The ontology and temporality of conscience

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-34

  Kukla, Rebecca ^a  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 33845300001     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1015111212268     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Earlier versions of some sections of this paper were presented at the 2000 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, NM, as well as to audiences at Carleton University, the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria and Georgetown University. I first formulated many of the ideas in this paper during, and with the help of, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Background Practices, directed by H. Dreyfus and D. Hoy, Santa Cruz, CA, 1997. My research has also been supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, administered by Carleton University. All of my thought and writing concerning Heidegger is inextricably indebted to John Haugeland and his formative influence upon my philosophical development. This paper also owes its present form to helpful comments from Bela Egyed, Dan Gold, John Lysaker, Richard Manning, and Robert Scharff.
2. Some readers of this paper have wondered whether authors such as Heidegger and Derrida are concerned with norms and normativity at all, and have likewise objected that instead of talking about norms, I ought rather to be dealing with what they see as a more primordial notion, be it 'law,' 'ethics,' or'value,' to name just a few. In order to respond to (and hopefully head off) this line of disagreement I would like to make some terminological and methodological points up front: When I speak of norms and normativity, I am referring to something incredibly general. I do not mean to restrict my attention to explicit rules, nor to social principles, nor to moral norms (all of these representing common, narrower meanings of the term 'norm'). I am (by stipulation, if you like) using the terms 'norm,' 'normative,' etc., as covering terms for any of the phenomena with respect to which it makes any kind of sense at all to distinguish 'is' from 'ought,' proper from improper, success from failure, right from wrong, etc. Thus, nearly be definition, I consider laws, values, social norms, explicit rules, implicit embodied principles, telos, etc., all to be particular species of the more general phenomenon of normativity. I actually have no investment and little interest in the ongoing debates concerning the relative primacy of law, ethos, rule, etc., and my paper should not be read as a contribution, however veiled, to that debate. It might be helpful to think of my understanding of the phenomenon of normativity as more or less Aristotelian: the normative domain encompasses all those phenomena that are partially constituted by directedness and hence potential success and failure. This broad sense of normativity is standard within some philosophical circles, and I will lay claim to it by fiat, with no disrespect towards those that use the word differently.
3. The reading of Heidegger given in this last paragraph owes much to John Haugeland's work on Heidegger. See, for instance, his "Heidegger on Being a Person," Nous 16: ( 1982) 15-26.
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Irans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 291. Hereafter cited as 'BT'.
5. The problem here barkens back to that raised by Hegel for 'immediate ethical life' through his reading of the Antigone myth. Antigone, we may remember, seemed to be the most committed possible agent with the strongest possible form of normative responsiveness, because her relationship to the norms governing her world was immediate - she took them as laws of nature with no origin and no room for interrogation. But for just this reason, it turned out that he relation to them was not normative at all. She could not actually recognize their claims, because, as transgression was not a disclosed possibility for her, she could not step back from them so as to see them as making a claim upon her, which she had a responsibility to live up to in virtue of her commitment to their legitimacy. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Irans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 263-294.
6. It may be helpful to pursue this point a bit. Recall that Kant's categories are supposed to be pure concepts whose application is transcendentally necessary, in the sense that they must be thought as applying to objects if those objects are to be thinkable at all. But his argument for the transcendental necessity of their application does not, he realizes, add up to an argument for the possibility or the correctness of their application. While descriptively, we must think using the categories, this does not mean that such thought is legitimate in the sense of providing a real object of thought to which our judgments are genuinely accountable, such that the resulting thought is governed by the objective facts about the world. The transcendental deduction of the categories is designed to be a legitimacy proof in just this sense, wherein Kant does not try to show the legitimacy of particular judgments that use the categories, but rather such judgments' legitimate capacity to disclose and be governed by the objective world. See I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Irans. P. Guyer and A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219-266. My claim here is that Heideggerian transcendental conscience, whose call is the condition for the possibility of any normative responsiveness at all, requires a legitimacy proof in the form of a transcendental deduction, which will show that this call can really disclose and allow us to be governed by objective normative force (but which will not demonstrate the legitimacy of any particular claim of ontic conscience).
7. Here lam indebted to W. Blattner's work, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially Chapter 1.
8. This is why Heidegger's "interpretation pays no attention to the basic forms of the phenomenon, to 'evil' and 'good' conscience, to what 'reproves' and 'warns' " (BT p. 267).
9. The point here is a special case of the famous argument, given with equal force and notoriety by Kant, Wittgenstein, and Lewis Carroll, that the ability to apply rules cannot itself consist entirely in the passive recognition of those rules: in order for those rules to actually govern action, we need the capacity to be gripped by them, and this capacity cannot take the form of the recognition of yet more rules without plunging us into a pernicious regress.
10. Likewise, as Hegel reads Antigone, Antigone's act of burying her brother catapults her compatriots into uncanniness, by revealing an implicit tension between two sets of normative practices (the civic and the familial), each of which had formerly had immediate lived force. This tension demands negotiation and choice, and hence its disclosure alienates those who must deal with it from immediate, fallen ethical life. This alienation in turn enables the development of responsible individual agency).
11. This order of dependence is different from that identified by some commentators, who read the call of conscience as demanding that we wrench ourselves away from the everyday. See for instance R.A. Cohen, "Authentic Selfhood in Heidegger and Rosenzweig," Human Studies 16 (1993), 123.
12. In fact, "Dasien is initially and for the most part not itself," according to Heidegger (BT p. 109).
13. Kant severed the self who exercised authority over itself, so that the imposer of the moral law and the subject who could follow or fall short of the law were distinct, at least from the point of view of the self itself. But having distinguished between the giver and the receiver of the law, Kant has trouble making clear in what sense either type of self could strictly count as autonomous (see, for instance, S. Zizek, "Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple," www.lacan.com/laclingXIII2.htm [1999]). Responsibility and authority in action risk going missing in Kant, since the rational self, considered as such, cannot but act rationally and hence morally, while the pathological self is not normatively responsive at all and behaves only through being subjugated by reason.
14. It is this lag, together with the fact that are thrown - that is, always factically positioned in a concrete world that conditions our space of possibilities before we are in a position to take responsibility for this space - that together add up to Dasein's essential 'guilt'. Transcendental conscience attests that we are (transcendentally) guilty, which is not to say that it accuses us of some particular transgression or debt, but rather that its call reveals this necessary condition of falling short of fully determining ourselves. See BT p. 262.
15. "Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulation the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms, he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. . . . There is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor" (J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Irans. H.E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), 101-102).
16. In the next several paragraphs, my account of calling has been influenced heavily by L. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," reprinted in S. Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 100-140.
17. This point has been missed by a number of Heidegger commentators, for instance F. Schalow, "Language and the Social Roots of Conscience: Heidegger's Less Traveled Path," Human Studies 21/3 (1998), 141-156,
18. and L.I. Okhamafe, "Zarathrustra and Heidegger's Call of Conscience," Philosophy Today 28/1 (1984), 77-82, who confuse the individuating function of the call with a call to be individualistic. If we happen to be individualists, with unusual projects and values, then this is an ontic fact about us that has and could have no interest for Heidegger.
19. It is well known that Heidegger grants the existence of several types of temporality, of which chronological time is but one, derivative form. An analysis of Heidegger's metaphysics of time lies far beyond the reach of this paper; indeed, there is an enormous body of secondary literature devoted to this topic (see, e.g., Blattner (1999), and J. Hodges, "Heidegger's Temporalities: Genesis and Structure of a Thinking of Many-Dimensional Time," Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999), for just two particularly current and detailed discussions). For my purposes here, I am content merely to motivate Heidegger's move to multi-dimensional temporality in Being and Time, by showing the insufficiency of experienced chronological time to capture the structure of temporalized phenomena such as the Heideggerian call of conscience.
20. J. Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,' " in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D.G. Carleson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14.
21. J. Derrida, On the Name, Irans. D. Wood, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 14.
22. Given the language Derrida uses to make this point, we can see that the problematic we are confronting here is just the same as that discussed by Kant with respect to all rulefollowing, and in light of which he introduced his 'schemata', which represent rules that are not determining but require a creative judgment on the part of the judge in order to be followed. See Kant (1998), 268.
23. J. Derrida, "Before the Law," in A. Udoff, ed., Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 135.
24. A reader of Heidegger may counter that it is, after all, Dasein who utters the call of conscience, even when it calls using the representative voice of a parent, friend or television screen, and certainly Dasein literally exists. But when Dasein calls itself out of its uncanniness, it speaks with the voice of conscience, thereby once again deriving its authority from the originary yet always deferred authority of conscience itself. Not every imperative that I might utter to myself would count as a binding dictate; this happens only when my imperative is backed up with the authority of conscience - an authority that grounds my responsibility for each and every one of my normatively responsive acts.
25. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Irans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Derrida (1992).
26. Derrida in fact makes the connection himself between his ghosts and the Heideggerian uncanny, calling haunting the "organizing force of Heidegger's uncanny" (Ibid. p. 174), but he only asserts this connection without discussion.
27. Here I am drawing upon and directly inverting S.G. Cromwell's recent phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia, wherein he argues that nostalgia itself is disruptive and uncanny (see his "Spectral History: Narrative, Nostalgia and the Time of the I," Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999)).
28. As Hamlet realizes, "The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King" (Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii, In. 604-605). Where actual historical events and actions left Hamlet ' s stepfather unmoved, Hamlet hopes that their uncanny representation in fiction will enable the call of the King's conscience.
29. Hamlet is Derrida's central example of a ghost narrative in Specters of Marx (1994).
30. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Iv., In. 2-6.
31. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Random House, 1987). While my analysis is quite different than hers, I am indebted to Drucilla Cornell for having presented Beloved as an example of another helpful ghost narrative in her presentations to the N.E.H. Summer Institute on "Background Practices," directed by H. Dreyfus and D. Hoy, Santa Cruz, CA, 1997.