR they do
so in ways that tacitly abandon their putative allegiance to naturalism (and hence also abandon
their standards of what it is genuinely to account for it). Rebecca’s criticisms of me aim for the
same heel.
To understand these criticisms, I need to add one last bit of exposition, because last year I
did not actually talk about normativity in any detail, but only referred to How Scientific Practices
Matter (hereafter HSPM). Since the discussion focuses on my account of normativity, we need
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to have it before us. Once again, I shall settle for a quick and dirty summary in distinct points,
each of which is further elaborated in the book:
A) I sought “to locate [normative] authority and its binding force in the material
surroundings that constitute a meaningful situation or field of action” (HSPM 257), as causally
intra-active. Causality is usually understood to involve interactions among independently
determinate objects, whose identities and causal capacities are specifiable in non-normative
terms. I argued that causality could only be understood by giving priority to phenomena (objects
only show up as definitely bounded systems with determinate capacities as components of
phenomena, which define an object by its effects upon another component). Causal relations are
thus intra-active rather than inter-active, and are thereby normatively constituted; objects and
their properties are only articulated within phenomena by the standards/norms for correct
identification/reproduction of a phenomenon.
B) Normative authority and force cannot be constituted by deontic (Brandom) or
existential (Haugeland) commitments undertaken by agents, because such commitments cannot
be binding upon us. There can be normative force only through agents’ responsive belonging to
a situation (which is, of course, a phenomenon), to which one must respond. A situation is not
external to the agent; one is an agent only as already belonging to and affected by a situation.
The performative capacities of the agent as responsive to a situation, and the solicitation by the
situation of an agent’s possible responses, belong together as mutually defining.
C) Normativity is temporal. Mark Okrent has already argued that biological normativity
(the goal-directed teleology of organisms behaving for the sake of sustaining and reproducing
their own characteristic pattern of agency) is temporal: “Living things do more than dance a
distinctive repetitive dance; they are distinctive repetitive dances” (Okrent, ms 102), and their
success or failure can be assessed according to whether the temporally extended pattern they
already instantiate is sustained in new circumstances by their current activities. My account adds
three points to Mark’s: a) the pattern in question is not simply that of the organism, but of the
phenomenon that determines both organism and environment together;
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b) the pattern of organismal life is not simply repetitive, but instead opens onto a field of
developmental, ecological, and evolutionary possibilities, however vaguely articulated;
c) most crucially, we are organisms whose extensive discursively and practically
articulated niche construction frees us for understanding possibilities as possibilities, opening us
to future possibilities that are grounded in but not simply repetitive of past patterns of activity.
D) These possibilities that allow us to “become what we are” are socially and materially
interdependent. We cannot press into possibilities unless other agents and equipment are
appropriately supportive or accommodating, and vice versa. Thus, our possibilities are “at issue”
in ongoing intra-action with others in shared circumstances, such that possibilities and their
significance can be transformed by what happens around us. What is at stake in these
interactions is nothing less than what we are to be (not just “us” but the world of possibilities into
which we and others are thrown together). The differences between correctness and
incorrectness, good and bad, justice and injustice, truth and error are constituted by the stakes in
sustaining or closing off those differences through our responsiveness to one another and shared
surroundings.
E) Our ongoing activities of holding ourselves and one another accountable to these
differences-within-phenomena are themselves aspects of the phenomena. Normativity is thus
worldly and historical; explicitly normative concepts (“good,” “true,” “right,” etc.) play an
expressive role within these ongoing practices, and thereby further articulate and transform the
issues and stakes in developing them in one way rather than another.
Once again, this has undoubtedly proceeded much too quickly for those of you who have
not read HSPM. My hope is that these points will become more clearly comprehensible when
you see how I draw upon them in response to two important objections raised by Rebecca Kukla.
II. Clocks and Rulers: The Phenomena of “Ordinary Time”
My response to Rebecca’s first objection is straightforward, but since that response
clarifies and intensifies the concerns underlying the second objection, I will take some time with
it. Here is the objection:
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In our practices of inquiry, we had better be able to have meaningful stakes in how things
were in the past, prior to those practices. But it is hard to see how Rouse manages to
avoid [the view that what things were like, say, five million years ago... was some kind of
formless, pre-determinate something]. He rejects the idea that “the world somehow
already comes naturally composed of discrete objects” (313). But this seems to me just
what historical inquiry does and must reveal, even if we have to be careful not to interpret
this as a truth that transcends any perspective on it. (Kukla, ms p. 9, 8)
So what were things like 5 million years ago, here, on earth? As recently as 150 years ago, that
question was thought to be unanswerable. The leading geologists of the 19th Century, Hutton,
Lyell and Playfair, joined in rejecting questions about the history of the earth as utterly
inaccessible and consequently unscientific, for the earth’s early history supposedly left no
discernible trace not obliterated by subsequent geological events. Developments in the sciences
have changed that situation dramatically: thermodynamic modeling, radioactive dating,
sedimentary analysis, and a variety of other experimentally and conceptually novel practices
have brought the history of the earth, and of the surrounding universe, within the space of
conceptual articulation. Light from faraway galaxies and rocks from long-gone epochs afford an
articulable presence to the unimaginably remote past.
Measurements of time and place are phenomena, patterns of causal intra-action. There is
no spatial or temporal metric apart from spatiotemporal “juxtapositions” within the world.1
Space and time in the familiar sense in which we speak of what happened here yesterday or there
five million years ago involve the appropriate deployment of clocks and rulers within the world.
Clocks take many forms, of course, from the annual circuit and diurnal rotation of earth around
Barad (2001) develops a parallel and complementary conception of “temporality and spatiality
[as] produced and reconfigured in the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their
constitutive exclusions” (p. 90) rather than as an external parameter “divided up in evenly spaced
increments marking a progression of events” (p. 78). Barad develops these themes in re-thinking
the political dynamics of specific “apparatuses of bodily production” rather than as a response to
metaphysical inquiries into the origins and grounds of normativity.
1
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sun and axis, to pendula, springs, vibrations of cesium atoms, changing proportions of chemical
isotopes, or redshifting of the hydrogen spectrum. But nothing is inherently a clock. Its
character as a clock depends upon its being properly caught up in timing practices, and
responding reliably to the demands placed upon it within those practices. Such practices involve
appropriate juxtaposition and tracking of what is measured and what measures it. But they also
involve subsequent juxtaposition and tracking of one measuring apparatus against another, so as
to calibrate them. Their character as measures of time depends upon such mutual accountability,
such that one set of measurements can serve to correct another. Correction (rather than just
replacement) can only occur against the background of a complex web of correlations and
calibrations amongst these phenomena, and their openness to further elaboration and extension.
In this respect, ordinary time is “strongly holistic” in a sense nicely expressed by Mark Okrent:
For a property of an individual to be strongly holistic is for it to be such that the property
is holistic [one thing cannot have the property without many other things also having it],
and in addition the specific character of that property is fixed by the corresponding
holistic properties in the other individuals to which this one is related. (Okrent, ms 78)
If the sequential and durational character of phenomena could not be coherently and
systematically interconnected, there would be no temporal character to any of them.
Timing practices also involve performances on our part, from tracking and counting the
relevant movements of the timing apparatus, to holding one another and ourselves accountable
for correct performance and appropriate responses. Not just any juxtaposition of periodic or
sequential processes can measure time, and even those processes that do serve as coordinated
measurements would not do so unless it mattered to get them right, that is, unless the difference
between correct and incorrect performance made a difference to subsequent performances.
Our participation in the constitution of ordinary time highlights another issue, however.
As Heidegger prominently noted, the temporality of such practices cannot simply be identified
with time as a measured parameter. The sequentially datable, spanned, significant, and public
character of “world-time” and the “time-reckoning” that discloses it are integrally involved in
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any and all practices of time measurement.2 As Heidegger put it,
Looking at the clock is based on taking our time, and is guided by it. What has already
shown itself in the most elementary time-reckoning here becomes plainer: when we look
at the clock and regulate ourselves according to the time, we are essentially saying
“now”. Here the “now” has in each case already been understood and interpreted in its
full structural content of datability, spannedness, publicness, and worldliness. (SZ 416)
Of course, Heidegger’s distinction between ordinary time and world-time draws upon
distinctions among Zuhandenheit, Vorhandenheit, and Dasein as essentially different ways of
being, which my naturalistic stance cannot countenance (there is a difference between disclosure
and discovery, between being and entities, but no intermediary articulation of ways of being;
disclosedness is not the way of being of a distinctive kind of entity, but the finite opening of the
world that constitutes any and all entities as entities). Nevertheless, the difference between
ordinary time and world-time tracks another distinction I do make, between “measured” objectswithin-phenomena and the “measuring” agencies that allow objects to show themselves
definitely. These two aspects of phenomena always belong together, and mutually implicate one
another.3
What I have said so far is indispensable to my overall account of the interdependence of
time and normativity, but it does not yet speak to Rebecca’s concern, I think. Her objection is
Blattner 1999, pp. 127-152, gives a remarkably clear and insightful account of Heidegger’s
treatment of world-time and time-reckoning. Except for a few small quibbles concerning the
relation between understanding and interpretation which do not affect the primary issues I
discuss here, I simply endorse Blattner’s exposition, and appropriate it as a correct description of
this aspect of temporality.
2
3
It might be objected that while all phenomena involve world-time, the datable, spanned,
significant, and public temporality of accountable performances, not all phenomena are timemeasurements. I think this point does not matter, because world-time could be datable, spanned,
significant and public only if “ordinary time” were strongly holistic. If there were not
systematically interconnected responsiveness to temporal measurement within the world, there
could be no world-time. Thus, their interdependence is mutual even in those configurations of
the world that do not explicitly mark time.
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not that I cannot account for how we can now measure temporal durations or sequences, or
deploy the practical competence in time-reckoning needed to undertake such measurements. Her
concern is instead with the intelligibility of situating the disclosure of entities “in” time at all.
Her concern is that my account intensifies a perplexity already familiar from Sein und Zeit.
Heidegger famously claimed that,
Entities are uncovered only when Dasein is. Before there was any Dasein, there was no
truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more. (SZ 226)
The seemingly paradoxical character of Heidegger’s claim is supposed to dissolve when one
distinguishes being from entities. Being and truth depend upon Dasein, but entities do not. So
the historical emergence of entities whose way of being is Dasein discloses other entities as
having already been there before Dasein. The same issue emerges in counterfactual mode, as
Rebecca notes, and Heidegger’s response would be parallel: as existing Dasein, we can correctly
assert that, had there been no Dasein, other entities would still have been there without us. There
is a crucial matter of scope here: Dasein’s existence provides the context within which the
counterfactual can itself be asserted and assessed. Had one tried instead to incorporate the
assertion- and truth-constitutive practices of Dasein within the scope of what is being
counterfactually hypothesized away, then the question would be self-deconstructive rather than
self-contradictory, rendering its presuppositions not false but senseless.
Rebecca’s first worry is, I think, that my attempt to naturalize Heidegger leaves his
response unavailable to me. I claim that objects are only determinate within phenomena, and
that causal intra-action with our practices and norms are indispensable aspects of those
phenomena. Rebecca then plausibly worries that I cannot say, with Heidegger, that there were
entities before there were any phenomena, and that there would have been entities even had there
never been any phenomena for lack of conceptual-discursive accountability. That worry is
mistaken, however. It arises because of the presumption that “phenomena” in my sense are just
complex entities. If this were a case in which the determinacy of one entity depended upon the
existence of another, then Rebecca’s worry would be well-founded. It matters, however, that
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phenomena are not intraworldly entities, but are instead comparable to modes of Weltlichkeit. I
use the term ‘phenomenon’ to indicate the normative opening of intelligibility that allows entities
to show themselves against the background of larger patterns of intra-action, as a mode or
“configuration” of the world rather than an entity within the world. This concept, if its use can
be vindicated, would permit a dissolution of the problem through a disambiguation of scope
parallel to Heidegger’s treatment of the scope of the historical/counterfactual removal of
Dasein’s disclosedness. Within the scope of the causally intra-active phenomena that confer
sense upon the practices of asserting and assessing counterfactuals, one correctly asserts there
were determinate objects (i.e., objects-in-phenomena) before or without the actual practices and
norms that constitute their determinacy as the objects they are. We can correctly say that, had
we never existed, Pangaea and Gondwanaland would have existed and then broken apart into the
continents we know. If we were to try to hypothesize ourselves outside the scope of the
phenomena that constitute us as thinkers and agents and allow entities to show themselves in
definite ways, however, then the question self-deconstructs.
The point I am making about “phenomena” can perhaps be seen more clearly if we
construe it in terms of possible worlds semantics, which is in fact one of my central targets in the
book. The question then concerns what is meant by a “world.” On one construal, “worlds” are
just arrangements of entities and properties that could be specified by a formalizable set of
relations. If possible-worlds semantics could be coherently construed in those terms, then a twodimensional semantics would be intelligible. Not only could one ask, against the background of
the actual world, what would be true of some hypothetical possible world; one could also ask,
against the background of some hypothetical possible world w taken as the actual world, what
would then be true in w of that possible world (ours), which contingently happens to be actual
but might not have been. David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, among others, attempt to use such
constructions to leverage a form of philosophical analysis that would uncover “deep” conceptual
necessities independent of the contingencies of our world. More controversially, Kripke’s
conception of rigid designation also turns upon the coherence of such a conception of deep
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necessity.4
An alternative construal, which would undercut the intelligibility of two-dimensional
possible worlds semantics and possibly of rigid designation, takes the relevant sense of “world”
to privilege the actual world, as a causal nexus to which all discursive articulation and conceptual
normativity are beholden. Possible “worlds” are just hypothetical rearrangements of the actual
world, and presuppose it as the normative/conceptual horizon for understanding and assessing
claims about what would be true in those worlds. In that case, questions about what would be
true of our world, on the assumption that some “other” world w were the actual world, would be
utterly senseless in the same way that seeking to hypothesize away the causally intra-active
context of our conceptual norms would be senseless. It would be senseless because there would
be no constraints upon the answers to those questions, such that any attempt to pose them would
be what McDowell has called a “frictionless spinning in a void” (1994, p. 42). Indeed, I think
the point is the same point, but expressed in the less philosophically-felicitous idiom of alethic
modalities rather than normativity. Indeed, this point expresses a commitment that I take to be
fundamental to a consistent metaphysical naturalism: our causal intra-action within the world is
the inescapable horizon for all understanding.
III Can Normativity Have an Origin?
Although what I have said so far is, I believe, correct and important, and goes a long way
toward dissolving Rebecca’s first concern, it is not yet sufficient. Rebecca is right to give
priority to the historical over the counterfactual question (indeed, she gives it priority because
she rightly anticipates that something like what I have just said would be an appropriate answer
to the counterfactual question). What I have said so far does not fully answer the historical
question, because an additional issue arises there. By asking what things were like before there
were discursive practices and norms, rather than merely in their counterfactual absence, she
The dependence of Kripke’s argument in “Naming and Necessity” upon such a conception of
deep necessity is defended by Sanford Shieh (2001).
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poses acute concerns about the sense in which we can say “before” and “after” here, and thus
raises more fundamental issues about the relations between time and normativity:
Historical inquiry, which itself is practical and driven by normative stakes in the ways
Rouse attributes to inquiry in general, needs to disclose a determinate world consisting of
objects and phenomena that have the proper kinds of causal links to our current situation.
And it must now disclose a world of objects that, though we now have stakes in their
character, managed to exist independent of such stakes at the time. But his temporal
language suggests otherwise; he regularly talks about determinacy ‘emerging’ in the
context of practice and of things ‘becoming’ determinate in intra-action with agents. ...
Rouse has, I think, no special excuse for not asking the questions about the origins of
normative accountability that he refuses to address. (Kukla, ms. 9-10)5
We can put Rebecca’s concern this way: I cannot accommodate the existence of determinate
entities prior to the emergence of normative accountability to them, because their determinacy,
their capacity to make a binding difference, only “happens” subsequently. This would require
something like a retroactive constitution of their determinate bounds or capacities; but the
question of what entities were “before” their determinacy was retroactively constituted then
seems both unintelligible and unavoidable.
The first thing to say is that this is not just my problem, and it is useful to acknowledge
briefly just how pervasive and difficult the problem is. HSPM began by framing Heidegger’s
criticisms of Husserl and Neurath’s criticism of Carnap as compelling arguments against any
attempt to construe semantic, epistemic or ontological normativity in terms of atemporal
Editorial comment: Rebecca’s phrase “objects and phenomena” reflects the kind of careful
hedging that good reviewers undertake when they want to acknowledge a contested point that
they do not have space to discuss. As Rebecca knows, on my view, this passage invokes a
double redundancy. Objects are components of phenomena (although they also serve as the
locus for inferential links between phenomena). Moreover, phenomena just are causal links to
our current situation. I take it that Rebecca’s use of the conjunction indicates that she wants to
contest the claim that objects are components of phenomena, but regards that disagreement as a
digression in that context.
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necessity, because one then cannot understand how the relevant necessities become binding in
the historical-material world in which we live and speak.
Heidegger and Neurath saw that the putative normative authority [of transcendental
consciousness or logical necessity] was purchased at the cost of their normative force.
Husserlian fulfilling intuitions could only present the unfulfilled sense of fulfillment.
Carnapian autopsychological reconstructions of perceptual manifestations dissipated in a
solipsism of the moment that could never be accessible to materially situated, temporally
extended persons. Moreover, both Heidegger and Neurath saw that their criticisms of
these structural accounts of perceptual manifestations then extended more generally to
apply to “consciousness” or “language” as the presumed locus of any manifestation.
Husserlian transcendental consciousness could have no [connection to] psychophysical or
social reality. Carnapian languages could not actually be spoken or understood. HSPM
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Turning from logic or transcendental consciousness to natural laws or the (causally?) determinate
character of natural objects does no better. Such pseudo-naturalistic accounts of normativity
simply substitute scientific practices for fulfilling intuitions, protocol sentences, the pineal gland,
or the Virgin Birth as the locus for the magical irruption of atemporal necessity into nature and
eternity into history.
It is to Rebecca’s credit that she has discerned in Sellars and Derrida the outlines of a
serious alternative response to these concerns.6 Any acknowledgement of normative force (and
of course anything we think, say or do implicitly acknowledges normative force!) must be a
performative misrecognition of ourselves, as already bound to norms prior to that (re-) instituting
performance. We can make such performative misrecognition explicit by telling a retrospective
myth or spectral history, whether it be the Myth of Jones, the social contract, or Freudian
patricide. She concludes that,
6
Kukla 2000, 2002.
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A story such as [these], which in its very essence moves away from a traditional
explanation grounded in empirical objects and literal events, is bound to feel less
comforting— indeed spookier — than we would like. It is, after all (and contrary to
current philosophical trends), not so much a naturalizing as a supernaturalizing
explanation! But [its] discomfort ... tells in its favor, for ... it should not make us
comfortable. Haunting ... is essentially uncomfortable, uncanny and disruptive, and ...
this is just how it manages to do its constitutive work. In order for us to be genuinely,
authentically responsive to normative force, we must be able to ask the question of its
legitimacy, but we also saw that the answer must not take the form of an absolute,
completed story, for any such story would shut down the very space for normative
response that it was intended to open. As philosophers, ... we do not have the right to a
‘natural’ explanation of normative grip (such as a causal chronology) that would allow us
to slip into fallen canniness. (2002, 28-29)
My response to this proposal is twofold. First, we need to think through more carefully the
aspirations and the lacunae in Rebecca’s own spectral retelling. Second, when we do so, we will
find ourselves drawn back to a different kind of naturalistic story. After all, before we give up
on naturalism altogether, we need to consider whether the difficulty arises not from the
commitment to naturalism, but instead from mistaken presuppositions about what an adequately
naturalistic understanding of normativity must be. A more adequate naturalism may display
something more philosophically promising than fallen canniness.
I begin my reconsideration of Rebecca’s proposal by happily acknowledging that we
cannot give a traditionally-conceived naturalistic explanation of the origin of normative force, as
an explicable transition from some prior non-normative state of affairs to the institution of
norms. Her principal reason for rejecting such stories is also correct: for norms to be binding,
they must be recognized as having already been in place, by someone who recognizes herself as
already bound by them. Moreover, her insistence upon the need for a performative
misrecognition responds to an otherwise intractable problem in the most prominent alternatives
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to naturalizing stories, which invoke the broadly Kantian conception of normative force as selfimposed. The Kantian genre, of which John Haugeland’s appeal to “existential commitment” is
among the more sophisticated versions, cannot account for how self-imposed commitments can
be genuinely binding, since they would thereby be revocable by the very agents supposedly
bound by them (HSPM 247). If we understand such “commitments” as a form of performative
misrecognition, however, this difficulty might seem to dissolve. A constitutive misrecognition
of ourselves as already bound by norms would allow normative force to come from us,
irrevocably.7
I have two problems with this proposal. First, the conception of normative force as
instituted by an ideological misrecognition8 raises the question of why Rebecca’s explication of
the mythical or spectral character of normative force does not serve the function of a
demythologizing ideology critique. If norms have a grip on us through a performative
misrecognition, why doesn’t Rebecca’s explication of its merely spectral character loosen that
grip? How do norms continue to haunt us on this account? I worry that Rebecca’s account does
not really get beyond a self-undermining Kantian voluntarism.
Last year, I suggested that John’s conception of “existential commitment” was analogous to
what Kierkegaard called the “active despair of defiance” in the Sickness Unto Death. Rebecca’s
conception of a performative misrecognition grounding normative force is then reminiscent of
the passive despair of defiance. Kierkegaard characterized active despair in this way:
The [actively defiantly despairing] self wants to enjoy the entire satisfaction of making
itself into itself, of developing itself, of being itself; ... and yet in the last resort it is a
riddle how it understands itself; just at the instant when it seems to be nearest to having
the fabric finished it can arbitrarily resolve the whole thing into nothing. (Kierkegaard
1954, p. 203)
The passive despair of defiance grasps the futility of being responsible for its own seriousness,
i.e. for the normative constraint without which all its efforts to speak and act are but a
“frictionless spinning in the void” (McDowell 1994, 42), and yet defiantly refuses to defer its
intelligibility as a norm-bound self onto anything other than itself. It is thus a “despair which
wills not to let itself be comforted” (1954, 204). Such is performative misrecognition and the
telling of spectral histories, and the insistence upon the “spookiness” of normative authority and
force, I think.
7
8
Rebecca introduces her conceptions of performative misrecognition and spectral histories
through reflection upon Althusser’s discussion of interpellation and ideology in “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses.”
16
The more interesting problem, however, comes from Rebecca’s appeal to the notion of a
performance. Who performs this performative misrecognition that constitutes us as agents
already bound to norms? The answer is both obvious and troubling. Surely we norm-bound
beings are the performers; who else? Yet we are only constituted as agents through such
performances. Moreover, ‘performance’ is itself a norm-laden concept. Performances have
goals that they can fail to fulfill; a sequence of behaviors can also fail to cohere sufficiently to
have performed anything, even a performative failure. To invoke a concept of ‘performance’ as
the origin of normative force, even its mythical origin, seems only to defer the issue.
Here is where I want to return to the teleology of organisms in environments as the basis
for an alternative approach to these questions. Organisms, after all, are thoroughly performative;
as Mark has noted, to be an organism is to perform itself, its characteristic pattern of
differentiation from its surroundings, by acting for the sake of reproducing that pattern. The
elements of this pattern cannot be identified, however, apart from their belonging to the whole in
their proper order and place. Organismic teleology is thus strongly holistic in Mark’s sense,
already described. All strongly holistic patterns, however, display exactly the problem that led
Rebecca to seek the origin of normativity in performative misrecognition: they cannot be
initiated without having already been in place. The origin of life, the learning of language,
speciation, or Rebecca’s constitutive (mis)-recognition of self illustrate this problem, but they
also show how it can be appropriately dissolved. Consider language learning. When does a
child speak her first word? It cannot be the first time she babbles a recognizably distinct patterns
of phonemes. To utter a word is not merely to repeat a sound, but to grasp it as semantically
significant through its interconnections with other words. Language learning is constituted both
prospectively and retrospectively: prospectively, because other speakers need to respond to
babbling as if it were already semantically significant, and retrospectively, because a prior
history of babbling (and responding differentially to the utterances of others) is retroactively
appropriated within the story of emerging linguistic competence. Do not mistake this for a
special case, dependent upon the presence of other speakers already attuned to the space of
17
reasons, and hence merely deferring the difficulty. The proto-organism’s emergence as what it
is likewise depends upon recurrent affordances from its surroundings so as to co-constitute a
relevant environment, just as the proto-speaker’s discursive surroundings must afford responses
appropriate to its constitution as speech. It is the ongoing conversation, not the individual
contributions of its participants, which confers semantic contentfulness upon what could
otherwise only be noise.
So Rebecca’s problem becomes the more general problem of the temporality of novelty,
whose generality is strikingly expressed in this anecdote from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger:
Early in 1991, ... a group of historians of biology assembled at the Natural History
Museum in Berlin (East Berlin less than two years before). A paleontologist who had
spent his whole professional life ordering and reconstructing fossil material pointed to the
famous Solnhafen Archaeopterix of the Berlin collection and summarized the experience
of 40 years of work ... : ‘At the point of the emergence of the new, the new is not the
new. It becomes a novelty only by a transformation which makes it a trace of something
to which it has given rise.’ (1997, pp. 176-77). [for those not familiar with Archaeopterix,
it is the oldest known fossil of a feathered reptile or proto-bird]
Such transformations point toward another dimension of temporality, along with the
measurement of “ordinary” parametric time and the ordering of world-time that I have already
mentioned. An initial indication toward this dimension comes from Rheinberger’s suggestion
that we recognize a notion of “internal” or “operator” time, as a metaphoric extension of
Prigogine’s account of thermodynamically irreversible processes. Time in this sense is not a
measured parameter within a phenomenon, but an operator upon it, an internal ordering of its
differential reproduction:
[Internal time] characterizes a sequence of states of a system [of material entities and
actions concerning such entities] insofar as it undergoes continuing cycles of nonidentical reproduction. ... As long as this movement goes on, we may say that the system
remains “young.” Being young, then, is not a result of being located near zero on the
18
time scale; it is a function–if you will–of the very functioning of the system. The age of
the system is measured by its capacity to produce differences that count as unprecedented
events and keep the machinery going. (1997, 180).
Think of this conception as the reflexive temporality of a self-reproducing system. It is in
something like this sense that we may speak of bacteria as old and the teleost fishes as young, of
the Himalayas as young and the Appalachians as old, or of various galaxies as younger and
older. Such claims can simply express a commensurable measure of their duration, in years
perhaps, modulated by the characteristic patterns of their kinds. But they can also express
something different, a measure of the internal dynamics of the system in terms of its own openended field of “possibilities.”9 We live in the Age of Bacteria, the predominant life-form in our
eco-sphere, but any possibilities for irreversible transformation latent within bacterial modes of
life seem to have run their course. It is in precisely this sense, for example, that evolutionarydevelopmental biologists pose the problem of defining and comprehending the evolution of
morphological novelty and its underlying developmental possibility.10
Rheinberger and Prigogine draw remarkably opposing inferences from this conception of
time as an internal operator. Prigogine foresees the long-sought unity of nature, not in the
Newtonian-Einsteinian tradition of time-reversible laws, but in thermodynamic irreversibility:
When we introduce a time associated with the production of entropy ..., even though
entropic time does not keep pace with clock time, ... the descriptions of nature as
presented by biology and physics now begin to converge. Why does a common future
exist at all? Why is the arrow of time always pointed in the same direction? This can
only mean that the universe forms a whole. It has a common origin that already implied
time-symmetry problems. (1996, pp. 161-62)
Here we might think of Chou Enlai’s alleged response to a query about the significance of the
French Revolution: “It’s too soon to tell.”
9
10
For discussion of the problem of novelty as currently conceived in evolutionary-developmental
biology, see Müller and Wagner (1991) and Carroll et al. (2001), ch. 6.
19
Prigogine goes on, hesitantly but provocatively, to suggest that “time precedes existence” (1996,
163), as his way onto a “narrow path between two conceptions ...: a world ruled by deterministic
laws, which leaves no place for novelty, and a world ruled by a dice-playing God” (1996, 18788). Rheinberger, by contrast, finds only proliferation where Prigogine discerns convergence:
We end up with a field of systems that has a rather complex time structure, or shape of
time. The systems or reproductive series retain their own “ages” as long as they
differentially replicate, and the epistemic field can no longer be seen as dominated by an
overarching chronotopic paradigm. ... With “differential temporality,” we are further
than ever from the romantic illusion of history as an all-pervading “totality” .... (1997,
180-82)
Perhaps we should throw up our hands in despair at the inferential plasticity of this strange and
convoluted concept of time.
I suggest another possibility. Prigogine and Rheinberger are driven in opposing
directions by their inability to conceive a finite temporal field unifying the world’s disparate
patterns of differentially reproducing phenomena. Bill Blattner has given us a remarkable
exposition of Heidegger’s early conception of the finitude of originary temporality, as “a
temporal manifold that can be present in any given moment of sequential time: a future, Present,
and past that are all there at, say, 1:30 A.M., 9 November 1992, or 3:05 A.M., 10 October 1995"
(Blattner 1999, 92). Bill’s exposition culminates in the claim that Heidegger’s account fails as a
form of “temporal idealism,” in which Dasein’s originary temporality would supposedly explain
the structural features of ordinary time and world-time. With some hesitation, I want to suggest
that something like Heidegger’s conception of a non-sequential temporal manifold can be
detached from the project of fundamental ontology, and hence from temporal idealism. Such a
conception would also have to reconceive the relation between this non-sequential manifold, and
other dimensions of time, which after Bill’s arguments can no longer be conceived as
explanatory.
To motivate this perhaps-astonishing claim, let’s return to Rebecca’s criticism of the
20
possibility of telling a naturalistic story about the origins of normativity. I already quoted the
conclusion to her argument against any determinate origin of normative authority and force, but
did not remark upon the following remarkable shift in topic, or at least in tense:
In order for us to be genuinely, authentically responsive to normative force, we must be
able to ask the question of its legitimacy, but we also saw that the answer must not take
the form of an absolute, completed story, for any such story would shut down the very
space for normative response that it was intended to open. (Kukla 2002, pp. 28-29)
Rebecca’s problem has thus subtly shifted, from the impossibility of a temporal beginning to
normativity, to the impossibility of its closure. Now this is exactly right, as I argued in HSPM:
Kukla’s Sellars construes accounts of the sources of normativity as [performative] and I
have extended that construal to accounts of normative grounds. ... No articulation [of
what is at stake in our practices] can achieve (or rightly claim) finality, because its
normative significance arises from its pointing toward further possibilities (including,
crucially, the possibility of correcting it, out of fidelity to the shared stakes invoked in its
articulation). (Rouse 2002, 357-58)
The space of reasons, of discursively articulated normativity, is thus a unified temporal manifold
of purposive affectivity. To be bound to norms is to have one’s own being at stake in the
differential repetition of what one already is. This having-something-at-stake-in-becomingwhat-one-already-is is a non-sequential manifold, in just the ways that Bill has so aptly
described. Being for-the-sake-of something at stake in what one has already been is not acting
for the sake of some already definite end, for the “end” is itself at issue in one’s being-toward it
(“Dasein’s pressing-ahead into a for-the-sake-of-which gives it direction. It is crucial that the
for-the-sake-of-which cannot be either Present or already there, because then Dasein could not
press ahead into it” Blattner 1999, 110-11).11 That is why Rebecca rightly insists that the
11
The connection between this temporal manifold and the articulation of meaning is perhaps
more perspicuously expressible in French, in which this “direction” to our activities would be
their sens.
21
legitimation of norms “must not take the form of an absolute, completed story.” Likewise, this
unified temporal manifold is not a determination of one’s being by an unalterable past, because
what that past is depends upon what it is becoming. This temporal field is, in Kant’s prescient
formulation, purposiveness without a purpose. Indeed, it is precisely the situated indeterminacy
of what is at stake in one’s situation that constitutes its normative grip upon us: what is at stake
in our activities is what we (and everything else) are to be.
I now call your attention to a striking parallel between Bill’s description of the nonsequentiality of originary temporality and Rheinberger’s account of the internal, operator time of
differentially reproducing systems:
Rheinberger: “Recurrence, in terms of rearrangement and reorientation, is at work as
part of the time structure of the innermost differential activity of the systems of
investigation themselves. ... [T]heir history is deferred in a constitutive sense: the recent
is made into the result of something that did not so happen. And the past is made into a
trace of something that had not (yet) occurred.” (1997, p. 178)
Blattner: “The future never will be Present, and the past never was.” (1999, p. 114)
This parallel between Blattner’s exposition of Heidegger and Rheinberger’s Derridean deferral
of origins and grounds poses all the more insistently Bill’s challenge, which also underlies
Rebecca’s criticisms: why isn’t my account an untenable form of temporal idealism, or perhaps
even temporal solipsism, if one takes too seriously Rheinberger’s deconstructive account of
proliferating temporal operators?
My answer begins with the recognition that the phenomena of organisms–inenvironments also display a comparable temporal structure. To be an organism, as Mark has
eloquently shown, is to act toward what he calls a “goal,” but this is not a goal in the sense of an
already-determinate end to which Bill contrasted Dasein’s originary future. Its goal is instead
the differential repetition of the pattern it already is (which, I argued last year, is not already
determinate, but is instead laden with phenotypic and ontogenetic possibility, however
inarticulate or “world-poor”; remember Archaeopterix!). But I have also argued that this pattern
22
defines not an organism as an intraworldly entity, but the opening of a “way-of-life” akin to a
“deficient” mode of Weltlichkeit (“deficient” only in our parochial sense of its vague, not-telling
articulation of the world). It is the finite, unified, non-sequential temporal manifold of the
“internal” time of the organism’s unfolding developmental-evolutionary patterning.
This pattern encompasses not just the organism itself, but its surrounding environment,
the organism’s “world.” Why is this “world” or biological niche not simply another complex
entity within the world?12 We can in retrospect say that the phenomenon of an organism-inenvironment is not a bounded entity, because it is an opening onto any and every entity,
“disclosing” it as significant (or not) for the differential reproduction of the organism’s way-oflife. To be sure, an organism’s way of life configures the world so as to give central place to its
predators, prey/food, habitat-spaces,13 and so forth. But anything else has a horizonal presence
within the organism’s world (which after all, encompasses not only other organisms, but the
environment-configuring way-of-life of those organisms; indeed, even those aspects of the
universe which seem most thoroughly opaque to an organism’s way of life have a dim horizonal
presence for it, strikingly illustrated by the world-shattering irruption of astronomical trajectories
into the ways-of-life of mammals and dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous).
The same is true of our own discursively-articulated way of life, which is not just about
us, despite our recurrent humanist narcissism. The existence of entities whose way-of-life is
Dasein-like is intra-actively dependent upon the environmental affordances to which they are coconstitutively responsive. The unified, finite, non-sequential temporal manifold within which we
understand ourselves as having something at stake in our lives is determined not by us, but by
our vulnerable, intra-active dependence upon the world as a meaningfully configured “whole”
12
The answer to this question was developed at rather greater length last year, in part III of
“Heidegger Naturalized (and Vice Versa).)
13
The habitat-spaces of organisms have not a geometrical but a bio-existential spatiality,
pointedly illustrated by the microhabitats of moisture-loving, desert-dwelling Drosophila
pseudoobscura (Lewontin 2000, 53-54).
23
(NOT a totality). Indeed, and this is the crucial point in response to the worry about temporal
idealism, the relevant temporal manifold is not even the internal time-operator of the human
way-of-life, but the unified field of internal temporalities onto which the internal time-operators
of various differentially reproducing phenomena are merely perspectival openings. 14 Prigogine
was right to see time as a unified field in which all differentially-reproductive internal operatortimes can be mutually “calibrated” (in scare quotes, because time in the relevant sense is not a
quantitatively specifiable parameter), because they all share a direction (cf. Blattner on the the
originary future, 1999, p. 110). He was wrong, however, to try to conceive this as a non-finite,
sequential temporal manifold conceivable (from a God’s-eye view) as a totality. Rheinberger
was right to see any differentially reproducing material system as having its own internal
operator-time, but wrong to see them as self-referentially opaque to one another. They are
instead “perspectives” on the only-perspectivally-manifest (i.e., finite) temporal manifold that is
what a committed naturalist like me is content to call “nature” or “world.” But the world’s
temporal unity is just its causal intra-activity by another name. The world in this sense is both
causal and normative (as I argued in HSPM), which we can now understand as different
conceptual repertoires for registering its temporality.
I now turn to the second critical question that arises from Heidegger’s Temporal
Idealism: how are these three dimensions of “ordinary” parametric time, “practical” world-time,
and the finite, non-sequential temporal manifold of “nature” connected to one another? Bill
HSPM (Rouse 2002, pp. 246-55) critically discusses and revises Brandom’s claim that
conceptual normativity is essentially perspectival. Brandom located the “ground” of conceptual
perspectives in differences in bodies and desires, but his conception depended upon an untenable
oscillation between desires as de facto psychological states, and as normative statuses that are
themselves only “perspectivally” disclosed (2002, 236-38). Thinking through this aporia led to
this conclusion:
The bodies that engage in discursive practices are not clearly bounded objects, but
emergent, shifting boundaries between coordinated activity and its surroundings. The
perspectives expressed in their discursive performances are not features of bodies or
subjects by themselves, but practical configurations of the surrounding world as fields of
significant possible activity. (Rouse 2002, 253-54)
14
24
claimed that Heidegger aimed to show a relation of explanatory dependence among his parallel
conceptions, as part of the project of fundamental ontology: ordinary time was explained by
world-time, which was explained by originary temporality, thereby vindicating its character as a
form of “time” rather than just of teleology. The claim I am inclined to make instead is simply
that the three are co-constitutive dimensions of phenomena. Heidegger’s notion of “ordinary
time” was mistakenly conceived in accord with his conception of Vorhandenheit, but on my
account, ordinary time is simply the inferential interrelatedness of the various phenomena in
which one periodic process is tracked in relation to another. Time tracked by the rising and
setting of the sun, or by the precise measurement of nanoseconds with a cesium clock, are just
different time-measurements (of course, the inferential interconnections of time measurement are
complicated by the finite constancy of c in all inertial reference frames, as well as by the
penumbra of indeterminacy/error surrounding the outcomes of all measurement processes). Such
measured temporal durations and datings also require the normative sequentiality of world-time
in order to sustain their determinacy, and the unified temporal manifold in order for the
differential reproducibility of various internal operator-times and their phenomenal traces to
show up in the same (temporal) field. But of course the unified temporal manifold is itself only
sustained by the differential reproduction of measuring/measured systems (in which the
appropriate stages of each process must, i.e., should, be reproduced in appropriate sequentiality,
which allows for other organisms to have their correlates to “world-time”), and ultimately
vindicated/sustained by the mutual accountability of differently measured “times.” Such a
conception leads not to fundamental ontology, but to an expressivist conception of normative
vocabulary (Rouse 2002, 194) within a thoroughgoing pragmatic naturalism.
A parallel question may arise from the opposite direction, however, given the ways in
which the internal-temporality of our way-of-life toward various stakes has been brought
together in a single temporal manifold with the internal time-operators of other organisms-cumenvironments and other differentially reproducible material phenomena. John Haugeland (2000),
for example, has argued for the historical emergence of truth and objectivity, as the distinctive
25
Dasein not of homo sapiens, but of “us” conceived as more-or-less co-referential with
Brandom’s community of sapient we-sayers (1994, pp. 3-5, 650). Both Brandom and
Haugeland, on somewhat different grounds, believe that the emergence of human (or at least
Daseinish) beings has opened a markedly different kind of intelligibility and intentionality that
other organisms cannot encounter. By contrast, Mark Okrent’s paper for tomorrow aims to blur
such sharp differences between sapients and sentients, genuine and ersatz intentionality, and to
challenge claims that organismic teleology/intentionality is dependent upon human rationality.
The view I have sketched here suggests that both positions are partly correct, although it
is closer to Mark’s in emphasizing the dependence of rationality or discursive articulation upon
biological teleology. Discursive articulation, and its expressive extension by logical, semantic,
pragmatic and normative vocabulary, articulate the world in ways that allow entities-inphenomena, and the relations among various phenomenal configurations of the world (including
different time-operators), to show themselves as entities-in-phenomena. Other organisms do not
do this. As I said last year,
Ordinary biological intelligibility shows how various aspects of the world matter for the
ongoing reproduction of the organism’s way of life. ... Its possibilities thereby confer a
limited intelligibility and significance upon what shows itself as significant for them.
What most organisms’ way of life cannot make intelligible, however, are their own
possibilities as possibilities. The extent and the reflexivity of our discursively articulated
niche construction is what brings these possibilities into the open, and allows us to be
partially responsible for as well as to them. “Heidegger Naturalized” ms. p. 31
Other organisms consequently cannot disclose the unified temporal manifold; nor do they
measure time15 or account for their own activities as situated in world-time.
The principal issue that has motivated this discussion, however, is still Rebecca’s
15
The sequential and periodic developmental stages can of course be part of a time-measuring
apparatus, but their activities do not distinguish correct from incorrect timings.
26
question about the natural and historical origins of normativity, and the sense in which we can
rightly say that there was a determinate world before there was any discursive articulation or
normative accountability. What I have done is to disambiguate the word “before.” In the
ordinary, sequential sense of time, of course there was a determinate world before we appeared,
incorporating just the entities that we should take into account in our various dealings with the
marks it has left on our surroundings. These marks can only reveal a determinate past, however,
because we can track and check our intra-actions with these marks in a practically and
discursively articulated setting. In this setting, we become open to and gripped by the temporal
manifold of the world as a finite whole: that is, by what is at stake in the issues raised by our
responsive comportments toward the situation in which we already find ourselves. The world in
this sense is a strongly holistic, non-sequential manifold that incorporates anything and
everything past and future, whenever and wherever it happened (it incorporates all the entities
disclosed in any intra-active phenomena). Ordinary time and space, however, are not a metric
for this world, but an intra-active configuration of it. The sustained opening of this unified
temporal field is not a matter of commitment on our part, but of vulnerable, causally-dependent,
responsive belonging to the world, which cannot be parsed into McDowell’s division of first and
second natures.
Various articulations of this unified temporal field (perspectival configurations of it) can,
however, be located in historical time. We can, to use an example from HSPM, make sense of
the theological and personal stakes Isaac Newton foresaw in the conjunction of mechanics,
alchemy, biblical hermeneutics, and unitarian faith, and locate this configuration of meaning
after Galileo and before Kant. What we cannot make manifest is its normative grip; salvation
and the glory of God cannot move us in that way. The opening of the world as a unified
temporal manifold simply is this normative grip. That is what distinguishes the actual world to
which we belong, from the many possible configurations of the world that we can articulate, and
even discover in the ways-of-life of other organisms and or other historically situatable agents.
But when we locate such disclosures (our own included) in ordinary historical time, we do so
27
only as a component of a larger (causal) phenomenon, an opening onto the world as a unified
temporal manifold that has us in its grip.
Such a conception of ourselves and the articulated disclosure of the world is thoroughly
naturalistic. It accepts our causal intra-action with our surroundings as the inescapable horizon
of all thought and understanding. It thereby eschews any aspiration to stand outside our finitude,
or to grasp a magic language whose meanings would float free of their causally intra-active
interpretation. Ironically, many philosophers today do seek such a transcendent standpoint under
the banner of naturalism, but such approaches are perhaps better characterized as natural
theology. I agree with the passage I quoted earlier from Rebecca that we have no right to such a
conception, of the world as a totality of causal relations or laws that “would allow us to slip into
fallen canniness,” because it would “shut down the very space for normative response that it was
intended to open” (2002, 28-29). But the alternative is not to reconcile ourselves to the
uncanniness or spookiness of normativity. Such spookiness is the other side of the same coin,
conceding nature to our natural theologians. The alternative is instead to acknowledge the
finitude of our concepts and norms, our belonging to nature as an inexhaustibly sublime whole
whose further articulation always lies ahead of us.16
16
In this respect, my view has much in common with the account of metaphor and sublime
understanding developed by Kirk Pillow (2000), as an attempt to extend Kantian aesthetic
reflective judgment into the sphere of conceptually articulated expression.
28
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