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MODERN EU ROPEAN PHILOSOPHY General Editor WAYNE MART IN , University of Essex Advisory Board SE B AS T IAN G ARDNER , University College, London BEAT RIC E HAN - PILE , University of Essex HANS SLUG A , University of California, Berkeley
Some recent titles Frederick A. Olafson:Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics Gnter Zller:Fichtes Transcendental Philosophy Warren Breckman:Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory William Blattner:Heideggers Temporal Idealism Charles Griswold:Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment Gary Gutting:Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity Allen Wood:Kants Ethical Thought Karl Ameriks:Kant and the Fate of Autonomy Alfredo Ferrarin:Hegel and Aristotle Cristina Lafont:Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure Nicholas Wolterstorff:Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology Daniel Dahlstrom:Heideggers Concept of Truth Michelle Grier:Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion Henry Allison:Kants Theory of Taste Allen Speight:Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency J. M. Bernstein :Adorno Will Dudley:Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy Taylor Carman:Heideggers Analytic Douglas Moggach:The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer Rdiger Bubner:The Innovations of Idealism Jon Stewart:Kierkegaards Relations to Hegel Reconsidered Michael Quante:Hegels Concept of Action Wolfgang Detel:Foucault and Classical Antiquity Robert M. Wallace:Hegels Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God Johanna Oksala:Foucault on Freedom
Batrice Longuenesse:Kant on the Human Standpoint Wayne Martin:Theories of Judgment Heinrich Meier:Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem Otfried Hffe:Kants Cosmopolitan Theory of the Law and Peace Batrice Longuenesse:Hegels Critique of Metaphysics Rachel Zuckert:Kant on Beauty and Biology Andrew Bowie:Music, Philosophy, and Modernity Paul Redding:Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought Kristin Gjesdal:Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism Jean-Christophe Merle:German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment Sharon Krishek:Kierkegaard on Faith and Love Nicolas de Warren:Husserl and the Promise of Time Benjamin Rutter:Hegel on the Modern Arts Anne Margaret Baxley:Kants Theory of Virtue David James:Fichtes Social and Political Philosophy
Espen Hammer
Temple University, Philadelphia
c a m br i d g e u n i v e r si t y p r e s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Espen Hammer 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Hammer, Espen. Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory / Espen Hammer. p. cm. (Modern European Philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00500-6 (hardback) 1. Time. 2. Philosophy, Modern. 3. Continental philosophy. I. Title.II.Series. bd 638.h 2755 2011 115.0903dc22 2010049737 isbn 978-1-107-00500-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
C on t e n t s
Acknowledgments Introduction 1 The historicity of time 2 Modern temporality 3 Two responses to the time of modernity 4 Hegels temporalization of the absolute 5 Schopenhauer and transcendence 6 Time and myth in the early Nietzsche 7 Recurrence and authenticity:the later Nietzsche on time 8 Heidegger on boredom and modernity 9 A modernist critique of postmodern temporality Conclusion Bibliography Index
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A version of Chapter 8 has appeared in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 29:1 (2008), pp. 199225. I thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant that in 200506 supported much of the foundational work on this volume. I also thank the NorwayAmerica Association for a grant in the fall of 2008. Thanks, in particular, to the philosophy departments at the University of Essex and Temple University for offering me leaves of absence to continue working on the manuscript in 200607 and 2010. I am indebted to the various audiences to whom parts of this material have been presented, and to all the colleagues, students, and friends who have made the writing of this book possible. Among them I am especially thankful for the input I have received from Jay Bernstein, Stanley Cavell, Richard Eldridge, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Elizabeth Goodstein, Paul Guyer, Axel Honneth, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Joseph Margolis, Terry Pinkard, Hartmut Rosa, and Martin Shuster. My stays as Visiting Professor in the philosophy departments at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the New School for Social Research in the period between 2005 and 2008 have been sources of invaluable help. A special thanks to my wife, Kristin, and my two children, Mathias and Stella, for their patience and encouragement.
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I n t roduc t ion
Questions about the nature of time have always puzzled the philosophically disposed mind. What are the essential properties of time? How can we know them? How does time relate to other fundamental features and facts of the universe such as space, conscious life, and the occurrence in it of events and their connections? Does anything exist beyond time? Is, in what may seem like a fleeting sequence of ever passing nows, time a mere succession of discrete moments, or does it harbor a more fundamental continuity? Is time real or in some sense a function of the human perspective? The questions arising from even the briefest and most casual reflection on time are numerous, difficult, and, we tend to think, profound. Time itself can never be made directly present in experience. Evanescent and intangible to the point of appearing ungraspable, it nevertheless permeates and, in a sense, governs everything that takes place. It dissolves into things, processes, and events as the mode of their becoming, and yet is typically represented by means of space and spatiality, as though time were a mere medium of movement. Our experience of time defies such an easy definition, however, and seems to involve mental abilities such as remembering, synthesizing, and anticipating. As Augustine notes in an often-quoted passage in the Confessions, I know well enough what [time] is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.1 Many philosophers interested in questions of time have focussed on time as an abstract concept, excluding not only the relation to human conceptualization and agency but any association with the wider social,
1 Augustine, Confessions , trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 264.
Introduction
psychological, and political dimensions of human existence that are studied in disciplines such as history, anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology. Time has been an object of metaphysics. In this study I will refrain from raising any of the perennial metaphysical questions of time. My interest, rather, is human existence in time and what it means to exist temporally.2 In this regard, I will be making three guiding yet crucial claims. The first is that our consciousness of time, the way we relate to time and take it up, to a large extent is a function of historically mediated horizons of meaning. Our schematization of time is expressive of our identities as knowing and desiring beings, while also influencing these identities. Drawing on philosophical interpretations relating to specific social realities, I intend, in other words, to explore how agents, being at least partly self-legislative and self-interpretive, experience time, and what the implications may be of such experience. The second guiding claim is that there is something peculiar about the time of modernity (or what I will equate with Western modernity in order to distinguish it from other and possibly different processes of modernization occurring elsewhere).3 The time of modernity, which I will argue imposes specific constraints on what we can take human existence in time to entail, is torn loose from its erstwhile association with natural cycles and processes to become a disenchanted succession of essentially homogeneous now-points. In thrall to such momentous changes as urbanization, secularization, commercialization, technicization, as well as an ever greater increase in social complexity, the life of modern societies and subjects is to a tremendously detailed and overwhelming degree organized with reference to the chronometer, the representation of time according to a principle of successive instants,
2 In The Time of Our Lives:A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 2009), p. xiii, David Couzens Hoy distinguishes between time defined as clock-time and temporality defined as time in so far as it manifests itself in human existence. A distinction between clock-time and lived time will be important in this book as well, although I do not distinguish rigorously between time and temporality. As I see it, this would have been counter-productive given the fact that this terminology is not employed consistently, or even at all, by the thinkers I will be discussing. 3 The Weberian question about the uniqueness of Western modernization has recently been the subject of a lot of debate. There are those, following Weber, who continue to believe that there is something unique about the Western process of modernization, and that, while unique, it carries a universal significance. Today, however, it is common to talk about a plurality of different processes of modernization. Since my own conception of modernization is fundamentally Weberian, I will restrict my findings to a Western context and leave the question of universality open.
Introduction
each of which has a similar weight, leading in a linear direction from a past that is gone forever to a not yet actualized future. As I will argue, this temporal configuration raises a number of existential and ethical-political questions. My third guiding claim is that this development has sparked off its own philosophical discourse of modernity, in which key figures in the post-Kantian tradition have explored, and in many cases criticized, the ramifications of the rampant consolidation of a modern, disenchanted time-consciousness.4 The advantages wrought by a disenchanted time-consciousness are both obvious and numerous. Most strikingly it makes possible a new and enormously effective system for precisely coordinating social interaction. With the chronometer comes a vast increase in discipline, efficiency, and social speed, transforming every major institution in Western societies. The factory is totally clock-based, and so is the current office environment and urban space in general, as well as private life. Transportation, business, the flow of information, indeed everything we do, either alone or with others, is to a greater or lesser extent controlled by the clock. Moreover, the very idea of progress, which can be traced back to Christian conceptions of providence, is largely owed to technological innovation, presupposing a linear conception of time according to which the past is irretrievable and the future an open horizon. The before and after, the idea that history offers movement, change, and development is based on appeals to clocks and calendars. Perhaps most strikingly, the rise of the exact sciences and modern industrial technology would not have been possible without an objectivist, clock-based understanding of time. It is impossible to imagine the modern world without the clock. For many of the central post-Kantian thinkers, however, including Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno, the disintegration of external, socio-historically sanctioned authority with its premodern forms of time-consciousness has brought about a wide-ranging
4 The idea of analyzing at least selected parts of the post-Kantian tradition of European philosophy as engaged in some type of extended debate over the nature, promises, and (in many cases) dissatisfactions of modernity is by no means new. It features prominently in Jrgen Habermass influential study The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) and has been pursued in considerable depth by Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Strauss, and many others. However, no account so far has interpreted the discourse of modernity in terms mainly of problems related to temporality and duration. For a good overview, see Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford:Blackwell, 1991).
Introduction
sense of dissatisfaction. In some instances, such as those of Hegel and Nietzsche, this has led to the recommendation of new and, in these philosophers view, emancipatory forms of commitment. However, in many of them it has been viewed as a potential threat to both agency and motivation. If time, calculated and commodified, is disenchanted to become a succession of irreversible now-points to be taken up by the instrumental pursuits of a post-conventional agent, then every traditional certainty, whether of faith or sensation, stands in danger of being rendered hollow or invalid. Clock-time, while a homogeneous resource, lending itself to be exploited by rational and calculative behavior, is empty and uniform, devoid of any intrinsic sense of significance. The aim of this study is to analyze and discuss how the temporally inflected experience of uncertainty accompanying the perpetual and dynamic process of modernization finds a cultural response in the tradition of philosophical reflection from Kant to Adorno.5 Two interconnected issues, both related to subjective effects of modernization, arise in this regard. One is the lack of existential meaning in a world in which few or no permanent and intersubjectively validated cultural, spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic contexts in which to experience the bindingness of value are accepted. Lack of meaning, I argue, is a function of the modern agents and modern societys incessant erosion of pre-given authority and value-patterns. With the destruction of the various contexts that grant human life existential meaning and form, and which permit the formation of narratives that in an intersubjectively binding fashion can generate both individual and collective meaning, a quotidian crisis of subjectivity begins to emerge. As ends are subjectivized, agents start relating instrumentally to them, and the crisis grows even deeper. The time merely of waiting to achieve a subjectively and, from the point of view of any such meaning-giving contexts, arbitrarily set end is empty, meaningless, and self-stultifying. Another important concern is the changing and changed experience of transitoriness. On a traditional metaphysical account of transcendence, like that found in Platonism, the adequate ethical response to the fact of temporality (and hence of transitoriness) consisted in trying to invent and employ procedures and practices of evasion. By purifying the soul through rational or ecstatic participation in noetic
5 I here follow Marshall Berman, who in All That Is Solid Melts into Air:The Experience of Modernity (New York:Penguin Books, 1988) consistently speaks of modernism as a reaction to modernization.
Introduction
essence, or, as in Christianity, through salvation, the human being could triumph over time and be united, after her brief earthly sojourn, with the transcendent sphere of immutable being. Secularization, enlightenment rationalism, and skepticism have largely undermined this appeal to transcendence, thereby radically transforming how agents are able to interpret and make sense of fundamental facts of life such as embodiment, suffering, and death. Indeed, the disintegration of metaphysics became an ideological hallmark of modernity itself, placing man in a concrete historicity, a historical time, that, when fully secularized, stretches indefinitely into the future, with no possibility of archetypical return or repetition, leaving the modern agent to pursue her goals exclusively in relation to her own capacity for autonomous reason-giving. In tandem with the emerging social and cognitive impact of physicalist interpretations of time (or clocktime), agents have increasingly been led to perceive time as a mere succession of homogenous instants devoid of any inherent meaning that could justify the experience of radical contingency made possible by this time frame. Transitoriness obtains a particular significance precisely because the time of the active modern agent is measured out in ever-more precious seconds, minutes, days, and months that need to be conquered and controlled. Philosophy has by no means been the only field in which modern time and time-consciousness has sparked off reflection. In the arts, and especially in literature, there are numerous and powerful responses to this issue. As early as in his 1916 study The Theory of the Novel , Georg Lukcs claimed that time is the key to understanding the modern novel, and that only the novel has been able to register fully how intimately the alienation of modern subjectivity from a sense of objective purpose is connected to changing conceptions of time.6 Much of the growing body of critical discourse on Marcel Prousts Remembrance of Things Past has been examining how the relationship between time and modernization is reflected in literary form.7 The novel, in particular, provides historical context and subjective viewpoints, thereby bringing the relevant phenomena to light in ways that no philosophical text is able to match. While often accomplished in interpreting the
6 See Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel , trans. Anna Bostock (London:Merlin Press, 1978), p. 121. 7 See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time , trans. Stephen Bann (New York:Columbia University Press, 1993) and Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (New York:Columbia University Press, 1998).
Introduction
general significance of such matters, philosophy has typically shunned questions to do with context and lived subjectivity.8 As I will try to show, however, while the historical dimension is often only implicit, it is never completely absent; thus my task as an interpreter has been to bring it to light and read the relevant philosophical texts as responding to their own social conditions and the type of experience these conditions make possible. I therefore offer a rereading of certain central representatives of the modern European tradition, different from that advanced by standard histories of modern philosophy, in order to seek in them a fruitful approach to the too often ignored relationship between modernization and time-consciousness. Appearances notwithstanding, the philosophy I will be dealing with is indeed a discourse on, as well as a response to, modernity. Although I hope to demonstrate the centrality of the question of time in any proper account of the philosophical discourse of modernity, I will not provide reasons to believe that the dominant responses to the emergence of a modern conception of time are tremendously persuasive. Reconstructing a tradition that runs from Kant over Hegel to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and certain of the figures associated with the early Frankfurt school, I will on the contrary argue that they are all faced with very tough challenges though some more so than others. The position I favor will be based, though not closely, on accounts coming out of the writings of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. The first chapter is predominantly methodological. The aim here is to make plausible the idea that time can, and indeed should, be analyzed with reference to publicly endorsable structures of engagement that, when employed to schematize concepts, provide time with significance. While capable of being distorted in various ways, they can never be completely replaced by objectivist or naturalist conceptions of time. Of importance for my argument is the first-person point of view and its relevance for understanding the kinds of responses agents are able to muster when
8 One current exception to this tendency is Charles Taylors A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass. and London:Harvard University Press, 2007). On p. 3, Taylor refers to secularity, his object of philosophical investigation, as being a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place. He continues that by context of understanding here, I mean both matters that will probably have been explicitly formulated by almost everyone, such as the plurality of options, and some which form the implicit, largely unfocussed background of this experience and search, its pre-ontology, to use a Heideggerian term.
Introduction
relating to these structures. I also offer a brief account of narrative, arguing that lived time tends to be structured along narrative lines. The second chapter presents historical material and interpretations regarding the rise of a modern consciousness of time. I try to show how, with the rise of modernity, radical changes in the organization of everyday life conspired with the Enlightenment critique of metaphysics and the commitment to progress to generate a new sense of time and ones place in it. Accompanying these vast changes is a huge transformation of structures of self-interpretation and action-orientation. From having been constituted by appeals to pre-given forms of symbolic authority, they gradually become oriented towards the formal and instrumental, serving mainly subjective rather than objective ends. The chapter ends by identifying two important strands in the modern experience of temporality that will subsequently cause discontent:first, the universalization of linear, homogeneous time, which radicalizes the age-old problem of transitoriness, calling for substantive reconceptualizations of mans relation to society, to others, and to his own mortality; and, second, the orientation towards progress which will turn out to stand in conflict with the displacement and, in the most extreme cases, rejection with considerable ethical and existential consequences of vocabularies expressive of the anchoring of identities in a fabric of collective meaning and purpose. In Chapter 3 I consider two responses to the time of modernity:one Kantian and one Aristotelian. The Kantian strategy is to argue that rationally endorsed projects projects initiated by an agent capable of rational self-determination cannot involve the kind of alienation that I associate with the modern time frame. However, since the exercise of pure and decontextualized autonomy is itself predicated on the acceptance of a disenchanted temporality, it follows that the issues of transitoriness and existential meaning do not go away. By contrast, the Aristotelian strategy is to retrieve an alternative temporality based on the idea of praxis. Here the activity is its own end, the fulfilling expression of an intersubjectively endorsed cultural commitment, and time, rather than being understood within an instrumental framework, is theorized as a field, an enabling medium, in which meaningful action action that draws on historically binding, traditional patterns of action and interpretation can occur. I argue that although such an Aristotelian critique of modernity is in some ways promising, it underestimates the difficulties involved in rejecting the temporal economy of modern life, seeking refuge in an altogether unrealistic anti-modernism.
Introduction
In Chapter 4 I turn to Hegel and examine the tension between, on the one hand, his theory of time and, on the other, his early interpretation of European modernity. On the basis of his theory of time, which interprets time in terms of the necessary unfolding of a rational process, Hegels theory aims to eliminate the ethical and existential consequences of the disenchanted modern time frame. As a form of life and embodied in institutions that self-consciously express it, Hegels Geist is a self-determining rational structure whose development is inherently meaningful. In the early account, however, Hegel paints a much darker picture, especially of European modernity and the challenges it imposes on the formation of an autonomous form of subjectivity. I thus attempt to reveal the tensions between his metaphysics of time and his thinking about the crisis of modern subjectivity. In sharp opposition to his rival Hegel, Schopenhauer, who is mainly concerned with the problems of finitude and transitoriness, rejects the notion of rationality as an immanent process of self-realization, instead offering an account of transcendence. In Chapter 5 I analyze his account of time and aesthetic experience, arguing that his vision of Platonic transcendence does not adequately resolve the problem of transitoriness. I also suggest that the Schopenhauerian view represents a melancholic response to time:in refusing to accept finitude and transitoriness, it exemplifies a resistance to come to terms with loss and thereby to mourn. Turning, in Chapter 6, to the early Nietzsche, I discuss how his critique of Enlightenment rationalism, embedded in an account of Greek tragedy, leads to the advocacy of a pre-modern, cyclical understanding of time opposed to the contingency and irreversibility of linear time. I propose that the early Nietzsche, for reasons internal to his account, fails to identify modern authorities capable of offering the kind of non-reflective assurance that he needs in order to ground his position. The later Nietzsche, examined in Chapter 7, criticizes all attempts to negate transient life, associating them with nihilism. Accepting transience becomes a matter of affirming the past as irretrievably gone; it is to accept that nothing lasts while resisting the desire to establish a melancholic attachment to the lost object. I finally analyze Nietzsches ambitious attempt to rethink the notion of time by means of his conception of the eternal recurrence of the same. Criticizing Nietzsche, I suggest that none of his recipes for countering the modern crisis of temporal awareness is satisfactory. The appeal to myth is regressive;
Introduction
the active nihilism of his later work is incapable of solving the problems to which it is designed to respond. In particular, I contend that since, on his account, there can be no unchosen demands upon the self, the creations being presented by Nietzsches bermensch remain without any binding value. The redirecting of desire towards the transient world becomes a narcissistic game incapable of overcoming the problem of nihilism. While both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche focus mainly on transitoriness, Heidegger, whose work I discuss in Chapter 8, turns to the problem of meaning more generally. In his analysis of the relation between time-consciousness and modernitys achievement of a secular order marked by the pursuit of autonomy and technological mastery, he establishes a link between rationalized modernity and boredom. Of particular importance for my purposes is that Heidegger understands boredom as a direct and painful confrontation with the emptiness characterizing a mere succession of mutually homogenous moments of time. Modern technological environments, and indeed modern society in general, are structured such as to preclude the possibility of meaningful engagement. They are, in Heideggers view, quite simply boring. In light of this diagnosis I discuss Heideggers appeal to a notion of commitment. By taking full responsibility for ones selfdefinition and by implicating the self in ones engagements, experience again becomes meaningful and significant, and the awareness of time no longer a burden. I ask how successful this account really is. In particular I argue that his concepts of commitment and authenticity essentially remain stuck within the parameters of a modern, disenchanted temporal economy. Theorists of postmodernity invariably claim that the modern project, pa with its various meta-narratives of progress, innovation, and emanci tion, has come to an end, and that what we now witness is a tremendously pervasive and exclusive orientation towards the present, the given, and the appearing (as opposed to any conceptions of essence or origin).9
9 The most influential study of the concept of the postmodern has undoubtedly been Jean-Franois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1999). See also Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity:Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture , trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) and Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York:Columbia University Press, 1994). For a cogent exposition of the relation between modernist ideologies that make reference to the new and the postmodern rejection of this category, see Boris Groys, ber das Neue:Versuch einer Kulturkonomie (Munich:Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992).
10
Introduction
In their view, technological advancement has reinforced this position:the tremendous increases in physical and informational speed have made our horizon of expectation less a function of the narratives we construct regarding historical development and change than of the more imme diate demands and desires of individual agents. Although these devel opments, which I examine in Chapter 9, seem undeniable, I suggest that the values and problems of modernity have not been entirely superseded by the emergence of the postmodern. On the contrary, understanding and criticizing the present requires a thorough analysis of what I will call a modernist consciousness of time. Thus, I will analyze a position according to which lived time is understood in terms of the subjects relation to a form of immanent transcendence. For Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno, the time of progressive modernization is empty and homogeneous, and by extension the same is true of the protracted now of postmodern temporality. In countering this time frame and its social conditions they introduce a set of critical tools with which to think not only about time but about experience and ethics. According to the view I excavate and extrapolate from their writings, time, while predominantly homogeneous, occasionally permits a dimension of alterity to affect the ego, thereby placing it in a relationship of ethically relevant responsibility. I conclude Chapter 9 by arguing that the problem of existing in time must be related to a notion of social critique. When the subject finds itself in a position of being addressed by a significant and authoritative, yet ultimately sublime, other, the solitary time of boredom and emptiness has the potential to be transformed into a common project. I end by hinting towards the political implications of this point.
1 T h e h i s tor ic i t y of t i m e
The aim of this chapter is to establish a general theoretical framework for analyzing the various post-Kantian positions that emerge in response to the temporality of modern life. I do this by defending the claim that the experience of temporality is itself historical and, as such, fundamentally a product of human convention; and I seek to distinguish this view from accounts that do not refer to the social or to the social constitution of time. I then try to show that, qua historical, this experience can be theorized in terms of the inferential articulation concepts implicitly have when applied in temporally indexed judgments, and I emphasize the first-person standpoint as being ultim ately both irreducible and authoritative. The idea of narrative will be important: the narrative mode conditions and structures action, experience, and selves. Ultimately, these can appear intelligible only temporal synagainst the background of narratives that bring about thesis, thereby creating order and unity among their various elements. Finally, I introduce three levels of temporal mediation and negotieveryday life, (b) of the relation between singular action ation (a) of and ones life as a whole, and (c) of larger, collective events suggesting that narrative is what allows these levels to interact with one another.
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modern agents have of time and to conjecture that, independently of the various regional circumstances whether scientific, personal, social, or natural-cyclical in which time is an issue for us, something general yet non-trivial can be said about modern temporality. Prima facie there should be nothing peculiar about such a procedure. Philosophers, sociologists, and historians typically refer to modernity by characterizing it in various general terms, depending on their research interests, data, and interpretive horizons. Modernity may set the stage for a Promethean act of collective self-legislation, or it may be an epoch of nihilism and disenchantment; it may be studied with reference to a huge range of topics such as for instance the rise of the novel, secularization, the triumph of technology and science, the spread of liberal political institutions, new orientations towards sex, the drive towards totalitarianism, and so forth: there are innumerable ways in which the continuities and characteristics of a historical epoch may be understood and articulated, and debates surrounding the nature of modernity are not likely to go away very soon. It should be noted, though, that my intentions may easily seem at odds with the concerns of the majority of writers interested in the category of modcharacter. ernity. They deal with phenomena of an obviously historical The novel, for example, or the system of parliamentary representation, is something that has a particular history:it came into being because people created and developed it in ways that the historian can trace, depending on her interest and point of view. I, by contrast, point to a phenomenon time which many, including most professional philosophers, are inclined to treat as belonging to the order of nature. Just as nature in general is governed by unchanging laws, so time, it would seem, has certain properties that, whatever they may be, do not change. Time, then, is an ahistorical dimension of a physical system, the universe considered as a whole, whose constituent laws and behavior carry no intrinsic relation to how we happen to go about applying temporal predicates in a given period of human history. It may therefore seem unacceptable to refer, as I do, to the time of modernity, or modern time, and the like. There is no such time. There is only physical time. defeating. To raise this objection this early in my study may seem self- Can I not simply set the specter of reductionism aside and bracket the metaphysics of time? Do I not open a can of worms that will prevent me from ever addressing my central concerns? In a sense I certainly do. In a treatise on, say, moral philosophy or aesthetics I would in most
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cases not be obliged to worry about the ontological status of phenomena like intentions or emotions. Most philosophers writing on these subjects take certain concepts for granted without wondering about their relation to concepts of a purely natural order. The concept of time, however, seems different from, say, concepts such as obligation or pleasure. Whereas the latter concepts would have no extension in a world without humans, time is one of the fundamental features of the universe, having its origin, according to contemporary cosmology, with the Big Bang, and then continuing indefinitely. It is simply a fundamental and universal feature of reality; hence it would seem absurd to dismiss physicalist or, more generally speaking, agent-neutral ways of employing temporal concepts.1 Even someone who refused to make any realist commitments about time would have to admit that, within the frameworks in which they are being used, such concepts certainly carry a pragmatic meaning, and that natural science (and indeed the natural-scientific worldview) could not be possible without them . I do not seek to resolve the ontological quandary that arises once we contrast the apparent inevitability of a physicalist conception of time to a social conception of time. That would take me too far afield and probably exceed my powers. One thing it should be possible to agree on, however, and with which I want to begin my attempt to sketch the nature of social time, is that there is in fact an everyday usage of temporally inflected concepts in which such concepts meanings and involve specific implications. We should attain specific be able to agree that there is a phenomenology here to be engaged with. Among the phenomena that deserve to be highlighted are social practices whereby we employ temporal categories practices that reflect and express deep-seated and complex historical commitments. Indeed, social life contains numerous layers and structures
1 It should be noted that to say that the passage of time is in some sense agent-centered does not as such imply that it cannot be viewed as an inherent part of the fabric of the universe. For J. M. E. McTaggart, in his classic paper The Unreality of Time, Mind 17 (1908), pp. 45673, the A series corresponds to our everyday notions of past, present, and future. The A series is the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future (p. 458), and can exist only in so far as the verbal tenses of ordinary language (expressions like it is the case that, it was the case that, and it will be the case that) can be taken as primitive and unanalyzable. Ordinary language with its range of verbal tense must then exist, and with it speakers who use it. However, the A series is not therefore a human convention; it simply presupposes the reality of tense. McTaggart contrasts this with the B series, in which positions are ordered from earlier to later, i.e. the series running from earlier to later moments.
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of temporal organization just think of the temporal structuring of work, politics, family life, ritual, play, love, and, indeed, every social activity and recognizable human project. While both time and space are fundamental dimensions of the universe, the concepts we possess of them are taken up and processed in determinate ways as human agents relate to the world both temporally and spatially. As I will soon argue in more depth, temporality is not, as Kant argued in his account of pure intuition, only explanatory of some of the most fundamental a priori features of human experience (such as the ability to experience duration, succession, and coexistence); rather, it is present in all our dealings with ourselves, others, and objects, and as historical beings with particular practices and vocabularies we relate to time in culturally and historically specific ways.2 So can this by itself a cursory reference to the phenomenology of social time help to account for the antinomy of physical and social time? One may hold the (realist) view that a specific rational endeavor, say theoretical physics or philosophy, holds the key to formulating a final and objectively true theory of time a theory, let us stipulate this, whose truth-value is logically independent of the means we have at our disposal for justifying it in which case there would be an essence to time that would be unaffected not only by human anthropology in the most general sense, but by historical contingencies as well. However, even if such a theory were to be formulated, it would not follow that human practices of relating to time and interpreting it would be any less binding for us. Human experience, I will argue in more detail later, is inherently structured on the historically mediated, practices of relating to time. basis of actual, It is largely unaffected, in other words, by third-person descriptions of time. If someone were to claim that Einsteins theory of general relativity offers the true theory of time, or at least the true theoretical framework within which to understand time, then this person might very well be correct.3 Yet such a claim would be of no actual consequence whatsoever for her self- understanding as an agent. Even
2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:Macmillan, 1986), B219:The three modes of time are duration , succession , and coexistence . There will, therefore, be three rules of all relations of appearances in time, and these rules will be prior to all experience, and indeed make it possible. 3 There is considerable disagreement about whether the theory of relativity offers a theory of the nature of time, or whether it is mainly concerned with the problem of measuring time. For an exponent of the first view, see Max Planck, Eight Lectures on Theoretical Physics , trans. A. P. Willis (New York:Columbia University Press, 1915),
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if this person were to find a way to make sense of the very purpose of such an undertaking, she would not be able to make the relevant mathematical statements comprising this theory become a part of, and influence, her everyday orientation in the world. To be sure, she could, as some practitioners of mathematical physics no doubt are, be obsessed with Einsteins theory and constantly reflect upon it. What she could not do, however, except at the risk of making herself unintelligible both to herself and others, would be to try to interpret herself, her relation to others, her everyday experience, or her plans and projects, in terms that would include those of Einsteins theory of general relativity. Such an undertaking would be external to what she could possibly claim with any degree of authority and plausibility to make up her self-understanding. At the phenomenal level, the objectivist accounts we find in physics seem largely incommensurable with our everyday understanding of temporality. Does this entail some sort of dualism whereby time potentially has two sets of properties, one that is real and another that, while unavoidable in some sense, ultimately is unreal and agent-relative? One could imagine that this would commit me to have to work out the relation between these two levels, and that I would have to introduce, say, supervenience or similar concepts used in order to conceptualize such relations. Again, since I am going to focus my analysis on agent-relative features of time, on features pertaining to the time of the everyday, what will interest me are the implications the various stances towards time we dispose of as modern agents carry for our self-understanding, and at this level considerations about the relation between the natural and the social do not arise. The sense that I need to work out the nature of the relation between these two sets of properties can arise only from a materialist or reductionist standpoint, requiring me to think of it in terms of some sort of contrast between essence and appearance. Yet from an agent-relative point of view, which is experienced as more or less autonomous, such an analysis is not called for. Referring, as I occasionally do, to the time of the everyday as being largely incommensurable with time considered as a fact of nature may seem like an imprecise or even sloppy way of drawing an important philosophical distinction. It would seem that matters of degree
p. 120. For an exponent of the second view, see Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time in the Science of History, in Supplements:From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond , trans. H. S. Taylor, H. W. Uffelmann, and J. van Buren (Albany, N.Y.:SUNY Press, 2002), p. 55.
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should not be allowed to play a role here. The reason why they are needed, however, is that the time frame I scrutinize, namely that of modernity, so palpably demonstrates interconnections between these two levels. Processes of modernization, I will argue later, eminently involve the impacting of systemic imperatives upon everyday actionorientations; thus conceptions of objective (or cosmic) time start influencing the logics of human action and self-interpretation in such a way as to transform them. The historic emergence of clock-time can perhaps be viewed as the most drastic expression of this tendency. As I will soon discuss in greater detail, the early modern introduction of clock-time as the prevalent and socially enforced way of relating to time has profoundly changed our conception of what existence as a temporal being involves. There is no sanctuary from the larger historical forces and their impact on conceptions of time. The introduction of the chronometer made the organization of the working day more rigorous and the fear of losing time, with its immediate economic connotations, more overt in that each operation could be measured to last a certain while that would set the standard for all other repetitions of the same operation. Chronometric linearity revolutionized social coordination, making human interactions and transactions easier to calculate and predict, and in so doing placed increasing demands on peoples willingness and ability to discipline themselves in accordance with the demands of the clock and the calendar.4 The consequences of this development for agents everyday dealings with time have been immense. Now if I am not interested in defending a dualism involving real and non-real properties but simply in studying the time of the everyday as it pertains to modernity; and if this time is mainly historical; then is not my approach to modern time best characterized as being a species of social constructivism? According to standard social construction theory, there is a substantial class of phenomena that, rather than enjoying an independent standing or reality, are mere reflections
4 Readers familiar with Habermas may here note that I implicitly endorse his view that, for certain purposes, systemic imperatives and lifeworld imperatives governing the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld must be dealt with separately and distinctly. By analogy with Habermass account of social rationalization, I view the introduction of clock-time as a process of colonization whereby key features of the lifeworld are transformed or destroyed. For Habermass most elaborate discussion of the system/ lifeworld distinction, see The Theory of Communicative Action , vol. ii, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason , trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 11398.
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or products of contingent social forces and tendencies. According to Ian Hacking, claims about social construction entail a denial of inevitability; thus, social construction analyses about X hold that X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is present, is not determined by the nature of things, it is not inevitable.5 As I have already started to intimate, and as should be obvious, the way we go about relating to time in modernity is not inevitable in the sense that it is determined by the nature of things. One implication of this is that had the history of Western modernity been different in certain relevant respects, then we would most probably have thought of time in other terms. Perhaps earlier, non-linear conceptions of time would still have been dominant, or other instruments for measuring and calculating time than the clock and the calendar would have been invented, generating alternate understandings of time. In this sense, my view dovetails with conceptions of social construction. I differ, though, from social construction theory of the more radical kind in resisting the inference, so often made, from historicality (and therefore contingency) to illusion. For many social construction theorists, the historicity of a concept means that it cannot enter into judgments that possess any genuine claim to validity. At best, such judgments refer to something unreal precisely a construction of some sort being opposed to what is there independently of our historical practices. The problem with this view is its conflation of genesis and validity. While concepts have a definite historical origin, it does not follow that the class of objects a concept purports to refer to necessarily is unreal. It may be unreal, of course, but never because its concept has a determinate genesis. Money is eminently a social construction; it has a history that can be tracked and documented; and yet the claims we make about it certainly do come with objective truth-values. Note that when, earlier, I refused to commit myself to an opposition between objective, physical time and the subjective or illusory time of the everyday, I suggested that temporal concepts can be binding on us because they contain norms that are implicit in our practices of judging and inferring, and that without such practices what we did would no longer be intelligible either to ourselves or others. Having dismissed the illusion thesis of radical social construction theory, I can now return to this claim and propose that our temporal
5 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 6.
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concepts have this ability to be both historical and capable of imposing certain normative constraints on us: we must accept them, for otherwise our capacity to be intelligible to ourselves and to one another would be jeopardized. I am now closer to showing why I am entitled to dismiss reductionist and metaphysically realist skepticism as irrelevant. These concepts make up the fulcrum on which we organize our experience. They are not inevitable; they do not refer to the natural order of the world. Over and above everything else they are facts about who we are at this particular moment in history, and about how we make sense of ourselves and our experience. In other words, it is not possible to adopt or reject the concepts at our ourselves and our experience temporally on disposal for describing the basis of a mere decision, whether rationally grounded or not. They are, rather, an outgrowth of the form of life that we have come to count as our own, and they are necessary in order to have other experiences that we count as essential to who we are.6
Time-consciousness
In order to shed light on the sense in which we may speak of an everyday conception of time that, while historical, is not arbitrary or merely relative in some external manner to a particular set of practices, I will introduce the notion of time-consciousness.7 The term is used in a number of different ways. We may refer to the timeconsciousness of someone in a specific time period, or the term may be used to designate a collectives temporal self-understanding as it comes to be displayed in exemplary symbols, patterns of action, or technological items of the period in question. The word is also used more technically as referring to the minds awareness of time, or how temporality is a factor in cognitive and appetitive processing. My use of
6 I am here indebted to Stanley Cavells remarks in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 119:What we take to be necessary in a given period may alter. It is not logically impossible that painters should now paint in ways which outwardly resemble paintings of the Renaissance, nor logically necessary that they now paint in the ways they do. What is necessary is that, in order for us to have the form of experience we count as an experience of a painting, we accept something as a painting. And we do not know a priori what we will accept as such a thing. But only someone outside such an enterprise could think of it as a manipulation or exploration of mere conventions. 7 The term stems from the German Zeitbewusstsein and was originally used by phenomenologists, yet has now been imported into a number of discursive contexts.
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the term will combine these meanings. By time-consciousness I have in mind a practically determinate, reflective, and agent-related stance towards time. The time of the everyday (or what I call social time), I will suggest, is made comprehensible to the individual agent by virtue of socially constituted structures of engagement that, when embodied in speech and practice, provide temporal orientation, structure, and meaning. Before I turn to the issue of temporality itself, I need to give a brief sketch of the pragmatist and inferentialist account of norms and concepts that I will be drawing on in order to spell out how agents relate to time. The key to this account, developed mainly by Robert Brandom but with forerunners in Kant, Wittgenstein, and Sellars, is the claim that our practices of judging and inferring, as well as action itself, are inherently normative. The norms may in some cases take the form of explicit rules, although in most cases they are implicit in what we do as speakers. Explicit rules, Brandom argues, almost always presuppose the existence of norms that are implicit in our practices of judging and inferring.8 Like Brandoms position regarding normative commitment, Kants theory of judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason was designed to account for how, and under what specific conditions, our concepts are to be legitimately employed. According to Kant, for concepts to find legitimate application in judgments there must be certain normative demands, or validating conditions, that specify what counts as a correct application of the concept. By virtue of her capacity for spontaneous action, in each instance of application the individual agent is responsible for following the rules that stipulate the normative conditions under which such application can take place, thereby ascribing them to herself as valid. The agent self-consciously takes herself to be committed to the rules in question. Following Kants lead, Brandom thus understands judging as a species of acting: every time we act, we undertake a commitment to do what is necessary for the action to be correct; thus, acknowledging the rules as binding, we do what we think is appropriate in order to perform the action we take ourselves to be performing. One might think that such behavior could be analyzed in terms of what people actually do. On such an account, the norms implicit
8 Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 20.
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in a societys practices would be discernable simply by observing how the members of a society regularly behave. However, such descriptions are inadequate unless they take into account what people think must be done in order to engage in the kinds of practices they happen to engage in. Without this it would not be possible to account for what it means to go against the rule, or to do things incorrectly. A mere description would simply state what people do but rule out the possibility of anyone committing an error. There could be deviations from the mean but not misfirings, infelicities, or mistakes. In describing the practice in question, the proponent of the regularity view is thus ultimately forced to presuppose normativity. Norms, then, are not just regularities exhibited by the practice but, as Brandom calls them, proprieties implicit in the practice. The proprieties implicit in practices, moreover, are social achievements. They arise only in so far as they are recognized and instituted by members of a particular community. Laws of nature constrain without any such recognition. They just apply. Norms, however, can exercise an authority over us only in so far as we actively endorse them as authoritative. For norms to be binding, someone has to take them to be binding and treat them as such. For Brandom, the process of instituting norms and proprieties is, however, quite complex. On the one hand, there must be individuals who on their own give them authority by practically acknowledging them in their actions. On the other hand, such acknowledgment commits agents in the eyes of others not only to the norm in question but to a host of others that may exceed their explicit grasp. Thus there is independence in that norms have no normative force over the individual unless she freely acknowledges their bindingness. Yet in exercising such independence, the same individual is dependent on the attitudes of others, who attribute and hold [her] to the commitment, and thereby administer its content.9 According to Brandom, while the commitments we undertake provide us with a certain social status on the basis of which we
9 Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 22021. On p. 223 Brandom offers another important statement of his essentially Hegelian account of the social authority of norms:The commitment one undertakes by applying a concept in judgment or action can be construed as determinately contentful only if it is to be administered by others distinct from the one whose commitment it is. So in acknowledging such a commitment, one is at least implicitly recognizing the authority of others over the content to which one has committed oneself.
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obtain recognition, there is always a process of negotiation taking place between the individual and those who attribute a certain set of commitments to her. The individual may find that what she took to be a coherent, meaningful application of a concept does not permit her to find the requisite recognition from the other. She will then need to consult the other and engage in a conversation about what is in fact implied in our practice. The other is necessary in order to confer objective status on the position she is in as someone undertaking a commitment. Thus, on Brandoms view, her authority is only partial. While she may commit herself to being the player of a particular game and in so doing acknowledges certain norms to be binding upon her, the other is needed in order to decide what further moves are appropriate or obligatory given that she takes herself to be playing this game. Although she needs to take herself as affirming their validity, she does not objectively control in the sense of having full authority over all the norms that govern the possible moves within the game. For Brandom, undertaking a specific normative commitment is to bring conceptual norms into play by putting forward the inferential structure on the basis of which a given concept has content.
Saying or thinking that things are thus-and-so is undertaking a distinctive kind of inferentially articulated commitment: putting it forward as a fit premise for further inferences, that is, authorizing its use as such a premise, and undertaking responsibility to entitle oneself to that commitment, to vindicate ones authority, under suitable circumstances, paradigmatically by exhibiting it as the conclusion of an inference from other such commitments to which one is or can become entitled. Grasping the concept that is applied in such a making explicit is mastering its inferential use:knowing (in the practical sense of being able to distinguish, a kind of knowing how) what else one would be committing oneself to by applying the concept, what would entitle one to do so, and what would preclude such entitlement.10
Brandoms basic point is that in taking up a certain stance in a conceptual space by saying or thinking that something is the case, or by doing something we implicitly appeal to reasons (and offer to give and be asked for reasons) on the basis of which what we do or say becomes intelligible. There is, in other words, an inferential know-how that goes with, and makes possible, judging and action. Such reasons
10 Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons:An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 11.
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may not always provide a logically or formally determined set of inferences. On the contrary, most of the inferences that articulate the content of a given concept are material . If we judge that Philadelphia is to the west of New York, then by virtue of a material inference we should (and will) be committed to holding that New York is to the east of Philadelphia; and if we judge that we see a dog, then we should (and will) be committed to the applicability of the concept of mammal to it. Commitments provide premises from which other propositions can be inferred. To master the use of a concept is thus to master the inferential relations that come into play once the concept is being employed. Thus, if for instance someone says that it is a beautiful day, then in standard cases understanding what this person means requires knowing implicitly that it is being implied that it is not raining, that it is not particularly cloudy, that the sun is up, that there is no fog, and so forth. These are some, though far from all, of the material inferences that are being presupposed in saying that it is a beautiful day. These inferences stipulate what it means for something to be a beautiful day. However, when applied in a judgment like this, the content of the predicate beautiful (as in it is a beautiful day) is not simply given. Someone and this points to the inescapability of individual acknowledgment of proprieties might imply that it is cloudy just because he or she loves the grey shades of color clouds can give to a day, associating a days beauty with that. The content can never finally be fixed but is determined through ongoing processes of negotiation whereby different interlocutors respond to each others ways of using concepts. There is never any final answer to what is correct, Brandom writes:everything ... is itself a subject for conversation and further assessment, challenge, defense, and correction.11 Brandoms semantic view centers on the claim that commitments and entitlements of inferences are established through intersubjective negotiation alone. We have seen that he does not believe that content can ever be finally fixed through such processes of negotiation. There will always be deviant interpretations and applications of given concepts; thus, agents will never escape the need for reflection and correction. We have also seen that norms are typically implicit in the practices of judging. What we do when we reflectively spell them out is to make them explicit. However, it is the sum total of the communitys ongoing negotiations that ultimately constitutes the norms as
11 Brandom, Making It Explicit , p. 647.
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authoritative, and the individual speaker, when rational, will tend to follow the communally constituted norms when engaging in particular practices. For Brandom, to follow a rule is to act in accordance with the rule. Whether explicitly or implicitly, it is to apply (in so far as it is determinate) the rule to a specific case. When a concept is being employed along these lines, the speaker thus draws on standards that govern the application of the concept. The presence of the norm licenses, we might say, the proper application of the concepts in judgments. It determines the range of implications and commitments that each legitimate application of the concept involves. Although it ultimately is the form of life, as Wittgenstein would call it, understood as an ongoing process of reason-giving and responding to reasons, that creates or generates the norms in question (in the sense that norms in the final instance can be said to be instituted by the community), our linguistic authority ultimately rests on appeals to the framework of rules:thus, language, for Brandom, comes to rest on a framework of rules such that our mutual intelligibility in language becomes supported and made possible by that framework. One important problem with this view is that it underestimates the flexibility and precision with which we exercise our linguistic abilities. No interpretation of a rule will ever determine the right action in every single case. No concept can be completely bound by rules. Indeed, as Wittgenstein points out in paragraph 201 of the Philosophical Investigations, no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The existence of a given rule is logically compatible with an indefinite number of applications. Wittgenstein therefore infers that we must conceive of a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation , but which is exhibited in what we call obeying the rule and going against it in actual cases.12 What Wittgenstein most probably wants us to see is that rule-following requires the existence of
12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Blackwell, 1958), 201. This, of course, is the paragraph which led Kripke to interpret Wittgenstein as a radical skeptic about meaning. What I do here is simply to signal that rather than reading 201 as an argument for skepticism, I see it as demonstrating that accounts based on an appeal to interpretation will inevitably fail. For Saul Kripkes contribution, see Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1982). See also Stanley Cavells discussion of Kripkes account in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago and London:University of Chicago Press, 1990), ch. 2.
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practices. Only in and through participation in a given practice the exercise of judgment in specific cases, the mastery of language is it possible to speak about obeying or disobeying a rule. According to Stanley Cavell, it is thus by agreeing in judgments the judgments that make up a given practice that we agree in the norms revealed in those judgments. We then agree in a form of life, in all the various ways in which we have come to be judgmentally attuned; thus, we share an indefinite number of commitments and conceptual practices with other speakers. On Cavells view, what is normative is the mastery of language itself, the infinitely fine-grained capacity we all have to make ourselves intelligible by projecting words into new contexts and remaining ready to declare and respect the implications of doing so. We speak as members of the human group, as representative humans, and language is shared and made possible by a prior agreement in judgments the tremendously detailed and complicated ways in which we are mutually attuned. A representative is, however, individually responsible for the way she seeks to represent the community; and hence the individual qua representative of the community is therefore always responsible for her own linguistic moves. In cases of disagreement, it will not ultimately be possible to appeal directly to the rule; rather, the individual must own up to the moves that she makes in the language game. The notion of use brings in a component of acknowledgment:the individual must actively take responsibility for her own words; she must respond to the specific requirements that a particular practice in a particular situation imposes upon her.13 It must be emphasized that this particular consideration, which will play an important role later in this study, does not invalidate the view that the various moves we make in a particular language game (including those that relate to time) do carry pragmatic implications. We mean something specific, X, when we apply a given concept only because doing so is to imply that certain implications what Brandom calls material inferences follow. We understand each other in so far as we relate to these implications and thus to the commitments that each individual speaker takes up when saying something. What the Wittgensteinian objection about rule-following amounts to is a denial
13 For a useful discussion of the relevant methodological contrasts between Brandom and Cavell, see Paul M. Livingston, Philosophy and the Vision of Language (London and New York:Routledge, 2008), pp. 17196. For the notion of responsiveness, see also Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell:Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Oxford:Polity Press, 2002), p. 23.
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of the view that in saying X, we follow socially constituted rules or, as in Brandoms view, relate to material inferences that can function as reasons that license us to do this. As speakers belonging to the same life-form we share ways of employing a specific concept in saying X. That means that we share a commitment to the various implications involved in doing so. However, the rules do not govern our behavior. On the contrary, we can tell which rules or implications speakers are committed to by observing their actual employment of the concepts that go into the saying of X. In cases of disagreement and confusion we can reflect on these implications and try to spell them out. That is different, however, from relying on the rules in order to make judgments. We make judgments as members of a specific community. We speak as one speaks; our voice, when aiming to be reasonable and create conviction, seeks to represent the community. However, the authority in cases of disagreement does not rest with those who purport to represent intersubjectively validated norms. Such norms cannot settle conflict. All they can do is help us to understand our differences and articulate where each individual stands. Brandoms deontic scorekeeping model is useful in modeling how speakers commit themselves to various forms of inferences. However, it mischaracterizes the individuals authority and ultimately downplays the role of practices in accounting for how these commitments are made. Now how can any of this be of any relevance when thinking about direct our relationship to time? I have already suggested that our most and ordinary experience of time is by way of publicly meaningful, inferential structures of engagement. Time-consciousness, therefore, cannot as well as the concepts that make such consciousness possible, be theorized from a purely objectivist point of view. If time is nevertheless conceived as I want to suggest it is, or approximates to, under modern conditions in terms of succession, a linear series of nows, where the line of time moves from the past through the present into the future, or through any causal or physicalist equivalent of the simple succession model, then temporal concepts, while not necessarily unstructured by material inferences, start to become abstract and, in some cases, indeterminate. Of course, sequential time forms an unquestioned horizon within which agents operate in so far as they organize and measure it by means of clocks, calendars, and other systems for measuring, and time is then repsequentially structured resented as a perpetual recurrence of nows. One minute follows the other, one month is succeeded by the next, and as such they are
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mutually identical, homogeneous, and without intrinsic significance for the agent. However, the time of clocks and calendars chronological, sequential time only starts to carry significance for an agent endowed with particular beliefs and intentions in so far as she observes, and identifies with, certain publicly endorsable structures of engagement with time that are agent-relative in the sense I have outlined. The experiential possibilities that are available to human beings in specific historical and cultural circumstances are in complicated and innumerable ways dependent on their working conceptions of the nature of time, as well as on how their temporal economy is organized in everyday, unreflective settings. A scientific theory of time, such as the one we find implied by Newtonian mechanics, is, if applied under ideal circumstances stipulated by the theory itself, central to mans capacity to predict phenomena, thus making technology and technological progress possible. Scientific mastery presupposes among other things that duration can be measured objectively, that the distinction between the past, the present, and the future can be understood in terms of the distinction between different modalities of existence (necessity, actuality, and possibility), and that criteria are available by which to identify occurrences such as coexistence and succession. While all-important for the pursuit of technological progress, the conception of physical or scientific time is by no means, however, sufficient to account for all forms of experiential temporalization and configurations of existential possibility. Psychological time, the annual, monthly, weekly, and daily biographical rhythms of starting, getting underway with something, and bringing activities to a close, sets the stage for mans selfinterpretation as an initiator and overseer of events the unfolding of which the agent is entitled (and condemned) to see herself as at least responsible for. Life itself follows natural patterns from birth through adolescence and maturity to old age and death, each of which presents different challenges, experiences, rewards, and frustrations. The body has its cycles, ranging from mood swings to fluctuations in physical and mental capacity, each of which presents the individual with a given set of parameters by which to confront and negotiate the fact of existence. Like the vicissitudes of the human body, the natural cycles of day and night, and the passing of the seasons which sets in motion the growth and decay of life, may seem inevitable:there is little or nothing we can do to influence them, and, despite the many unpredictable events of nature, their occurrence is experienced as belonging to an order of necessity. Mythical or archaic conceptions of time tend to
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imitate the many ways in which nature, beyond mans will, fluctuates between decay and regeneration. Agrarian societies in particular, in which the renewal of alimentary reserves takes place on a regular and often annual basis, marked by ritual, typically draw on the observation of biocosmic rhythms to form symbolic representations of periodic purification and the regeneration of life. Rather than seeing time as a succession of independent and self-sufficient moments, members of such societies understand time as inherently cyclical as structured around the endless repetition of cycles consisting of cosmogonic creation, decay, and regeneration.14 Lived time is not, however, exclusively dependent on conceptions of natural necessity. Imagine a concrete situation of everyday life. The car needs to be picked up, a friend returns to ask why we did not make good on our promise to give him a helping hand, the shop where we went to get groceries is about to close, or we are about to take up a mortgage. In making sense of any such situation, a complex set of expectations and demands come into play. We will have to presuppose not only beliefs but inferential relations holding between who we take ourselves to be, our needs and desires, as well as our expectations of others and the commitments our agreements with others confer upon us. A temporal horizon is thus disclosed to us. Rather than simply relating to the here and now, we structure a chain of significances along an unruly temporal axis. The now becomes impregnated with what was, our stored memories and knowledge, and with anticipations of what will and should be. The car needs to be picked up because it was handed into the garage yesterday, and because we were promised we would have it today when it is needed in order to drive the children home from school. A promise has been made. Hence someone has been placed in a particular normative relation to another which constrains this persons future plans and actions. The promise can be revoked or broken, heeded or revised, but whichever line of action is being taken will only be fully intelligible with reference to the past commitment this person entered into by making the promise. Events, we might say, are objects in time, and events interrelate. We relate to them by providing a temporal form that itself is structured inferentially along the lines just described. There may be a simple causal order, such as when the occurrence of a cause leads us (perhaps along simple Humean lines, on the basis of contiguity and constant
14I return to the conception of cyclical time in Chapter 6.
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conjunction) to infer the occurrence of a given effect, or there may be more complex interconnections between events where earlier events generate later events, and later events fulfill or complete earlier events. In their discursive presentation events are bound together along the lines of inferences that we bring to them. We see the blooming flowers as manifestations of springtime and place them temporally by invoking the sequences associated by the annual changes in nature from winter to spring and summer, and all of this while viewing the whole process in terms of concepts like regeneration, life, or perhaps beauty. We interpret the beginning of a life from the perspective of the end, or we approach a dilapidated house as the conclusion to years of neglect. We always bring certain inferences to bear on what we experience such as to transform mere succession into meaning and form. Actions, as we have seen, are also structured temporally. For a particular action to have meaning and be describable in a determin ate fashion, it needs to occur with reference to inferential relations that point both backwards and forwards in time. To be able to be disappointed in someones behavior, for example, it is necessary to have certain beliefs about what has occurred, what someone has promised she will do or say, which desires one has had and still has, as well as beliefs about what would satisfy them. No action, no human behavior, would ever be meaningful and determinate unless it could be situated in a conceptual structure of socially endorsed inferential relations that refer to both past and future. Some philosophers, most notably Paul Ricoeur and Georg Henrik von Wright, have taken these and related observations to entail that understanding action is to place it within a narrative ; it is to offer storystatements that connect the action with beliefs about actual past events and desires and expectations about future events, as well as with inferences expressive of the agents self-interpretation and interpretation of others thoughts and actions, and all of this against a larger context of social and historical developments that ultimately provides the action with its point and significance.15 Successful narratives confer a structural unity on all of these elements such as to make actions, or
15 Thus Georg Henrik von Wright in Explanation and Understanding (London:Routledge, 1971), p. 115, holds that the behaviours intentionality is its place in a story about the agent . Paul Ricoeur explores this thought with much sophistication. See his Time and Narrative , trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London:University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. i, p. 57:If, in fact, human action can be narrated, it is because it is always already articulated by signs, rules, and norms.
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sequences of actions, intelligible. In so far as this is true, it follows that, when understood and brought under a definite description, intentional action brings past, present and future into particular types of relations with one another. An action that is undertaken in response to a past event for the sake of some future state of affairs synthesizes past, present, and future in a particular way. It extracts a complex configuration from what would otherwise be a mere succession, thereby providing the various events with a form or significance that allows us to grasp them together.16 Story-statements make the representation of a unity of events possible. They order events temporally, thus making them intelligible as, for instance, beginnings, responses, obstacles, or turning points. However, they also impute meaning to particular events by showing how they contribute to a plot or at least some kind of significant sequence of events. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that we live out narratives all the time, and that our lives become intelligible to us to the extent that we can recount the stories of which they are composed.17 To look at a life is, in a sense, to encounter a narrative. Although my view dovetails with MacIntyres in important respects, especially when his conception is cast in terms of the theory of material inference that I have outlined,
It is always already symbolically mediated. On p. 52, he states why time is so central to the symbolic articulation of human action:time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal experience . In The Philosophy of the Novel:Lukcs, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 12831, Jay Bernstein offers a suggestive interpretation of von Wrights thesis that turns out to have ramifications for his assessment of modernity. 16 David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 89:Human time in our sense is configured time. The narrative grasp of the story-teller is not a leap beyond time but a way of being in time. It is no more alien to time than the curving banks are alien to the river, or the potters hands to the clay. Mere sequence is like the prime matter of the philosophers and theologians. It is not something we could ever experience. It is a limiting concept:the thought of what lies beyond our experience, yet has a force of its own which runs counter to it, like a gravitational pull. The experience of the pull of chaos is our only experience of temporal sequence. 17 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue:A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 212: It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. For a thorough discussion of this account, see Anthony Rudd, In Defence of Narrative, European Journal of Philosophy 17:1 (2007), pp. 6075. Rudd is in part responding to objections raised by Galen Strawson, Against Narrativity, Ratio 17:4 (2004), pp. 42851.
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it is necessary to distinguish between, on the one hand, the basic level of organization that characterizes a human life regardless of the capacity for explicitly transforming this level into an explicit form and, on the other, the narratives that people explicitly and actively shape. This distinction is sometimes formulated in terms of the contrast between story and narrative. The story is what is being narrated in a narrative. If I say to someone that I will tell her the story of my life, then one thing I could mean is that although the story is there because my life does show up certain determinate patterns and lines of temporal organization, I have not yet transformed this story into a full-blown narrative. In the most extreme case of providing explicit discursive form to my life, I may decide to write an autobiography. I then make explicit and rhetorically embellish a story that could otherwise have remained fairly contours of crude and without contours. By contrast, I may relate the my life in a couple of sentences. There are, in other words, levels of explicitness here that MacIntyre fails to take into account.18 For him, the intelligibility of a life (and hence someones personal identity) is dependent upon the provision of narrative. However, there is a big difference, both quantitatively and qualitatively, between someone who simply has an interesting story but has not told it yet and someone who appropriates this story and actively creates narrative form. The difference, it seems, is mainly gradual. While the organizational features that structure the events themselves can, though not necessarily, remain the same regardless of the process of verbalization, there are different degrees of self-awareness. Some people tend not to reflect upon their own stories very much and show little interest in constructing explicit narratives. Some may even largely live out stories over which they have little control stories they unreflectively obtain from foreign sources, such as significant others or advertising. Many of the stories that make up our lives are obviously quite conventional, and there is no escape from the ways in which cultural context provides meanings in the form of interpretatory schemes and inferences.
18 See Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, p. 62, where he argues that what is essential to narration is not that it is a verbal act of telling, as such, but that it embodies a certain point (or points) of view on a sequence of events. Furthermore, narrative structure refers not only to such a play of points of view but also to the organizational features of resolution, the events themselves in such terms as beginning-middle-end, suspension- departure-return, repetition, and the like. We maintain that all these structures and organizational features pertain to everyday experience and action whether or not explicit the narrative structure or the act of narrative structuring takes the form of verbalization.
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We do what people in our situation normally do; we follow the tracks laid out for us by others, and even innovation and creativity will have to take place against a background of the understood and expected. Others, such as perhaps certain authors or people undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, may be highly focussed on their stories and in excruciating need of providing as much form, sincerity, truth, and explicitness to them as possible. In these cases the quest for authenticity often becomes paramount:Is what I recount when I confront my socially shaped past really an expression of who I take myself to be in the present, or do I, like the character Roquentin in Sartres Nausea , find myself in some perhaps unnerving way alienated from the narratives I am capable of providing? When offering a sense of authenticity, story-statements make possible the apperceptive identification with a set of events as elem ents of my story. I own up to what I have become and the way I became what I am. The story I tell may help me to see what would otherwise appear as a contingent heap of unrelated happenings as events for which I can take some degree of responsibility. Either they now appear as the result of intentions, plans, or projects that I have had, or, less explicitly, I start to be able to see them as reflective of who I am or who I aspired to be at a given point of time. There will be commitments that I see myself as having entered into, and these commitments will be based on allegiance to overarching values and goals.19 Of course, narratives may not always generate this kind of awareness of oneself as an autonomous agent. In many, or perhaps most, cases the narrative will reveal contingency and confusion. However, without the possibility of narrative, I would be unable to recount who I take myself to be. My self would be opaque the mere result of all the things that without my thought, reflection, commitment, or initiative have been pushing me around. We have now gone beyond the level of mere action-description. For how a person is disposed to act (and think) in the sense just outlined will, as I have already intimated, also have consequences for who this person is. Our pragmatic reckoning with time reveals important dimensions of our own identities of who we are and aspire to be. A persons identity thus depends on (but is obviously not exhausted by)
19 In this sense I agree with Charles Guignons deflated Heideggerian stance in On Being Authentic (London and New York:Routledge, 2004), p. 139: Wholehearted commitments are unconditional in the sense that they are experienced as definitive of who you are.
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his or her actions in the temporal space that our temporalized conceptual relations opens up. Someone who does not take paint ing after Duchamp to constrain or structure what painting can be is different from someone who does. Equally, someone who predominantly acts for the sake of a future good is different from someone who acts predominantly for the sake of immediate gratification. The narrative structuring of life turns life into an ongoing project. How we negotiate our temporality is an essential and unavoidable aspect of who we are.20 The mode in which we respond to our interpretations of the past and the related mode in which we respond to our anticipations of the future also structure the world in which we act. If we find ourselves writing literature after Beckett, we may find only certain possibilities of expression to be available, while other forms of expression may strike us as essentially unavailable. Moreover, what we aspire to write will inform what we write and how we consider the significance writing. of past forms of writing (such as Becketts) for our own What we happen to write will be a response to the temporally saturated world of beliefs, commitments, desires, and possibilities that we face in any given situation. Stories structure both ourselves and the world.
20 This may be a good place to acknowledge certain structural similarities between the view I outline here and that of Heidegger in Division Two of Being and Time . Like Heidegger, I aim to distinguish between measurable, sequential time or what he sometimes calls derivative or vulgar time and a more primordial form of time which we engage with and, in a sense, constitute through our engagement. Unlike measurable, sequential time, the more primordial time cannot be objectivized but is, rather, a function of our capacity to hold together in a differentiated unity the various temporal ecstasies of having been, making present, and being ahead of oneself. While I do not share Heideggers attempt to describe primordial temporality in terms suggesting that it is ontologically more real than measurable, sequential time, I share his sense that the latter represents a kind of falling away from, and a reification of, primordial time. Heidegger associates this falling away with at least three different tendencies:the history of metaphysics with its drive towards isolating presence (the presence, in the case of time, of successive nows), a shying away from the existential burden of Daseins fundamental ungroundedness, and, finally, modernity itself, with its drive towards calculation, instrumental control, and fungibility. In this regard I only subscribe to something like the modernity account. As I will argue in Chapter 2, modernization tends to lead us to downplay our dependence on primordial time and interpret ourselves and our experience almost exclusively in light of measurable, sequential time. As such, this process of rationalization, being one of the key conditions of successful modernization, has been tremendously advantageous. However, I also want to argue that it has brought about a genuine loss of meaning and a new and highly challenging sense of transitoriness.
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never be fully theorized independently of references to socio- economic status) will also enforce a temporal organization on their activities and self-interpretations. (The older brother will be able to borrow the car in order to go skiing with his girlfriend in the afternoon, but only after he has finished his homework and if he can pick up his mother from work on the way back home. His dad is away on business the whole week and will not be able to mend the broken lamp until he returns.) According to Peter Ahlheit and Anthony Giddens, we need to distinguish between the different levels at which such socially endorsed time structures operate.22 First, there are the time structures of everyday life. They provide normative constraints on how we deal with predominantly repetitive routines and rhythms of labor and recreation, private and public life, attending to ourselves and others, as well as the related challenges, discussed in the sociology of time, of synchronization, speed, duration, and the sequentialization of action. Going to sleep and waking up again; getting to and from work; deciding whether to see a movie or go swimming these are all everyday tasks and activities that individuals perform in their own way but which nevertheless have their own temporal logic. I may for various reasons decide to stay awake at night and sleep during daytime, but what I cannot change is the normative expectation that sleeping takes place during the night, that most public activities take place during the day, that the time devoted to sleeping must permit one to fulfill ones duties in relation to other people and institutions, and so on. How I take up and respond to these structures will, however, ultimately be expressive of who I am, and of how I want and am able to spend my time. I may be a late sleeper, and this would be a characteristic of me as an individual, yet I can only be a late sleeper because intersubjective expectations make late sleeping possible. If there were no expectations to the effect that getting up early is desirable or in some sense necessary or required in order to perform certain tasks or undertake certain actions, then I could sleep until noon every day but hardly be a late sleeper. As Giddens points out, time at the level of everyday existence time tends to be interpreted as reversible. If for some reason I refrain from going swimming today, I can always do so tomorrow or some other day.
22 Anthony Giddens, ed. Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 14065; Peter Ahlheit, Alltagszeit und Lebenszeit, in Rainer Zoll (ed.), Zerstrung und Wiederaneignung von Zeit (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 37186. For a more general sociology of time, see also Barbara Adam, Timewatch:The Social Analysis of Time (Oxford:Polity Press, 1995).
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Although genuine actions always bring about certain consequences, they can usually be rectified by further lines of action. In everyday life our decisions do not carry as much weight as when we venture into commitments that have the capacity to permanently change things. This is one of the senses in which everyday life can appear trivial:it is full of actions each of whose significance does not mark me permanently as a person. Hence a second type of inferential relations structure the way we interpret the relation between singular actions and our life as a whole . Whether implicitly or explicitly, a human being will inevitably have a perspective on how a particular decision fits in with her generalized self-conception. Not all types of decisions fit this pattern. Only the ones we think of as weighty do. Ones decisions about education, for example, build on previous knowledge and experience while preparing one for later challenges, and all of this with a view to leading a specific life the life of a physician, a lawyer, a bricklayer, and so on. Questions to do with synchronization, speed, duration, and sequentialization of events are in this regard highly relevant. Will I have children before I finish my education? Will I stay in the same job throughout my working life, or will I have more than one career? When will I retire? How, in other words, will I spend my time on earth? A third type of inferential relation structures our understanding of larger, collective events the kinds of events which historians ordinarily try to understand. We conceive of ourselves as inhabiting a certain historical epoch, and we tend to think of history as the successive replacement of one epoch by another in accordance with some larger scheme of interpretation that we variably think of in terms of notions such as progress, decline, change, repetition, or stasis. It is important to note that the three types of inferential relations are interconnected in all sorts of unruly ways. The time horizon of everyday life, for example, is never independent of biographical time (the time of our life as a whole). The broader conception of who I am and how I would like to spend my time influences my everyday priorities and actions, just as how I act and think at the everyday level impacts on what I can take myself to be more generally. I may choose a particular type of education and view it as a reflection of what people in our day and age do. Or I may interpret my own epoch on the basis of experiences to do with my biography. A set of social experiences, for example, may have capitalism, the effect of making me see my own period as that of late an age of democracy, or an age of interminable decline.
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Narratives are crucial when such interweaving of various types of inferential relations takes place. If we look at a particular action, such as for instance that of deciding to spend more time with ones family, then it is easy to realize that it may involve considerations taken from all the three levels. I think about my everyday routines, my general conception of who I am and want to be, and, perhaps, about what one does (say as a middle-aged man) in this day and age. Each type of inferential relation provides temporal patterns (rhythms, sequences, speeds, attempts at achieving synchronization) as well as perspectives on the past, the present, and the future. Each, moreover, is highly dependent on socially constituted meanings, imaginaries, and narratives that leave limited room for individual innovation and creativity. In particular, rhythms, speeds, durations, and sequentialization of activities and events are predominantly given as functions of institutional rhythms, deadlines, timetables, opening hours, schedules, and so on. Along these lines, there is much to explore in the sociology of time, and the body of literature within this field is rapidly expanding. This chapter has served only to set the stage for what will be discussed more directly in the next chapter. There I will turn to the very idea of modern temporality and analyze some of its most important ramifications.
2 Mode r n t e m por a l i t y
According to Charles Baudelaires famous 1863 statement, Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.1 Considered as a category of social being, modernity makes essential reference to the present, not only as a simple portion of time, but as what passes, the contingent and the circumstantial, that which breaks with the past and throws us mercilessly into the future. The idea of modernity as marked by this particular economy of time raises a number of questions. What must temporality be like for modern agents to be able to relate to it in this way? What is the relation between, on the one hand, modernity as a concrete social formation with particular technologies, practices, identities, and ideologies, and , on the other, its temporal configuration? In what features of modernity should we search in order to account for this new time of passage and the passing? How, indeed, do modern agents relate to time more generally? I begin this chapter by considering some of the historical factors that have led to the emergence of a modern temporality. Following such theorists of modernity as Max Weber and Georg Lukcs, I argue that as purposive-rational action takes on a normative and empirical predominance over other forms of action, the socially endorsed attitudes and perceptions of time, and the ways in which our concepts are temporally schematized, become radically transformed and, in a sense, distorted. Under the impact of the purposive-rational orientation, agents increasingly orient themselves towards the future, while being prepared to lessen the influence and authority of the past as a source of guidance for the present. At the same time, the clock, and clock-time, with its
1 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, in Selected Writings on Art and Artists (New York and Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1972), p. 403.
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quantification and neutralization of time, and its role in the commodification of time, starts to mark out temporal experience in general as both transient and repetitive. The upshot, reverberating in all sorts of ways throughout the post-Kantian tradition, calling the Enlightenment faith in moral and technological progress into question, is the emergence of the interconnected issues of a loss of meaning and a highly increased and changed sense of transitoriness.
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I start with a clue from the German historian of concepts Reinhart Koselleck, who, drawing on his semantic studies of linguistic behavior, holds that the onset of modernity, or what he refers to as Neuzeit , brought about a dramatic shift in lived time.4 Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte is geared towards studying how historical events are semantically articulated. What are the conceptually articulated meanings pertaining to such events? How are such events expressed in the various vocabularies of their time? Koselleck is not presupposing that history and language coincide in the sense that events or experiences are exhausted by their linguistic articulation. Nor is he holding that the linguistic articulation is necessarily correct in a realist sense. Rather, the claim is that the study of historical concepts is bound to reveal important facts about the interconnection between history and language, events and self-interpretation. These facts suggest both that historical events do not exist independently of articulation, and that language, or rather our concepts, reflect historical experience. While numerous extralinguistic factors enter into the constitution of every event, thereby creating an essential tension between structuring and material, social reality and social events are in important ways discursively structured.5 In studying the eighteenth-century emergence of the concept of Neuzeit , or modernity, Koselleck finds that it embodies several crucial characteristics. One is that the use of this concept, particularly in historiography, presupposes a conception of history not as static and repetitive, as in the pre-modern historians who, invoking Thucydides, saw all histories as structurally similar or parts of the same history
4 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:On the Semantics of Historical Time , trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1985). Among philosophers I am not alone in taking Koselleck as a guide to the time-consciousness of modernity. While drawing a different conclusion, Jrgen Habermas does the same in the opening chapter of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 67. 5 Koselleck, Futures Past , p. 231:In the absence of linguistic activity, historical events are not possible; the experience gained from these events cannot be passed on without language. However, neither events nor experiences are exhausted by their linguistic articulation. There are numerous extralinguistic factors that enter into every event, and there are levels of experience which escape linguistic ascertainment. The majority of extralinguistic conditions for all occurrences (natural and material givens, institutions, and modes of conduct) remain dependent upon linguistic communication for their effectiveness. They are not, however, assimilated by it. The prelinguistic structure of action and the linguistic communication by means of which events take place run into one another without ever coinciding.
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while providing no emphasis on the present, but as fundamentally allowing for contingency and radical change. From having thought of history as a particular ordering of events that only subsequently occurs in time, modern historians begin to see history as unfolding both in and through time, and therefore as containing a constitutive element of contingency.6 Suddenly the grasp of the present and its capacity to be presented both as a beginning and an end became more important to historians than the mapping of the present onto a distant past that could serve as its framework of interpretation. In particular, as the notion of progress started to make its impact with Kant and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, history could be seen as the progressive unfolding of events leading into the present, which now, in its orientation towards the new and the unprecedented, could be set apart from the rest of history and be designated as Neuzeit . The concept of progress is equivocal. It may, as in Marx and Comte, be understood as progress from a particular state towards a fixed, utopian state in the future. On such an account, every moment belongs to, and obtains its meaning from, a continuous history directed towards a determinate end. The present is an accumulation of the past, and the future the necessary result of all the accumulated moments of history.7 However, other conceptions of progress tend to shun teleological considerations and simply see history as permanently advancing without a final destination. On this latter account, which only makes sense in so far as a principle of progress (technological innovation, mans moral perfection, and so on) has been identified, the individual moment cannot be given meaning in terms of its twin relationship to the past and the future. There can be no historical master narrative. Instead, history becomes an endless interlacing of the repetitive and the irreversible a permanent renewal .
6 Historiography informed by conceptions of providence also distinguishes between the ordering of events and their temporal insertion. Augustines account of world history is a good example. For Augustine, profane history, including the history of the Roman Empire, is ultimately governed by Gods will. See Augustine, City of God , trans. Henry Bettenson (London and New York:Penguin Books, 2003), p. 215:we must ascribe to the true God alone the power to grant kingdoms and empires. He it is who gives happiness in the kingdom of heaven only to the good, but grants earthly kingdoms both to the good and to the evil, in accordance with his pleasure, which can never be unjust. 7 When I ascribe such teleological considerations to Marx and Comte, I do not mean to claim that they follow Aristotle in believing that everything, including a complex phenomenon such as human history, develops in relation to an objectively existing telos . I only take such considerations to entail the postulate of a beginning and an end to history, as well as the principle of perfectibility as historys ultimate explanans .
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However, for such a conception of history to become acceptable and authoritative, a modern, secular time-consciousness has to emerge. The Copernican revolution, the developing new technologies, the exploration of the globe, the creation of new and more mobile instruments of political power, as well as the emergence of manufacturing industries and concentrated investment capital all of these were factors that, in the period between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the French Revolution, opened a gap between what Koselleck calls the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. Whereas the peasant-artisan environments of the medieval period, existing largely within the temporal frameworks set by the various cycles of nature, subsisted entirely on the experiences of their predecessors,8 the early modern agents found themselves forced to bracket traditional knowledge in favor of being directed towards an active transformation of the world. From letting the horizon of expectation be a function of the space of experience, it increasingly became the case that the limits of the space of experience and of the horizon of expectations diverged.9 Thus, Koselleck writes, the burden of our historical thesis is that in Neuzeit the difference between experience and expectation is increasingly enlarged; more precisely, that Neuzeit is conceived as neue Zeit from the point at which eager expectations diverge and remove themselves from all previous experience.10 A new form of futurity, marked by a sense of openness, uncertainty, and contingency, started to emerge. Slowly but persistently, early modern agents had to get used to a greater speed in social, political, and technological processes of transformation; indeed, not only did the Neuzeit introduce permanent renewal, but it drastically accelerated the tempo of change. They witnessed this acceleration as a feature of the process of modernization, and they affirmed it in various ways (and with various degrees of allegiance and success) by shaping their attitudes and mind-sets so as to be in conformity with the requirements imposed on them by this process. The key to Kosellecks account of modernity is his thinking about the development of a new conception of contingency. In this regard, he is wholly in accord with the classical understandings of modernity, those of Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber, for whom modernity means the disenchantment of the world, the loss of intersubjectively
8 Koselleck, Futures Past , p. 277. 9 Ibid ., p. 280. 10 Ibid ., p. 284.
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validated and instituted forms of value and interpretation, expressed in acts of ancestor-worship and religious practices, and experienced as an openness to cosmic forces and pressures to which one is indebted and before which one is both fragile and responsible. When the social order comes to reject past authorities and embrace the pursuit of a projected future, it has to accept a completely new form of contingency. No longer a natural continuation of past cycles and taken-for-granted practices, it becomes permeated with a sense of risk, requiring the kind of strategic calculation of uncertainty that is being undertaken in capitalist investment and technological innovation.11 Of course, every social order is faced with its fair share of contingency, and Kosellecks claim is not that pre-modern societies did not experience suffering and want, fears and catastrophes. What is new in modernity is not that there is more contingency but that its representation has changed.12 In markets, democracies, and scientific-technological environments, we must (and indeed can) take ourselves as being engaged in conduct oriented towards prediction, where the effort to calculate, control, and dominate goes hand in hand with an awareness of risk. Koselleck puts great emphasis on the idea of the present as involving transition. As the space of experience and the horizon of expectation get disentangled from one another, ones attitude towards everyday life is increasingly marked by expectations of change and a heightened acceptance of transience. Indeed, as socio-political and scientific-technical renewal become institutionalized in forms of democratic representation and organized research, and as technologies of communication, organization, and travel develop while labor becomes more regimented and intense, a sense of acceleration starts to make itself felt: the temporal rhythms and intervals that in pre-modern society were embedded in unchanging natural cycles can now be patterned on the basis of imperatives formed with reference to values set by the rational agent herself.13 Change thus gradually becomes more rapid,
11 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1986). Central to Becks account is his claim that modernization brings about a transformation from collective to individual risk. 12 For more on this particular point, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea:Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1999), p. 11. 13 For an important study of the notion of social acceleration, see Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung : Die Vernderung der Zeitstruktur in der Moderne (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 2005). See also Paul Virilio, Esthtique de la disparition (Paris: ditions Balland, 1980).
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and the present as what distinguishes the past from the future becomes progressively condensed.14 Around 1750, with the invention of the steam engine, the spinning-machine, and the telegraph a new compression of both space and time, a new capacity and desire for speed, starts to transform the structures of everyday life.15 As everything which is solid melts into air (Marx), however, it becomes increasingly difficult to entertain the idea of a non-temporal, immutable contrast to the finite, temporal world of objects. While obviously not the only cause of secularization (the rise of scientific rationalism being at least as important), the intensified sense of transience that nothing that can be an object of human experience is lasting, that everything in the empirical world is radically finite and transitory is likely to have played a role in the slow, yet persistent disintegration of organized religious activity in Europe from the time of the Enlightenment to the present.16 Kosellecks semantic analysis is highly useful for historical research. It demarcates an original object of study, provides a method for exploring it, and throws genuine light on the development of historical time. Koselleck is, however, reticent about the underlying forces of change. To be sure, as explanatory factors he mentions political,
14 In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 67, Hegel writes that it is not difficult to see that ours is a birthtime and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation ... The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world. 15 David Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford:Blackwell, 1990), pp. 240ff. See also Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 157: Es gehrt ... zu den Befunden unserer Epochenschwelle, dass schon vor Erfindung der Dampfmaschine, der mechanischen Websthle, des Telegrafen, die den Verkehr, den textilen Leitsektor der Produktion und die Nachrichtenbermittlung beschleunigten, eine zunehmende Schnelligkeit des ganzen Lebens registriert wird. 16 According to Agacinski, modern consciousness is one of passage and the passing. From now on we think that everything arrives and passes . Nothing permanent gives things any kind of anchor against time. See Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing:Modernity and Nostalgia , trans. Jody Gladding (New York:C olumbia University Press, 2003), p. 11. In Charles Taylors, Michael Allen Gillespies, and Hans Blumenbergs accounts of secularization, the modern sense of transitoriness is traced back to medieval nominalism, which undermined the older vision of objectively existing universals, introducing a radical sense of contingency.
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intellectual, economic, and technological transformations. He does not, however, seek to identify the fundamental logic leading to the uprooting of traditional time-consciousness. As a student of semantic alteration, he delimits his research methodologically from any kind of serious engagement with the impacting causes; thus, like much of the hermeneutic tradition from which it springs, his work might be said to suffer from a certain idealistic prejudice. In order to understand the logic behind the new time-consciousness, we need to focus on two crucial dimensions of the emerging modernity:on the one hand, the rise of capitalism with its free markets and general commodification, and, on the other, the development of an autonomous technological or instrumental rationality. Analytically, the two are distinct phenomena or processes and can be theorized separately. It is obviously possible, as in the former communist systems in Russia and Eastern Europe, to have a highly technological society without capitalism. What is not possible, however, is to have capitalism without a considerable or even pervasive orientation towards instrumental rationality. We need to understand what this instrumental rationality amounts to and how it can be said to generate its own form of temporality. The classic statement of the normative orientation underlying technology (and, as we will see shortly, capitalism as well) is that of Max Weber, who referred to a purposive-rational (zweckrational ) form of rationality.17 Purposive-rational action, for Weber, is action oriented towards the realization of a given end. The action is rational in so far as the agent manages to identify and make use of the most effective means available to secure it. Weber emphasizes that from the purposive-rational standpoint, no end can be rationally adopted. The end is set on the basis of an appeal either to absolute value or to given subjective desires. None of them permits rational deliberation. It is only when a given end is viewed as a means to secure a further end that it can be rationally adopted. He also claims that in purposively rational conduct, the agent will be weighing the alternative efficacy of each of the possible means of attaining the end. In technology and social administration, purposive-rational action is action according to a plan or procedure which is rational in so far as its application is meant to maximize the desired outcome in all relevantly similar cases.
17 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization , trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York:Free Press, 1966), pp. 11518.
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Weber contrasts this with forms of rationality that are less prevalent in modernity. Value-rational (wertrational ) action is action directed towards affirming an overriding ideal, recognizing no other considerations. The ideal may be of duty, honor, or devotion to a cause or a faith:the essential point is that the outcome of the action is subordinated to the interest in affirming the ideal through ones action. While value-rational action is rational in so far as it involves the setting of coherent objectives to which the individual directs her activity, what Weber calls affective action is undertaken under the influence of some sort of emotive state. Like value-rational action the basis for an adequate assessment of the action is not located in the instrumentality of means to ends, but in whether or not the act is carried out for its own sake. The act, we might say, is autotelic. Its purpose or telos is inherent to the action itself. Weber finally identifies a fourth type of action-orientation, namely traditional action, which is carried out under the influence of custom and habit. An agent here acts in a specific manner because it is socially expected in a given situation, and the outcome of the action is assessed in terms of a shared and authoritative framework of value that objectively provides meaning to the action. Although value-rational and traditional action may appear similar in that both presuppose the existence of an established framework of symbolic value, Weber stipulates that the meaning of traditional action does not require the coherent and defined understanding of value that we find in value-rational action. Traditional action is most often unreflective; value-rational action, by contrast, tends to be highly reflective and undertaken out of explicit allegiance to the ideal or value in question. The purpose of rehearsing this familiar typology is not to engage in exegesis. I will not be following Webers own use of it except to note that his famous account of how the so-called spirit of modern capitalism grew out of an initial commitment to ascetic Protestant ideals of disciplined work capable of proving the worthiness of the individual to obtain salvation can be understood as pointing to a transformation from traditional and value-rational to purposiverational action.18 Early modern capitalism, for Weber, with its rational planning, its perpetual postponement of gratification, and its disengagement of the individual from the wider concerns and symbolic
18 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , trans. Talcott Parsons (New York:Charles Scribners Sons, 1958).
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authority of the community in short the inner-worldly asceticism (innerweltliche Askese) of the protestant work ethic involved the institutionalization and endorsement of purposive-rational action as the dominant form of social action. Indeed, as the rationalistic work ethic of capitalism spread to other spheres besides that of the economic (e. g. to politics, law, and science), it brought about a drastic weakening of the religious ideals that had spurned it (after all, the ideals themselves were increasingly considered to be without authority), leaving the individual faced with the iron cage of instrumental rationality and , when it comes to adopting ultimate ends, little opportunity but that of mere arbitrary and subjective decision. In the large economic and bureaucratic organizations of more developed forms of capitalism, purposive-rational action became increasingly a matter of collective planning and large-scale management, thus ruling out value-rational or traditional action. Unsurprisingly, the spirit of capitalism brought about a completely new economy of time. Waste of time, Weber writes, was for the burgeoning bourgeois the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of ones election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.19 Time is not only strictly quantified; it is viewed as a scarce resource, easily lost, to be fervently seized upon and conquered. In his 1923 study History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukcs argues that, while highly suggestive, Webers account of purposiverational action as the key to theorizing modernity needs to be supplemented by a theory which describes the operations of capitalism as a distinct historical and social formation. This means that the concept of commodification will have to brought into the equation. Although Weber himself acknowledges that capitalism, which is identical with striving toward profit in the continuous, rational business organization, requires the rational capitalist organization of [formally] free labor,20 and that neither rational bookkeeping nor the spread of monetary exchange relations is sufficient to account for the long-term institutionalization of the profit motive in society, he does not see the commodity form as central to the understanding
19 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , pp. 15758. 20 Ibid ., p. 21.
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of modern society. Drawing on Marxs theory of commodification, Lukcs claims against Weber that capitalism transforms both the subject and the object in accordance with the logic of the commodity. Unlike Weber, who explains the domination of purposive-rational action in modernity as the result of the rise and influence of religious ideals, Lukcs insists not only that acting rationally under capitalism is inadvertently to act in accordance with the principles of purposive-rational action, but that this must be understood as a result of the dominance of the commodity form. In particular, as capitalism, with its great emphasis on monetary value or exchange value, and hence quantification, both makes possible and requires an orientation towards calculation, it is inevitable, he argues, that agents will have to take up a purposive-rational stance towards their social environment. For Lukcs, the theory of purposive-rational action must be amalgamated with Marxs view that under capitalism human relations will be structured by the inexorable laws of the marketplace. When human beings relate via the market, however, they can be fully rational only in so far as they accept the need to act purposive-rationally. It is impossible to act rationally in a market without calculating costs (means) and the likelihood of their generating specific benefits (ends). Although not impossible, acting traditionally or in a value-rational mode is to counteract the fundamental laws of capitalist exchange. Rational behavior in a market is geared towards maximizing efficiency (in order to lower the costs), downplaying the use value (or intrinsic value) of an item in favor of its susceptibility to be exchanged, rejecting traditional values and ideals as offering relevant constraints on action, and seeking ends that satisfy subjective wants and desires while being both logically and pragmatically separate from the action itself. According to Lukcs, while the attitude of calculation draws labor out of the organic-irrational, that is, the natural cycles of pre-modern production, it requires an increasingly specialized labor force geared towards dealing exclusively with only fragments of the complete process of production and exchange. As for Weber, on Lukcss account, these mutually dependent aspects of social rationalization lead together to a transformation of lived time. In particular, as labor becomes commodified and thus made measurable in units of time, the pre-modern embeddedness of time in cycles of natural reproduction and labor gives way to a conception of lived, everyday time as inherently quantifiable that is, as essentially an indefinite repetition of commensurable unities.
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According to Lukcs, time is thereby understood by analogy with, or even becomes a function of, space:for just as physical space is abstract and measurable, a container indifferent to its content, so now is time, and duration becomes a matter of mere quantifiable length, with the length of time being understood in terms of standardized temporal succession:
Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable things (the reified, mechanically objectified performance of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality):in short, it becomes space.21
Lukcss analysis is by no means without problems of its own. It rests heavily and quite dogmatically on Marxs highly controversial theory of value; and its philosophical categories, when not offering social analysis by means of its peculiar blend of Marx and Weber, are largely directed towards employing an outmoded, quasi-Hegelian scheme of objective and necessary development. Moreover, since its object is industrial capitalism, it is not clear how far it can be generalized to serve as anything even remotely qualifying as a theory of modernity. In their co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argue at least implicitly that it can indeed be generalized far beyond Lukcss original estimates.22 Adorno in particular draws on it in order to elucidate crucial features of late modern (postindustrial) society as well, including its system of cultural reproduction. My purpose, however, in bringing the early Lukcs to the table is not to defend his theory but to draw on some of its claims in order to formulate two theses. First (and this should be fairly uncontroversial), purposive-rational action cannot be limited to the technological domain but should be seen as the predominant form of rational action in modern capitalist society. It is predominant not only in the sense that it conforms to the requirements of technological development and progress, but because a capitalist system presupposes and could not function without the
21 Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 90. For a different approach to this notion of time becoming, like space, a container, indifferent to what fills it, see Taylor, A Secular Age , pp. 5859. 22 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York:Verso, 1979).
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intensive exercise of such rationality. In a highly commercialized society, it is likely, as both Lukcs and, later, Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as, today, Habermas, argue that the purposive-rational attitude associated with commodification will come to dominate most, or probably all, major parts of society, including even the most intimate lives of its members. It should be emphasized, however, that I do not seek to suggest that non-instrumental reasons for adopting a particular end or goal are completely unavailable to modern agents. The claim is that since they are exogenous to the dominant instrumental orientation, such reasons will tend to appear as marginal, irrelevant, or arbitrary, and in general be difficult to trace and promote. They may, as Charles Taylor argues, in some important ways be action-guiding yet still be largely unacknowledged by most agents.23 Or, as Adorno holds, while existing, they may not be action-guiding in any obvious sense and actually be extremely hard to detect.24 In fact, the fundamental point, namely that in modern societies one mode of rational evaluation the instrumental dominates social relations, is even compatible with the possibility of demonstrating that end-oriented rational behavior is possible. I am not, for example, rejecting the possibility of offering a Kantian demonstration to the effect that certain maxims command unconditional acceptance among all rational agents. That may perfectly well be possible.25 What I put forward here is a historical claim. It is a claim about what kinds of reasons rational, modern agents will tend to find binding, and therefore about what kinds of actions they will be able to consider rational on this basis. Second , the dominance of purposive-rational action means and this is the claim I need to flesh out in much more detail that there must be something inherently new and distinctive about the modern conception of time. If time is no longer embedded in the cycles of natural reproduction, then what exactly becomes of it, and what are the ethical and existential consequences of this transformed conception of time?
23 I have in mind Taylors project as he lays it out in the first part of Sources of the Self:The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1989). 24 This will be the burden of my argument in Chapter 9. 25 In the next chapter I claim that Kants account of reason, on which his moral philosophy is grounded, presupposes a disenchanted, future-oriented, and ultimately instrumental attitude. If this is right, then (while I recognize the tremendous complexities involved in trying to reconstruct the exact relation between agency and law in Kant) the Kantian claim to have uncovered unconditional moral commands should at least be viewed with some degree of suspicion.
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All that she can rationally care about is how well the application of the means will maximize the achievement of her ends. If she has adopted a particular end, the commitment to a particular set of means follows from a consideration of what that end is and what its actualization, when brought about most effectively, requires. The end is what is to be realized it is the future the agent wants to put at her disposal; the means are justified by being shown to be the best way to achieve the realization of the end. When embedded in a general orientation towards utility and technical control, purposive-rational action (and a purposive-rational orientation more generally) involves looking at the world as composed of possible means. Rather than being composed of objects that are valuable on their own terms, the world tends to be reduced to a set of resources the Bestand (standing reserve) of which Heidegger speaks in the Question Concerning Technology and elsewhere.26 The traditional values that once were accepted as constraints on action are set aside in favor of the application of impersonal procedurality and utility maximizing. Ends are disconnected from traditional contexts of meaning and made to be a function of individual will. How, then, is time experienced? For one thing, since what matters is the moment of satisfaction (the actualization of the end), the time which separates the agent from it must be a dead or meaningless time a time to be overcome.27 The purposive-rational agent is seeking to conquer time. She knows that the amount of time at her disposal is limited (and that life is radically finite); hence purposive-rational action can serve as an attempt to control, or perhaps even deny, this finitude. Acting instrumentally for the sake of obtaining a future end is, on the one hand, to accept uncertainty and contingency (the agent is never in a position to control all the factors that may influence the outcome of the action), and, on the other, to try to bring them under ones control by employing a well-functioning procedure. Speed is here the crucial factor. If the means are employed effectively, they will make possible a relatively swift execution of the action and shorten as much as possible the time until the end is achieved. They will help the agent to save time and thereby to eliminate as far as possible the
26 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , trans. William Lovitt (New York:Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 335. 27 For a useful account of what this implies, see Lorenzo C. Simpson, Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity (London:Routledge, 1995), pp. 5152.
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dead and meaningless time between the action and the realization of the intended end.28 Of course, the clock is the pre-eminent instrument for keeping track of the time that is to be overcome.29 The clock tells the agent how much time has passed from the actions inception, and how much is left, according to ones stipulation, until the realization of the chosen end. If the purposive-rational agent is aware of her finitude, then the clock, with its incessant ticking away of seconds and minutes, heightens and expresses it. Clock-time is essentially linear, homogeneous, and irreversible. Any given moment of time is gone forever, being unremittingly replaced by new identical moments that themselves disappear. The purposive-rational agent is future-oriented. While her technical-pragmatic knowledge (her ability to predict an outcome on the basis of insight into the lawlike relations holding between causes and effects), which, once an end is adopted, is all she can recognize as binding and relevant when it comes to assessing which action to take, is necessarily derived from past experience and accumulated information, her project is to bring into existence a specific state of affairs. In doing so, she will neither ask what her chosen means may or could have meant to people in the past, nor whether the ends she sets conform to traditional value patterns and self-interpretations. The future she is facing is open, unconstrained by past horizons of experience, and ready to be
28 In A Secular Age , p. 40, Charles Taylor argues that Our encasing in secular time is ... something we have brought about in the way we live and order our lives. It has been brought about by the same social and ideological changes which have wrought disenchantment. In particular, the disciplines of our modern civilized order have led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious source, not to be wasted. The result has been the creation of a tight, ordered time environment. This has enveloped us, until it comes to seem like nature. We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done. This time frame deserves, perhaps, more than any other facet of modernity, Webers description of a stahlhartes Gehuse (iron cage). 29 For an interesting reflection on how the modern obsession with precise clock-time has grown out of modern agents desire for effectiveness and speed, see Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York:Harper & Row, 1976), p. 101:Todays reckoning in sports, for instance, with tenths of seconds, in modern physics even with millionths of seconds, does not mean that we have a keener grasp of time, and thus gain time; such reckoning is on the contrary the surest way to lose essential time, and so to have always less time. Thought out more precisely:the growing loss of time is not caused by such a time reckoning rather, this time reckoning began at that moment when man suddenly became un-restful because he had no more time. That moment is the beginning of the modern age.
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given a specific direction by the ends to be actualized. This, of course, is historically understood in terms of the notion of progress the ideal of human life itself as a process of everlasting change and improvement. For the proponent of progress, the world is never settled; on the contrary, ones relation to it is marked by a fundamental restlessness that drives one from one action to the next. The time until the realization of the end, however, is presented as calculated beforehand:not only is it linear, homogenous, and irreversible, but, according to the planning, a time which is parceled out and quantitatively reckoned. The pursuit of efficiency means that time is treated as composed of quantitative units (seconds, minutes, hours, and so on), each of which is assigned a specific value depending on the productivity it makes possible, making time itself, as Marx claimed when he defined value in terms of the time it takes the worker to produce an entity, a commodity:Time is money. A commodified time, such as in the extreme case of Taylorist attempts to minutely control and standardize the workers activities, yet also in everyday life more generally, is then regulated by the clock, which itself enhances the possibility of coordination and social control.30 From the standpoint of commodified clock-time, all events are commensurable and located within the same set of coordinates. Purposive-rational action is not just the kind of action we find in technology and science but, if we are to believe Koselleck, Weber, Lukcs, Heidegger, and Adorno, the dominant form of action in a modern society organized around the imperatives of bureaucratic management and economic calculation. It is not the only type of action that modern agents dispose of; the claim is just that it is the dominant one, that it is the form of action corresponding to a highly technicized, bureaucratized, and economically rationalized everyday life, and that other forms of action tend to be marginalized as the process of modernization inexorably moves forward.
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the early modern worldview in terms of such concepts as liberation, emancipation, and human self-assertion. I have mentioned the vastly increased ability to precisely calculate and coordinate social interaction. Just as strikingly, it makes historical time possible, the understanding of human nature as exhibited in large-scale human action on the basis of the correct sequencing of complex, spatially and temporally distant events.31 Most importantly, as we have seen, it fits in with the requirements of the purposive-rational agent described by Weber in his analysis of modernity the agent who predominantly is oriented towards marshalling the most effective means to achieve her ends. The very idea of progress, which in the modern worldview is often geared towards technological production, where progress consists in the enhancement of the efficiency of means, is also predicated on a linear conception of time a time frame in which the future can be understood as an open horizon. The list could be much longer. However, the story of the transition to a modern view of time can also be told in terms of various forms of dissatisfaction. It causes dissatisfaction, in particular because the very practice of temporal schematization that rationalized modernity imposes on agents is distorted. It can be thought of as distorted because the inferential relations, referring to both past and future, which make temporal schematization and synthesis possible (and hence intentional action intelligible), can only be realized in a stultified and incomplete form. As action-orientation, in particular, becomes increasingly geared towards purposive-rational intervention in an ethically neutralized environment, the ability to base its definition and intelligibility on narratives and inferential relations that refer to the past, which is crucial in order to provide sense to particular actions, is radically weakened, if not lost altogether. Actions lose their determinacy in abstraction from traditional contexts able to provide meaning, coherence, and motivation: thus, as Weber points
31 See Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton and Oxford:Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 227. In Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton and Oxford:Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 169, Bernard Williams, somewhat implausibly, claims that objective time of this kind was invented by Thucydides as early as in the fifth century bc. However, as Koselleck argues, it is first in early modernity that historians start taking seriously the view that historical phenomena exhibit no structure independently of their temporal organization. See also Karl Lwith, Meaning in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 7:There is not the least tendency in Thucydides to judge the course of historical events from the viewpoint of a future which is distinct from the past by having an open horizon and an ultimate goal.
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out, the end, rather than being a function of pre-given and authoritative values with reference to which the agent negotiates her position and defines her stance, becomes arbitrary, a means to satisfy desire or achieve further ends, but woefully unintelligible or arbitrary from the point of view of traditional, ethical value commitments. This has two important consequences. First, as we have seen, the time-consciousness of rationalized modernity exacerbates a sense of transitoriness. If once a transient world was juxtaposed to a world of immutable existence, thus generating anxiety about the finitude of this life or this moment as opposed to eternity, in a modern, secularized world time is universalized to become the experiential form of everything that can exist and takes on the form of a linear, irreversible succession of moments, each of which appears as radically transitory. Clock-time is repetitive in that it perpetually repeats moments of time (seconds, minutes, and so forth) that are identical with one another. However, unlike forms of repetition (such as, for example, rituals) that retrieve the past, the individual moment of clock-based time is a mere passing and therefore also a form of loss: this individual moment will never return. Time provides an essential condition of possibility for every being:everything exists within specific time spans, and time can be viewed as the universal medium within which every being is able to exist and develop. However, time is also destructive:its power means that everything is transient, provisional, and bound to come to an irreversible end. Things suffer through time, according to Aristotle; time wastes things away, and ... there is oblivion owing to the lapse of time.32 For beings with awareness of time, and of the present as opposed to the future and the past, every moment seems to carry an element of nothingness within itself; every instant is irretrievably gone, as it were, before we know it. Time in this sense, Sartre observes, separates me from myself, from what I have been, from what I wish to be, from what I wish to do, from things, and from others.33 When understood as the steady transformation of potential future into actual past by reference to a dynamic human perspective fixated on the present, time brings everything to an end in every single moment; it may seem to dissolve the world into an infinite dust of instants. Modern disenchanted time,
32 Aristotle, Physics , trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford University Press, 1947), 221a29. 33 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness:An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London:Methuen, 1969), p. 131.
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moreover, the time of purposive-rational action, does not have any intrinsic value; rather, through the implementation of apparatuses of acceleration and speed, we seek to pass through chunks of time in order to arrive at our goals. On the one hand, time becomes something that should pass, and as quickly as possible, yet on the other, we fear the brevity of life as it is interpreted in the light of projects aiming to master and conquer time:there is never enough of it. However, such a modern time-consciousness will also have to be faced with what is essentially a loss of meaning. The moments in time to which the purposive-rational agent is relating are empty. Far from being related to structures of collective historical understanding, they become viewed as fragmented, isolated, and contingent now-points linked together not via the configuration of a meaningful narrative, but in infinite linear progression towards an open future. One upshot of this is that the kinds of thick, genuine grounds for action, weaving personal identity and a fabric of collective meaning together, that mark traditional action-orientations start being replaced by a thin, modern conception of the self for which there are no constitutive attachments, no sacred bonds, between it and the social world at large, and for which reasons for action can only be valid in so far as they satisfy abstract, procedural constraints that exceed the horizon of established, historical meaning. As traditional bases of meaning dissolve as the result of a relentless pursuit of the ever-new, itself keyed to the precision of what Georg Simmel calls the supersubjective temporal schema of clock-time, the modern self may experience fragmentation or depersonalization a disaffection that typically takes the form of boredom, melancholy, ennui, or a sense of existential emptiness. Elizabeth Goodstein describes this process as a democratization of skepticism:Boredom epitomizes the dilemma of the autonomous modern subject, for whom enlightenment has also meant fragmentation for whom modernization and scientific progress have caused, in Max Webers term, the disenchantment of the world such that history and religion can no longer anchor identity in the fabric of collective meaning. If rationality is the sustaining myth of modernity, boredom, as an everyday experience of universalized skepticism, constitutes its existential reality.34 From the perspective of the inferentialist account of temporal awareness that was introduced in Chapter 1, such a loss of meaning
34 Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience without Qualities:Boredom and Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 34.
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can be theorized in terms of an at least partial disintegration of the thick web of inferences that weave past, future, and present together in a dynamic unity. As many of these inferences gradually lose their validity, being replaced with a more objectivist orientation towards successive instants that are to be conquered and mastered, the sense of selfhood, orientation, and identity that the inferences provide stands in danger of withering. A question that will surface later in this book is whether such narratives can be reconfigured. For now, however, I will hold on to the concepts of transitoriness and a loss of meaning, and use them as vantage points from which to analyze various philosophical responses to the modern disenchantment of time.
3 T wo r e spon s e s to t h e t i m e of mode r n i t y
In this chapter I consider two accounts of rationality, both of which can be construed as responding to the predicament that has been outlined. In the Kantian tradition, there is in addition to the means end orientation of purposive-rational action a strong emphasis on rational self-determination. I argue that while the project of rational self-determination may seem to promise a way out of the alienating conditions of modernity, it does not provide resources for reconceptualizing temporality such that the problems of meaning and transitoriness will be overcome. The Aristotelian tradition, by contrast, offers other resources for thinking about action, some of which are relevant for thinking about temporality. I argue, however, that its peculiar combination of anti-modern rancor and a desire to retrieve elements of ancient theories of virtue makes it unhelpful as a critical tool by which to criticize and, possibly, reconceptualize our relation to time.
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and immutable. Modernity is emblematized in the transitory yet selftranscending presences of modern art and fashion. While this could have constituted an interesting occasion for further exploring the promises embedded in the temporal significance of this strange tension between transience and immutability the kind of project that Benjamin and Adorno pick up, and which I will seek to approach in Chapter 9 Habermas immediately turns to the writings of Hans Blumenberg and Reinhart Koselleck, as well as the early Hegel, arguing that modernity, both de facto and de jure, is temporally geared towards a continuous breaking with the past. While often instrumental, the continuous breaking with the authority and significance of the bygone harbors the potential for being normative in a sense irreducible to calculative and meansend oriented forms of rationality.
Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself. Modernity sees itself cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape.1
The notion of self-created normativity is in Habermas closely linked to that of self-determination or autonomy the capacity to be a lawgiver unto oneself expressive of the freedom and dignity of the subject. According to Habermas, agents exercise their autonomy when they relate freely, without coercion, and on the basis of rational considerations alone, to reasons and reason-giving. One upshot of the Kantian appeal to autonomy is that it requires agents to shed, or at least regard with suspicion, those aspects of their own identity, including their normative commitments in the widest sense, that have been constituted without explicit consent and reason-giving. To be modern, which entails the aspiration to autonomy, means not to be satisfied with whatever is only pre-given or unreflective, and to press ahead, in accordance with rationally self-chosen reasons and principles, to whatever is to be brought about and constituted. Habermass claim is not that the old is bad or unwanted because it is old; rather, it is that the validity of the old should be bracketed when there is no explicit
1 Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1987), p. 7. See also Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion , trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 176:a society no longer externally determined is a society which must necessarily turn completely toward the future. The future is the obligatory temporal orientation, legitimacy converted into time, of a society containing its own ordering principle.
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reason to hold on to it:modernity, the age of freedom, demands that all norms should, if possible, satisfy the requirement of being rationally acceptable. Obviously, Habermas is not a Cartesian skeptic. He does not think that we can ever be in a position of meaningfully doubting all our beliefs. Following Charles Sanders Peirce, his view is that any belief may be doubted, not that they can all be doubted at once. However, the quest for autonomy requires agents to be constantly on guard, always questioning the material inferences involved in their reasoning, and never accepting any pre-given authority at face value. Constituting the privileged temporal mode, the future is more important than the past; thus, the autonomous subject is asked to reject and create rather than accept and discern in short to ride roughshod over its very situatedness, being prepared to rationally scrutinize every substantial meaning.2 In its prioritizing of the future, Habermass position is directly anticipated by Kant, who in his Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht contends that Sein Leben fhlen, sich vergngen, ist also nichts anders als: sich kontinuierlich getrieben fhlen, aus dem gegenwrtigen Zustande herauszugehen.3 In sharp contrast to the older aristocratic priority of leisure and pleasure, informing much of the Aristotelian tradition, Kant strongly advocates a bourgeois work ethic in the Weberian sense, placing a premium on discipline, cultivation of interiority, and renunciation of pleasure:Eben so wird die Menge der Abschnitte, die den letzten Teil des Lebens mit mannigfaltigen vernderten Arbeiten auszeichnen, dem Alten die Einbildung von einer lngeren zurckgelegten Lebenszeit erregen, als er nach der Zahl der Jahre geglaubt hatte, und das Ausfllen der Zeit durch planmig fortschreitende Beschftigungen, die einen groen beabsichtigten Zweck zur Folge haben (vitam extendere factis), ist das einzige sichere Mittel, seines Lebens froh und dabei doch auch lebenssatt zu werden.4 What renders
2 See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time , trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1985), p. 288:All concepts of movement share a compensatory effect, which they produce. The lesser the experiential substance, the greater the expectations joined to it. The lesser the experience, the greater the expectation:t his is a formula for the temporal structure of the modern, to the degree that it is rendered a concept by progress. 3 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht , in Werke in sechs Bnden , vol. vi, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pdagogik (Frankfurt:InselVerlag, 1964), p. 554. 4 Ibid ., p. 556.
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life valuable is not enjoyment, since that is fleeting and dependent on accidents and natural laws. A life of mere enjoyment, if at all imaginable, would also be self-defeating:desire would come to an end, and with desire life itself.5 What makes life valuable, rather, is cultivation and work for the sake of attaining a laudable purpose. A successful life is a life busy in pursuit of the good. In Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant bolsters this view by arguing that a life in pursuit of happiness the kind of life that, for him, will not involve the kind of forward-looking restlessness that characterizes agents exercising and cultivating their capacity for autonomy will necessarily fail in that no objective account of the nature of happiness can be offered. It is impossible to tell in advance what will make us happy. What makes me happy may not make you happy, and I cannot know in advance what will make me happy or how the various circumstances I find myself in will influence the ordering of my priorities. As a result, judgments being made to identify the best means to achieve happiness can only take the form of counsels (or general imperatives of prudence, based on experience), and they will never achieve the status of categorical commands of reason but remain assertoric. Those who seek happiness (and as creatures of need we all do) should observe certain empirical counsels, e. g., of diet, frugality, politeness, reserve, etc., which are shown by experience to contribute on the average the most to well-being.6 Kants claim in referring to these counsels is not that we should ever desire happiness for its own sake (there can be no such duty) by focussing on the counsels independently of other considerations; rather, it is that observing such strictures induces well-being and, most importantly, serves the purpose of making us capable of rationally setting ends and subordinating whatever empirical incentives that may arise to that purpose. A life of inactivity or pure pleasure-seeking, such as Kant ascribes to the South Sea Islanders,7 would prevent our faculties from being developed; hence a rational being, who will seek to attain specific ends set by herself, could not consistently want such a life. We have an imperfect duty to ourselves to cultivate our talents and avoid idleness. In Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, his most famous essay on the philosophy of history, Kant, echoing
5 Ibid . 6 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals , trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis:Hackett, 1993), p. 28. 7 Ibid ., p. 31.
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Rousseaus notion of amour-propre, further argues that, through the amassing of honor, power, and property, men are driven by a desire to distinguish themselves, thereby creating competition.8 As a result, they tend to be pulled out of their inborn tendency to seek to live an Arcadian, pastoral existence of perfect concord, self-sufficiency and mutual love.9 This, of course, is for Kant a fortunate circumstance, for only by leaving such an Arcadian state behind can mankind hope to develop its rational nature. Kant therefore adds that Man wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly, but nature intends that he should abandon idleness and inactive self-sufficiency and plunge instead into labor and hardships, so that he may by his own adroitness find means of liberating himself from them in turn.10 No progress can occur unless men break out of their tendency to laziness.11 The temporal economy implied by these passages is obvious. For the sake of attaining laudable, rationally self-chosen purposes, modern subjects defer pleasure, exercise strong self-control, cultivate their talents, and work; thus they deliberately break with the static nature of pre-modern subjectivity, perpetually orienting their self-interpretations in light of the future rather than the past. With Koselleck one might say that, for Kant, the ethic of work and incessant self-cultivation privileges the horizon of expectation over the space of experience. Made
8 Rousseaus writings obviously contain a number of references to amour-propre , and his view of it tends to be very negative, perhaps more so than Kant, who thinks it may serve the end of true moral progress. One of Rousseaus most straightforward definitions occurs in Emile or On Education , trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 21314:Self-love, which regards only ourselves, is contented when our true needs are satisfied. But amour-propre , which makes comparisons, is never content and never could be, because this sentiment, preferring ourselves to others, also demands others to prefer us to themselves, which is impossible. This is how the gentle and affectionate passions are born of self-love, and how the hateful and irascible passions are born of amour-propre . Thus what makes man essentially good is to have few needs and to compare himself little to others; what makes him essentially wicked is to have many needs and to depend very much on opinion. 9 Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Kant:Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 45. 10 Ibid . 11 Ibid ., p. 44. For the connection between progress and time-consciousness in Kant, see Koselleck, Futures Past , p. 280:Kant, who may have been the originator of the term Fortschritt (progress), indicates the shift that concerns us here. A forecast which basically anticipated what had already occurred was for him no prognosis, for this contradicted his expectation that the future would be better because it should be better. Thus, experience of the past and expectation of the future were no longer in correspondence, but were progressively divided up.
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to be defined in the light of imperatives referring to the horizon of expectation, the present, rather than being a function of the space of experience, is burst open. The body with its natural tendency towards inaction and pleasure-seeking must be disciplined; thus, calculation and concerns about efficiency and punctuality go hand in hand with the domination of clock-time and hence of a linear conception of time. Time, for Kant, is to be seized upon, conquered, and controlled. Kant has a clear sense of the sacrifices needed in order to pursue such an ethic of work and self-cultivation. Although a person, by adopting morally praiseworthy maxims, can make himself worthy of happiness, the study of morals, as we have seen, cannot teach him how to be happy.12 Moreover, since the attainment of happiness is ultimately a matter of luck, it would be foolish to expect happiness. Even the most active and deserving life may easily be full of hardship, and virtue is rarely rewarded, leading Kant, in his moral theology, to introduce his famous postulates of immortality and a benevolent Creator. Only under such conditions can we reasonably hope for the attainment of the Highest Good (summum bonum), the union of virtue and happiness.13 As Freud would later argue in his writings on civilization, progress tends to be bought at the expense of happiness.14 Activity in accordance with a modern, progressive temporal scheme alienates agents from the fundamental interests they are endowed with qua finite, embodied beings, creating a loss that can be accepted only in so far as it makes possible the formation of a fully rational character the ability to set ends for ourselves that are universally and hence categorically binding. There is a moral aim to both the history of individuals and the history of the human species that confers a theodiciacal quality on the sacrifices needed to achieve it.15 Our sacrifices, however unpleasant, have a meaning.
12 Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying:This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice, in Kant:Political Writings , p. 64. 13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:Macmillan, 1986), B841. 14 See especially Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents , trans. James Strachey, in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. xii, Civilization, Society and Religion (London and New York:Penguin Books, 1990). Freud enlists various factors explaining this claim, including, in particular, the emergence of strong feelings of guilt, which, via sublimation, channel libido into productive purposes. 15 For a thorough discussion of theodicy and moral progress in Kant, see Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford:Blackwell, 2008), pp. 3341.
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Similarly, for Habermas and other contemporary neo-Kantians, the alienated and alienating character of the time of modernity can be overcome (or at least be made acceptable) in so far as we find ways to see ourselves as subjects that is, as self-determining agents capable of acting on principles that are praiseworthy independently of mere instrumental considerations. What makes these principles praiseworthy is that they identify ends that have value for us, or matter for us, only because of the quality of the reasons involved in setting those ends.16 However, the master idea behind this conception is that of the value of ones humanity, the capacity to set ends as such, to be a lawgiver in a kingdom of ends. For Habermas, in particular, the setting of (rational) ends is a matter of collective reflection of rational endorsement as the result of a dialogically conducted testing of controversial validity-claims.17 In participating in rational dialogue, one must not only view oneself as a responsible subject, but all the other participants must be viewed as equally able to respond reflectively to reasons. The Kantian, then, interprets the notion of progress primarily in moral rather than instrumental terms. Progress is the individual and collective process of reflectively moving from states of subjection to arbitrarily willed law to states of subjection to self-legislated law.18 It means to become the subject of ones deeds, a subject which orients its thinking and judging fully, freely, and wholly in accordance with the commands of reason. For such a subject, it seems as though there can be no significant degree of alienation between itself and its rationally endorsed projects, on the one hand, and the time in which these projects are unfolding, on the other. The projects are mine regardless of their temporal structure; hence the problem of temporal alienation that we encountered in the previous chapter, which was predicated upon the idea that certain abstract, procedural constraints may lead
16 For a brilliant treatment of this issue, see Terry Pinkard, Liberal Rights and Liberal Individualism without Liberalism: Agency and Recognition, in Espen Hammer (ed.), German Idealism:Contemporary Perspectives (London and New York:Routledge, 2007), pp. 20912. 17 Habermas spells out this idea in numerous writings. Perhaps the most detailed account is found in Discourse Ethics:Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1991), pp. 43115. 18 Kant himself has many ways of capturing this idea. In his Lectures on Ethics , trans. Louis Infield (Gloucester, Mass.:Peter Smith, 1978), p. 140, he writes that Man must give [the] autocracy of the soul its full scope; otherwise he becomes a mere plaything of other forces and impressions which will withstand his will, and a pray to the caprice of accident and circumstance.
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agents to isolate themselves from sources of collectively authorized meaning, causing time to be conceived in the wholly abstract, homogenous, and calculable fashion required by the instrumentally oriented agent, appears not to arise. However, as I have already intimated, the purportedly autonomous Kantian subject is just as vulnerable to the problems of transience and existential meaning as the purely purposive-rational agent turned out to be. As Habermas himself emphasizes, a rational discourse can proceed only in so far as its participating agents accept that beliefs must be decontextualized and identities disconnected from the substantive contents of a particular form of life, including its vision of the good life.19 Thus, the moral conception of Enlightenment progress informing this picture of rational autonomy must itself be geared towards a continuous and progressive disentangling from traditional values and their unquestioned claim to validity. As a consequence, the exercise of rational autonomy becomes radically forward-looking. Rather than drawing on the ethical substantiality of the tradition, the force of the better argument commands agents to burst every provinciality asunder, and consider as possibly valid only those principles and ends that accord with reasons demand for universal acceptability among all rational agents.20 Thus, whether instrumentally or morally, Habermas understands modernity in light of the idea of continuous renewal that is, as a period of perpetual transition.21 As such, it cannot pose a real challenge to the homogeneous, linear, future-oriented, and essentially technological time of the clock. Kantian theories of agency and progress are essentially modern; they serve to legitimize,
19 See Habermas, A Reply, in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (eds.), Communicative Action (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1991), p. 219. 20 In his Recovering Ethical Life:Jrgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London and New York:Routledge, 1995), p. 33, Jay Bernstein takes this to mean that there is ultimately no real difference between instrumental and communicative reason. Both are formal and procedural; hence communicative reason is a component of the very disintegrative process it means to remedy. Although I do suggest that there are parallels in terms of how both regimes of reasoning presuppose similar types of time-consciousness, I would not go this far. Communicative reason is capable of setting rational ends. That makes it substantially different from instrumental reason, which limits reasoning to items that purport to be good only as means, thereby preventing any concern with the possible goodness of the actual ends of human action. My claim is that the argumentative context is instrumentally defined. For a more elaborate response, see Espen Hammer, Romanticism Revisited, Inquiry 40:2 (1997), pp. 22542. 21 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 78.
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A neo-Aristotelian rejoinder
Rather than appealing to the formal constraints on rational action a different response to the dissatisfactions of modern temporality consists in arguing that we should focus on the precise, constitutive features of practices that do not fit in with the requirements of such temporality. Thus in Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity, Lorenzo C. Simpson sets up a contrast between what he calls the time of ends and the time of meaning (or, alternately, the time of praxis).22 The time of ends is essentially the time I discussed in Chapter 2:the reified time of technology and purposive-rational action which becomes transformed into a calculable commodity to be quantitatively disposed of. Such a time is resolutely future-oriented; the future is defined as the time when the provisional and, from the point of view of traditional value-orientation, arbitrary ends set by the agent are meant to be achieved, thus making the present a time of empty waiting. The time of meaning, by contrast, is for Simpson a time of meaningful praxis. Drawing in part on Aristotles account of action in the Nichomachean Ethics, Simpson sees meaningful praxis as essentially identity-defining. Engaging in such praxis, the agent, rather than seeking to obtain some external end, acknowledges the action involved in that praxis to be its own end, an end through which the agent confirms herself as someone with a particular identity. Unlike purposive-rational action, which seeks to bracket conventional meaning, praxis cannot take place in a historical or cultural void. On the contrary, praxis is an application or creative repetition of the past understood as a historical legacy composed of socio-cultural norms and value-laden patterns of interpretation. For such an agent, temporality involves both preservation and invention; for in drawing on the horizons of the past, she will not only
22 Lorenzo C. Simpson, Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity (London:Routledge, 1995), pp. 5060. Simpsons work is closely related to the more influential neo-Aristotelian accounts provided by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Taylor, and Thompson. The reason why I have chosen to focus on Simpson is that he so diligently and systematically uses the neo-Aristotelian perspective to take up the issue of time. I am not claiming that Simpsons work represents the only neo-Aristotelian way of handling this issue; all I say is that his approach is one among possibly several, and that as an approach of this type it strikes me as compelling enough to warrant an extended discussion.
A neo-Aristotelian rejoinder
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repeat but creatively continue the tradition. According to Simpson, we may think of such a praxial temporality as effecting a fusion of the horizons of the past and the future. It presupposes, he claims, an applicative recollection oriented toward future action, thus being at once the time of preservation and invention.23 While the value and significance of purposive-rational action lies solely in its consequences, the value and significance of praxis lies solely in its doing. In performing the action well, the agent affirms her essential connection to a meaning-providing shape or form of life:Meaning has its natural locus in the phenomenon of world or form of life, and when meaning is made explicit, it emerges from the cognizance of a world.24 Yet the doing also discloses the subjectivity of the agent, her character, to others, thus creating the possibility of entering into concrete relationships of certain kinds with others who share the cultural background with the agent. Since the action is its own end, the agent engaged in praxis will not experience the present as transitory or empty. On the contrary, as the meaningful meeting point of sedimented layers of past expectations and mediated readiness for innovation, the present promises both fulfillment and satisfaction. Simpson considers the example of eating. If eating takes place within a purposive-rational framework, in a time of ends, worldless expectations such as fulfilling the nutritive function and being inexpensive as well as speedily consumed and digested will tend to take precedence over traditional expectations such as participating in a codified ritual and enjoying the taste, smell, shape, color, and texture of the food, as well as being in the company of others. The convenience, say, of the lonely drive-through, or of microwaved food consumed at different times by the various members of a family, then becomes more highly regarded than the ritualized family meal with all the socially encoded bonds and symbolizations it involves, enacts, and effects. However, if eating takes place within a framework geared towards praxis, then qua action it will be inserted providing frameworks and symbolic structures in the into meaning- world in which it figures. The consumption will then be its own meaning, which, while dependent on a tradition and the narratives that structure and connect individuals with it, always involves an element of change and innovation. The idea of slow food, which has gained
23 Simpson, Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity, p. 57. 24 Ibid ., p. 45.
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some following, thus represents a rebellion against the hegemony of the time of ends:eating slowly is to eat for its own sake, rather than for external ends that subordinate the consumption to a logic of mere means while calling for speed, efficiency, and cost-saving. Through slow-eating agents achieve a harmonious synthesis of traditional belief and anticipation in the present . The present becomes what the ancient Greeks called a kairos, the right or opportune time, interrupting the homogeneous flow of sequential time or chronos. Simpsons attempt to relate the problem of modern time to the notion of praxis is suggestive, reverberating in some respects, especially the idea that undistorted time-consciousness must be able to provide a balanced synthesis between past, present, and future, with the inferentialist account I offered in Chapter 1. On Simpsons view, Western civilization needs to regain its erstwhile relationship to symbolic authority embedded in meaningful practices. We need to rethink the shape and texture of lived time, thus accepting our finitude as beings who, rather than desperately trying to surpass it, accept time as the unfolding of tradition through our individual insertion in it. For Simpson, this means that we must challenge technology, and most likely also capitalism, in so far as they promote and effect the uprooting of action from concrete forms of life. Indeed, the only consistently promising way out of the time of ends appears to consist in some form of leave-taking with modernity as such.25 At this point, Simpsons position starts to look deeply conservative. Invoking cultural resources against capitalism and technology, he seems to yearn for a temporal configuration that is decidedly premodern. There is a Luddite side to Simpsons critique that sits uneasily with his interest in progressive politics. One would like to know whether the traditions he refers to are available, and, if so, whether
25 Simpson makes an effort to dispel the notion that the critique of technology articulated in this study is a blanket condemnation of modernity, ibid ., p. 172. He does so by responding briefly to the work of Christopher Lasch and his anti-modernist plea for accepting limits to progress. According to Simpson, such limits cannot be posited a priori:a community will always have to negotiate limits based on its own cultural and technological standpoint. Lasch, Simpson argues, sets up a false dichotomy between accepting the blind workings of nature and viewing every aspect of life as subject to choice. There is a middle road. While Simpsons point seems perfectly reasonable, it is still possible, especially on the basis of the kind of scathing critique of technology that one finds in his book, to imagine communities that would reflectively want to adopt radically anti-modern measures and, if possible, condemn all forms of modern technology.
A neo-Aristotelian rejoinder
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our attempts to make them relevant can ever lead to the reinstating of their authority. There is a difference between a tradition that is immediately authoritative and one that is deliberately adopted. Full freedom to adopt or discard traditions means that they no longer enjoy any intrinsic authority, and that the source of authorization must be sought elsewhere. The problem for Simpson is that his account rests so heavily on the notion of traditions that are intrinsically authoritative and, without question, authentically valuable. As soon as agents start applying external criteria by which to adjudicate between traditions, much of the point of appealing to them begins to disappear. That noted, it is unclear how any concerted leap out of modern conditions would even start to be imaginable, let alone desirable. What would it involve? How much would we have to sacrifice? There is a risk that Simpsons Aristotelianism will lead him to take shelter in what Adorno would refer to as false forms of immediacy practices that seem to promise an escape from the problems associated with disenchanted temporality, but which in fact are systemically interlinked with features that actually are unmistakably modern. Advertisement abounds with such promises. We hear of the perfect steak, car, or holiday, and always as the meaningful end that will represent a creative interpretation of the tradition. Yet advertisements, of course, are aimed at selling as many products as possible; the logic they obey is instrumental and not geared towards a time of meaning or praxis. The deepest problem with Simpsons neo-Aristotelian account is that it fails to take into account the constitutive role of contingency in all modern representations of social arrangements. As I argued in the previous chapter, the central key to understanding the nature of modernity is contingency the way in which, for agents who understand themselves as modern, no social arrangement can be conceptualized as necessary, originating from an essential source, and developing in such a way as to actualize an inherent telos. With modernity, that sense of stability is lost. The Kantian attempt to moralize progress and the Aristotelian search for ways to leap out of it each corresponds to different valuations of times three modes. Whereas the Kantian is uncompromisingly modern in wanting to evaluate the past and the present on the basis of a rationally self-chosen conception of a future state of affairs to be realized, the Aristotelian is anti-modern in wanting to evaluate
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the future and the present on the basis of the past. What they share is a sense that modern time ultimately is disenchanted, and that for modern agents it has become organized in terms of the homogeneous, linear scheme that was outlined in Chapter 2. Time has become a marker of abstraction and finitude. In the next chapter I consider an attempt not simply to seek alternatives to the form of rationality that fundamentally informs modern temporality, but to redefine time completely.
From late medieval nominalism to Kant, the critique of metaphysics was conducted in many different ways and on the basis of a wide variety of epistemic interests and orientations. As those with only a scant knowledge of history will know, the period between the late fourteenth century and the late eighteenth century witnessed such momentous developments as the rise of experimental, quantitative natural science, the Reformation, the downfall of theocracy, and the rise of liberal political institutions, as well as the emergence of a capitalist system of exchange with its new set of bourgeois values of independence, privacy, and individual rights. From having been viewed, in the Catholic ordo, as a logical expression of Gods eternal essence, nature was progressively disenchanted and its languages stripped of predicates that did not conform to the prevailing materialist, commercial, and mathematical-scientific desire to understand and relate to what empirical there is in terms that are expressive not of revelation but of verifiability, instrumental reason, and formal (mainly mathemat ical) models of thought.1 Not only did the appeal to the divine lose its explanatory power in most areas of human engagement, but the very idea of there being a divine reality at all that could command absolute authority in issues ranging from the operations of the visible world to the ideal structure of society and the individuals correct conduct within it, slowly but steadily declined and disintegrated, while continuing to do so well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Viewed retrospectively, it was never likely that metaphysics in its classic Platonist or Thomist guise based as it was on an ontological division
1 For a good overview of some of the most consequential steps in this regard, emphasizing the role of medieval nominalism in particular, see Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
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between the realms of temporal and non-temporal entities would survive these developments and solidify its position as a culturally dominant form. On the contrary, European modernity and, more specifically, its extended period of enlightenment, became predicated upon a rejection of metaphysics. In pre-Kantian European philosophy, the most influential anti-metaphysical movement was the British tradition, ranging from Hobbess materialism to the empiricism of Locke and, most conspicuously, Hume, but related movements also existed in France, most pointedly represented by materialist philosophers of nature like dHolbach, La Mettrie, and Helvetius. Even though Kants critique of metaphysics had many forerunners and was situated in the historical context of the burgeoning German enlightenment in the reign of Friedrich II, there can be little doubt about the breathtaking originality of his contribution. Unlike his antimetaphysical forerunners, many of whom became skeptical of the human claim to knowledge, Kant develops an anti-skeptical theory that assigns to human knowing its conditions and precise limits, and he establishes his doctrine of transcendental idealism according to which human agents are said to have epistemic access only to what Kant calls appearances, from which he sharply distinguishes things as they are in themselves. Whereas the rationalist tradition that he seeks to overcome had argued that objective knowledge must be knowledge of things as they are in themselves, Kant restricts knowing to the temporally and spatially appearing objects of sensuous experience. One of the central implications of his critique of metaphysics is that whatever can be experienced as an object or event must possess temporal coordinates; hence, the absolute, unconditioned, atemporal object of classic metaphysics can never be presented to a finite agent as an object of experience. In Heideggers formulation, Kants thinking is therefore an analytic of finitude: it seeks to delimit, and uncover conditions for, the exercise of an intellect for which there is no possible epistemic access to a noumenal reality.2 For such an intellect, time is an a priori determination of all presentable being. Kants generalization of time to all presentable being was instrumental in generating a modernist vision of a wholly secular order in which every possible form of authority is constituted not by a transcendent
2 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics , trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington and Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1990).
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force of some kind, but by mans own self-determination. For Kant, stored memories of past events should lose the privileged meaning they had in traditional societies and be replaced with a modern notion of progress according to which time is a mere succession of calculable instants in a world that increasingly is understood in the light of formal and quantifiable properties. In this chapter I want to look at some of the ways in which Hegel responds to these issues. Unfortunately, the vastness of Hegels work and the encyclopedic pretensions of his mature system prevent me from offering anything like a complete account. Instead I will focus mostly on Hegels attempt to overcome Kants conception of disenchanted and homogeneous time. Hegels fundamental claim is that temporal being is itself absolute. What Hegel calls spirit is of universal significance in that it speculatively unites subject and object, yet is also a self-actualizing structure that becomes what it is, or reaches its own essential determination, in time that is, in and through spirits own history. For Hegel, who draws theological conclusions from his philosophy of spirit, world history should thus be viewed as the teleological unfolding of nothing less than divine essence. On this view, God is a self-actualizing structure that requires history the history of human beings and their institutions to become what it is. This, of course, is an extraordinary claim, and no major thinker after Hegel has tried to defend it. Although, in some of its Marxist configurations, it has notoriously been used to defend evil in the name of historical necessity, most late nineteenth- and twentiethphilosophers, including pragmatists, hermeneuticians, logical century positivists, and poststructuralists, have actively weighed against it, emphasizing the finitude of historical existence. In the first section I examine Hegels claim and how he goes about defending it. In the second section I discuss Hegels own implicit self-critique and argue that his overall theory is plagued by inconsistency.
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At its most ambitious, Hegels theory purports to offer a conversion into philosophical terms of the Christian doctrine of providence such that, as Karl Lwith puts it, salvation becomes a secular theodicy for which the divine spirit is immanent in the world, the state is an earthly god, and all history is divine.3 Of course, much here hinges on what exactly this is supposed to mean. On a traditional view of Hegel, it entails a conception of the eternal divine manifesting itself in the particular and contingent. However, more contemporary anglophone Hegel studies (such as those of Pippin, Pinkard, and others) stress that if history is divine for Hegel, then it is not so much because God can be said to metaphysically manifest himself in history or that God/Spirit is some sort of entity in need of temporal actualization, but because history itself, when looked at philosophically, shows up a structure the gradual development of a fully self-determining culture that has essential features in common with that which Christian theologians would refer to as God. If anything, it will be self-sufficient or absolute, requiring no extraneous support or foundation in order to be what it is, and it will decisively and in a priori ways constitute or prefigure the space within which action and cognition become possible berhaupt.4 For my purposes it is the particular application of this absoluteness-claim within the framework of a historicist philosophy that will be important, and I will argue that Hegel, especially in the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Nature, tends to reify this structure, turning it into a metaphysical entity that allegedly shows up certain essential features such as selfdevelopment, and goal-directedness. Ultimately, this organization, self- quasi-Aristotelian view becomes the basis for holding that transience can be imbued with a rational dimension. In Parmenides, Plato, and much of the Christian tradition, the essential aim of metaphysics was to demonstrate the existence of atemporal, temporal purely intelligible archetypes or forms in contrast to which and hence transient being was viewed as ontologically corrupt and inferior. Moreover, since humans were understood to be endowed, through the purification of the soul, with a capacity to evade time, the
3 Karl Lwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche:The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought , trans. David E. Green (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 216. 4 For perhaps the most influential proponents of this Kantian interpretation of Hegels conception of spirit, see Terry Pinkard, Hegels Phenomenology:The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Robert Pippin, Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1989). For essays discussing the implications of this approach, see Espen Hammer (ed.), German Idealism:Contemporary Perspectives (London and New York:Routledge, 2007).
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fundamental problem of life, namely how to respond to the finitude of human existence, was not so much resolved as overcome by appeal to some version of redemptive transfiguration. Although, under the influence of Augustine, much of the Christian tradition eventually came to view eternity not as mere immobility but rather as the dynamic gathering of all time into an instant, the juxtaposition of temporal and non-temporal being remained absolutely crucial. The contrasting idea of the absolute as being itself temporal is not new with Hegel. It has its precursors in Plotinus, in several medieval readings of Aristotle, as well as in Goethe, with whom Hegel kept up a vigorous correspondence. Goethe was obsessed with the notion, presented by the chorus mysticus at the end of the second part of Faust, that all things corruptible / Are but a parable [Alles Vergngliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis].5 For Goethe, the eternal announces itself as something which is present as its own purpose in the singular yet fleeting moment. Many of his poems, as well as parts of his conversations with Eckermann, deal with the need to appreciate the moment, because every moment, he maintains, contains in itself the possibility of apprehending eternity. According to Goethe, this creates a basis for distinguishing between the intuitive grasp of reason and the discursive grasp of the understanding:The Divinity works in the living, not in the dead; in the becoming and changing, not the become and the fixed. Therefore Reason, with its tendency towards the divine, has only to do with the becoming, the living; but Understanding with the become, the already fixed, that it may make use of it.6 Yet the paradigmatic experience of such a presence in the fleeting instant was for Goethe inherent neither in the apprehension of art nor in that of any cultural form, but in the contemplation of nature, which, he argues, transcends the vicissitudes and limitations of historical time.7 While nature knows change, it always reproduces itself
5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust:Part Two, trans. Philip Wayne (London and New York:Penguin Books, 1959), p. 288. 6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann , trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco:North Point Press, 1984), p. 238. 7 Goethes poetry abounds with visions of the eternal in nature. See for example Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1798) or the final stanza from Eins und Alles: Es soll sich regen, schaffend handeln, Erst sich gestalten, dann verwandeln; Nur scheinbar stehts Momente still. Das Ewige regt sich fort in allen: Denn alles mu in Nichts zerfallen, Wenn es im Sein beharren will.
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within parameters that remain constant. It knows neither a past nor a future; it has neither a history nor a projected temporal end. Nature simply is what it is in eternity. Through his morphology, moreover, with which he approached and sought to grasp the essence of natural objects, Goethe believed himself to be in possession of a method whereby the eternal in the transitory could be immediately identified. As intimated by the nature morte, the Stilleben , nature is always bound to recreate itself in the forms it presents in the present. To experience such forms is to know eternity. Though suggestive, Goethes view could not satisfy Hegel or, arguably, stand up to much independent philosophical scrutiny. For one thing, it rests heavily on an appeal to the senses: even if the idea of morphological patterns is kept in mind, the account asks us to intuit the presence of the eternal in the temporal. Yet Goethe abstains from even trying to demonstrate that human intuition in fact contains a potential for transcending the level of the particular, or that the eternal can ever be present in the temporal. According to Kant, we are able to verify synthetic a priori truth in what he calls pure intuition (this, he argues, is how, in particular, the truths of geometry and mathematics are ascertained), although he never claims that pure intuition, or what he also refers to as the pure form of sensibility, can give access to eternal forms or patterns of sensuous being itself. On the contrary, pure intuition is the mere form of all possible intuition of appearances; it is a representation (Vorstellung) in which there is nothing that belongs to sensation.8 As such it is temporal, because temporality (as well as spatiality) is a pure form of every intuition. Moreover, it is quite clear that Goethes general skepticism of the reigning natural sciences leads him to underestimate the significance of physical or cosmological time. From the notion of natures transcendence of historical time, it does not follow that it contains an atemporal dimension.9 Everything in nature comes to an end; everything is transient, including the cosmos itself. Only in an exalted, idealized sense can one claim, as Goethe does, that natures temporal objects
(It is intended to move, to act and create first to form and then to transform itself; its moments of immobility are only apparent. In all that lives the Eternal Force works on:for everything must dissolve into nothingness, if it is to remain in Being.) See Goethe, Selected Verse, ed. David Luke (London and New York:Penguin Books, 1986), p. 275. 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:MacMillan, 1986), B34. 9 Of course, it is unlikely that our access to nature can ever transcend historical time. Our perception of nature is always mediated by cultural expectations and assumptions.
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are at the same time eternal. (Needless to say, Goethes morphology, with its search for eidetic essences, was never a likely competitor to Newtons mechanics or Darwins historicization of nature.10) According to Lwith, Goethe held on to the idea of eternal nature because of his deep antipathy towards human history.11 On Goethes view, European history is the history of Christianity and its fateful separation between the ideal and the natural world; hence only an appeal, he argued, to the eternal in nature can reunite what Christianity has disunited. This is the point at which Hegels position starts to deviate from that of Goethe. In Hegels most rationalist moments, human history world history is itself an emanation of spirit, whose absolute nature is grounded in, or even identical with, Gods divinity. The ideal and the natural are separated not because it is of the essence of Christian dogma to prevent their reconciliation, but because the history of Christianity coincides with spirits own self-alienation, which ultimately can only be overcome in philosophy, the consummation of spirits own self-understanding. This implies that history, rather than nature, is the primary site of spirits presence in and through temporal being. However, it also implies that thinking, rather than intuition, becomes the primary mode of access to the convergence between as Hegel famously puts it in the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right the rational and the actual.12 Hegels main discussions of time, in the Jena lectures on the philosophy of nature from 180405 and in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, are indebted to various Greek sources, in particular Platos Timaeus, with its vast invocation of time as the moving image [eik n] of eternity,13 as well as Aristotles Physics. In following Aristotle, Hegel focusses his account on the now (to nun), attributing to it a tremendous right because only the present truly is, in contrast to what is already past and what does not yet exist.14 This is not to say, though, that the past and the future are empty concepts. In Hegels view, the present contains both the past and the future:it is, as it were, the embodiment of
10 For an explanation of this issue, see H. B. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition (London:The Institute of German Studies in London, 1972). 11 Lwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche , p. 212. 12 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right , trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 20: What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational. 13 Plato, Timaeus , trans. Francis M. Cornford (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice Hall, 1959), p. 37d. 14 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature:Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philoso phical Sciences (1830), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 36.
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eternity, the infinite whole of time, which he describes as an eternal circle. Although time seems to press on from the potential, yet unrealized future to the actualized past, with the apparent present being fleeting and insubstantial, there is, Hegel argues, a true present which, while immanent in time, is nevertheless separated from the stream of time. In the positive meaning of time, it can be said that only the Present is, that Before and After are not. But the concrete Present is the result of the Past and is pregnant with the Future. The true Present, therefore, is eternity.15 As Hegel puts it elsewhere, one must recognize in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.16 Hegel rejects Kants view that time is a form of human sensibility, arguing instead that it must be considered a fundamental manifestation of the idea, or the fully actualized concept, in the realm of nature. Time, he maintains in the Encyclopedia, is the simple Notion without which change, development, the passing away, and coming into being of entities would be impossible.17 Time is intrinsic to finite things and not a form imposed on them. However, the abstract concept of time itself is eternal, existing in a timeless sphere of ideality.18 Hegels view may thus seem close to that of Plato, for whom the ideas the forms, or universals exist in an eternal now which is juxtaposed to the temporal dimension of ontologically inferior particulars. In Plato, time is identified with the periodic revolution of the heavenly sphere, initiated by the divine demiurge. However, whereas Plato rejects the view that past and future, and hence also the flow of time, are ontologically independent of the eternal present, he struggles to integrate the eternal successfully with the temporal. They remain separate from one another, thus generating the problem, prominent in the opening section of Parmenides, of how the generic status of a given particular can ever be accounted for.19 Hegels view is different. For him (and here we see him leaning towards Aristotle, albeit with a much more metaphysically ambitious theory of
15 Ibid ., p. 39. See also his Jenaer Realphilosophie . Vorlesungsmanuskripte zur Philosophie der Natur und des Geistes von 18051806, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg:Felix Meiner, 1967), pp.1013, in which this idea finds its earliest expression. 16 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right , ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 20. 17 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature , p. 35. 18 Ibid . 19 Plato discusses this issue in Parmenides , trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato , ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 92130.
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the relation between logic and metaphysics), the inner essence of the objective world is at one with the idea, or rational essence, according to which it necessarily finds its determination.20 Ontologically, Hegel is a theorist of self-actualization.21 Everything develops until it actualizes its own essence. The task of philosophy, one might say, is to disclose this essence at the adequate a priori level and provide it with a systematic conceptual presentation. So what exactly is Hegels argument about time?22 It has already been mentioned that he attempts to provide an account of time that is consonant with the notion of spirit actualizing itself in time. The passing of time, he claims, is a movement that can be described only in terms of a paradox:[Time] is that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is not , is.23 What Hegel seems to mean by this is that when we isolate a now and represent it to ourselves, then it turns out to be differentiated from the nows that have been and the ones that are not yet. The now cannot exist independently of its relation to other nows; rather, it is the successive negation of all the other now-points that precede and succeed it. It has being in not being:it signifies a transition from being to nothing or from nothing
20 For a useful formulation of this contrast, see Michael Murray, Time in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit , Review of Metaphysics 33 (1981), p. 688:If we were to triangulate Hegels approach we might distinguish the aim of a Platonic realist position that takes the Concept as eternal form or species, on the one side, and a nominalistic conventionalism on the other that takes the Concept as a temporal name. Then we might say that Hegels conception of the Concept is both ontological and temporal, so that the Concept is not a mere name but a mode of existence (viz., that of Spirits life) and not an eternal eidos but a temporal process of self-shapings. 21 Rolf-Peter Horstmann, What Is Hegels Legacy and What Should We Do with It, European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), pp. 27980:According to Hegel this new logic uncovers the laws which govern the constitution and the development of reason (understood as an ontological concept). Because reason is taken as a self-realizing entity whose process of realization can be thought of very much in analogy to the way in which a living organism unfolds its characteristic features in the course of its life time, these laws reflect in a predominant way processual aspects of elements in transition, of things in their coming to be and their passing away. Being the logic of reason and reason being the one and only real entity, this new logic is not attentive primarily to our subjective modes of thinking (though these play a role too) but rather mirrors universal rules of objective self-organization. 22 For a relatively clear account, see Richard Dien Winfield, Space, Time and Matter:Conceiving Nature without Foundations, in Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany, N.Y.:SUNY Press, 1998), pp. 5169. See also Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegels Philosophy (Albany, N.Y.:SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 3840. 23 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature , p. 34.
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to being. It is, he writes, intuited mere Becoming.24 Time is the mere transition from the now which is no longer to the now which is not yet. To move forward in time is to negate that which has been and transform that which will be but is not yet into its negation:that which is. Becoming is both arising and passing away. Hegel arrives at this conception by considering the relation between space and time. Time, he argues, is a conceptual successor of the concept of space in that time requires space for its own determination. Space itself is the prospective first and most minimal element of nature. On Hegels account, space (considered in its mere conceptual and a priori determination) is simply Auereinandersein (or mutual externality) and Nebeneinander (or juxtaposition), which together make up its infinite continuity of extension. Thus, although space is one and unbounded, it can be viewed as interrupted by discrete, ideal points. As opposed to Aristotles definition of space in terms of place, which presupposes existing bodies and their spatial interrelations, what Hegel here means by ideal points is not something that can be determined by real things in space. Any such view would seem to be viciously circular in that space would have to be presupposed in order to refer to the determination by bodies. Nor do these ideal points have any individuating characteristics by means of which they can be distinguished from one another. They are mutually external, immediate, and singular, yet what they comprise is completely undifferentiated and indeterminate. No differences can be ascertained. Since this, however, is unsatisfactory, Hegel starts discovering contradictions that mark not only the concept itself but also the universal structure it characterizes. The ideal points in space, he argues, are in fact determined, although not through themselves but by other such ideal points which themselves are also only negatively determined, that is, determined in relation to other points which they themselves are not. Each point, Hegel then continues to argue, is the negation of the others. Point A is not point B, just as point B is not point A. They are, according to Spinozas principle of omnis determinatio est negatio which Hegel here applies, each others negations. The successive determination of space is equated with a set of successive negations. Consequently, the point, as the discrete element in the continuity of space, generates a line where one point after another cannot help but pass into a geometric relation with the point contiguous with it.
24 Ibid ., p. 35.
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Moreover, the system of lines generates planes, and planes the threedimensionality of Euclidean space defined by straight lines. Space is in other words an infinite assemblage of heres that are utterly identical to one another, being differentiated only by virtue of their negative relations to the other heres. The way time can be said to follow from space is in Hegels exposition far from straightforward. As is well known, motion has often been invoked as a basis of time. In Newtons mechanics, for instance, time is a measure of motion in space. However, since changes in place involve motion only in conjunction with temporal alteration, it seems to follow that motion presupposes time, rather than being constitutive of it. What Hegel instead appears to suggest is that time simply is the way in which space as a whole necessarily is external to itself in its externalization.
Negativity, as point, relates itself to space, in which it develops its determinations as line and plane; but in the sphere of self- externality, negativity is equally for itself and so are its determinations; but, at the same time, these are posited in the sphere of self-externality, and negativity, in so doing, appears as indifferent to the inert side-by sideness of space. Negativity, thus posited for itself, is Time.25
Just as space is understood as a ceaseless self-transcendence of spatial differentiation, so time consumes its own moments, immediately supplanting one now with another equally straddling past and future. Space could not exist unless individual differentiation takes place through the negation of all the other ideal points in it:time, then, is this negativity. Hegel provides very little by way of a proper justification of how time follows from space. It is not clear why the self-transcendence of time could not, as in Kant and many other philosophers of time, be of an entirely different nature altogether. A somewhat promising account, in that it seems to go quite a long way towards preserving the letter of Hegels argument, draws attention to Hegels claim that, at the level of the dialectic of space, there is a contradiction between space as conceptual and space as material.26 According to Alison Stone, this means that, for Hegel, externality is self-contradictory. The contradiction
25 Ibid ., pp. 3334. 26 On p. 30 of his Philosophy of Nature , Hegel draws a distinction between abstract space and relative space, which he understands as the determinate space of some material body.
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can be overcome, she argues, by deducing the necessary emergence of a better natural form, namely time.27 Time unites the plurality of internal differentiation (the material) with the self-identity of ideal units (the conceptual). The reference to materiality, however, is misleading:Hegel is not making a systematic reference to materiality until later in the dialectic, and while space is a precondition for materiality, it must as such be distinguished from it. Even if we correct this mistake and replace materiality with extension, it is not obvious, moreover, that Hegel sees a contradiction between space as conceptual and space as extended. In the Zusatz to 257 of the Encyclopedia (to which Stone also refers) Hegel writes the following. Space is this contradiction, to be infected with negation, but in such wise that this negation falls apart into indifferent subsistence.28 The negation which Hegel refers to is that of the negation of extension in the ideal point. However, such spatial limits (as the ideal points), based on differentiation, become external to one another once extension is taken into account. They transgress the boundary that separates them from what they demarcate. Space is therefore both the differentiation of points, making possible lines and planes (which themselves are necessary for space to be possible), and their self-transgression. If time is defined as just this ongoing self-transcendence endemic to space, then it seems as though Hegel has presented an argument of some merit. We can now also begin to see what Hegel means by his claim that the true present is eternity. The present remains forever as the abiding now in relation to which the before and the after are not. Time is the endless, infinite becoming in the now, where the now exists in virtue of its negative movement. The now is thus a product of the endless work of the negative the endless negation of the negation. Now this is also the key to understanding how spirit can be both temporal and eternal. In Hegels characterization of it, spirit develops according to the same logic. As a conceptual structure, it divides or differentiates itself from itself, and then conceives of itself as the unity of the original concept and its self-differentiation.29 In this sense, spirit is nothing but the self-externalization of the concept in time:it is history, or
27 Stone, Petrified Intelligence , p. 40. 28 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature , p. 34. 29 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History , trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis and Cambridge, Mass.:Hackett, 1988), p. 80:Time is the negative element in the sensory world:thought is this same negativity; but it is the innermost infinite form itself wherein every thing that exists is, in principle, dissolved and chiefly the finite being, the determinate form.
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rather world history, as a movement of spirit towards the actualization of its own final essence.
The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit:to know ones limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the externalization in which Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening, intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being as Space. This last becoming of Spirit, Nature , is its living immediate Becoming; Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal externalization of its continuing existence and the movement which reinstates the Subject . But the other side of its becoming, History, is a conscious, selfmediating process Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externaliza tion, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is negative of itself ... The realm of Spirits which is formed in this way the in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of Spirit, and this is the absolute Notion .30
The idea of spirit as emptying itself out in time through its consecutive movements of self-externalization and self-discovery in the medium of philosophy is put to direct use in Hegels philosophical history of the world his account of reasons actualization in history. World spirit, he maintains in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, while indeed always one and the same,31 reveals itself in history as the rational process of its development. History is not simply the succession of essentially contingent events (hence it cannot be fully understood from a merely empirical point of view, as the object of historical research); rather, everything which takes place in it is directed towards an ultimate purpose and governed by the providence of a supreme insight and will in Hegels terms, by spirit or reason as the infinite power and infinite content 32 and understanding history means to understand the rationality which is unfolding in historical time. The claim is not that history can be constructed on purely a priori grounds,
30 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 492. For a useful account of the relationship between the Concept (der Begriff ) and time in Hegel, see Karin de Boer, Begriff und Zeit:Die Selbstentuerung des Begriffs und ihre Wiederholung in Hegels spekulativem System, Hegel-Studien 35 (2000):1149. 31 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 13. 32 Ibid ., p. 12.
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since that would lead to fabrications.33 The task, rather, of the philosophical historian is to apprehend empirical history in the light of, and as emerging from, an adequate conception of reason: To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rational in turn.34 A similar thought comes through in Hegels famous passage at the end of the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right :As the thought of the world, [philosophy] appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state ... When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.35 Let us pause for a moment and note how Hegels account, however ambitious, is designed so as to tackle the two interrelated problems of time which I initially introduced as arising with modernity and the emergence of a modern time-consciousness. First, through its reunification of the eternal and temporal, spirit and matter, it promises to point beyond the specific worries about transience that a secular modpriori ern order makes possible. By bringing the eternal order of a necessity not only in contact with nature and history but, through the externalization of the concept in time, into a position of being the animating principle which governs the world and gives it its purported rational intelligibility, Hegel hopes to have made transience a rational determination, rather than a merely destructive marker of finitude. Although world history considered empirically includes innumerable contingent events, time is essentially productive. It is the medium through which spirit overcomes its self-alienation in history and nature, and returns to itself in the full transparency of its shape as absolute spirit. The radical implications of what Heidegger addresses as Kants analytic of finitude are overcome. In that he aims to offer an account that is directed towards conferring value on the historical event as such, the event in itself and for itself, Hegel also points beyond what I have called the disenchanted time of rationalized modernity. As long as every event is valid in itself inasmuch as it is a manifestation of spirit, it follows that all history is meaningful in a profound, metaphysical sense. This is why Hegel considers reading the morning paper a kind of realistic morning
33 Ibid ., p. 13.34 Ibid ., p. 14. 35 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right , p. 23.
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prayer:36 events, however banal, of everyday life are themselves expressions of spirits unfolding in history. While acknowledging that modernity involves a skeptical distancing from the immediate certainties of faith, tradition, and collective life that is, everything which kept the citizens of the ancient Greek polis free and happy (as they were recognized as being at one with the community, having fully internalized and identified with its norms) philosophy, he argues nonetheless, heals the wounds generated by modernity. By means of philosophical comprehension, the emptiness of the rationalized living now can be countered and sublated into a higher unity of meaning.
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be the one-sidedness or inadequacy of these particular interpretations of what subjective freedom entails. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno will later argue with considerable force in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, he effectively claims that modernity suffers from a onesided rationalization.39 This critique is implicit in Hegels early writings on theology and reaches a great degree of elaboration in two important essays from around 1800:The Difference between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy and Faith and Knowledge.40 In the writings on theology, Hegel displays his objections to what he understands as the coldness and essentially alienating character of the Enlightenment, contrasting this with an idealized vision of the Greek polis as the embodiment of a social life capable of fostering a free and integrated form of subjectivity. The Enlightenments victory over religion, he argues, is introduces a calpyrrhic; rather than promoting genuine freedom, it culating, fragmenting model of rationality that transfers the alien lawgiver of positive religion to the inner life of the isolated individual.41 In the essays, standing at the beginning of Hegels Jena phase, he continues this critique by turning to the philosophical systems of Kant and Fichte. Isolating the subject from its alleged connection with the absolute, these thinkers, he argues, represent the very gist of the spirit of modernity, attempting to theorize reason as a completely selflegislating or self-grounding activity, the ability to rationally set limits
39 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (London and New York:Verso, 1979). 40 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy , trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, N.Y.:SUNY Press, 1977); Faith and Knowledge , trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, N. Y.:SUNY Press, 1977). 41 G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings , trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 210:We might have expected Jesus to work along these lines against the positivity of moral commands, against sheer legality, and to show that, although the legal is a universal whose entire obligatoriness lies in its universality, still, even if every ought, every command, declares itself as something alien, nevertheless as concept (universality) it is something subjective, and, as subjective, as a product of human power (i.e., of reason as the capacity for universality), it loses its objectivity, its positivity, its heteronomy, and the thing commanded is revealed as grounded in an autonomy of the human will. By this line of argument, however, positivity is only partially removed; and between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.
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for oneself and observe those on the basis of self-chosen principles. In Kant, this attempt generates a system characterized by an extraordinary set of dualisms: between reason and sensibility, theoretical and practical reason, the apriori and the posteriori, and so on. Rather than being acceptable consequences of Kants arguments, the dualisms testify to the essential alienation of the modern human being the finite, formal, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying nature of her particular form of reason.42 However, it is not until the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 that Hegel fully brings his social and philosophical critique together. What I want to show in the following is that the construction of the modern subject that we find in the Phenomenology does not cohere easily with the account of spirit and time that later emerges in the Encyclopedia and other writings subsequent to the full elaboration of the system.43 There is a deep tension between, on the one hand, the vision of spirit as capable of externalizing itself in history such that the emptiness of linear, secular time is overcome and, on the other, the conception of modern subjectivity as being radically self-alienated. Now, unlike the other preceding sections of the book, the long and remarkably complex chapter on Spirit in the Phenomenology presents Hegels recounting of the history of spirit from classical antiquity to the onset of Napoleonic Europe. Very roughly, spirit in the Greek polis is defined in terms of the actualization of an unquestioned ethical life uniting individual aspiration towards the good with the interests of the social body as a whole. Unlike the Roman world, which sees the birth of one particular type of free individual (though only as an abstract bearer of rights), the Greek polis possesses no conception of subjectivity apart from the individuals assigned place in the social system. In ancient Greece, the subject acquires its identity exclusively through identification with the social order, which is interpreted as
42 For the early Hegels account of what he calls reflection, which he distinguishes from speculation, the (essentially Schellingean) capacity to disclose a prior and more fundamental unity, see The Difference Between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy , pp. 8998. 43 Elizabeth Goodstein refers to Hegels account of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as a philosophical-historical myth about the origins of modern subjectivity. See her Experience without Qualities:Boredom and Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 4142. While I hesitate to think of it as a myth, I accept Goodsteins more general view that Hegel is seeking to construct a specific form of narrative. By recounting this narrative, Hegel wishes to account for why we ought to be committed to the specific set of ideals that he associates with modernity.
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unshakeable and natural. For Hegel, the goal of spirits journey is to unite subject and substance, free individuality and ethical life, in such a way as to be able to consider modern social life in Europe as fully self-determining. It is as if the individual must come into being before spirit can be united with itself as a life-form that offers genuine freedom. However, in order for that to happen, it is necessary for the individual to purify itself of its natural self, of everything that is simply given, immediate, and not rationally accepted. Full freedom is only possible when every pre-given particularity is overcome.44 Hegel refers to this purification of the natural self as Bildung education or, as in Millers translation of the Phenomenology, culture. Increasingly, the self is forced to distance itself from endsetting that depends on appeals to nature, or what appears natural in ones social world, and orient itself towards ends with which it can identify as a rational, self-determining agent. There is no need to run through all the details of Hegels complete story. It begins with the Romans, who disentangle the self from its previous dependence on a network of pre-given roles, reducing it to a subject of mere legal recognition in an essentially atomistic state. Having created a space for interiority, or a desire at least for retreating from the abstract social world into an inner sanctuary of apparently real freedom, the medieval, Christian world takes this self-alienation one step further. At this point, Hegel looks at the nobility and its struggle to fashion a aristocratic lifestyle by sacrificing every individual inclinagenuinely conform to the ideals of the desired life. In the tion that does not period of French absolutism, the self is engaged in pure strategic action, aiming, by cultivating an ethic of flattery, to be recognized in a completely external manner. Absolutism presents a world of deceit, a nihilistic game,45 described as both hollow and boring. This is the point at which, in Hegels account, the Enlightenment starts to formulate conceptions that continue and indeed enhance the pure consciousness of absolutism. For the proponents of the Enlightenment, there is no natural order or system of authority that deserves to be
44 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.:Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 384:Culture and alienation are akin in meaning:the determinate individual cultivates himself, and forms himself to essentiality, through the alienation of his natural being. More precisely, for Hegel, the cultivation of the self is conceivable only by the mediation of alienation, or estrangement. 45 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit , p. 317.
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recognized as binding. Rather, the only standpoint worth taking is one that is free from tradition and unreflected social practice. If authoritative grounds for belief or knowledge exist, then they must be found within the rational subject. The Enlightenment is therefore skeptical:its relationship to the world is marked by negation. In the absolute freedom of Rousseaus conception of the general will, the rejection of everything substantial reaches what looks like a stable, authoritative level:to be free is to adopt as ones maxims only those that conform to the demands of a universal (or impersonal) will, or the volont gnral . The general will is the will of the people as such and must be expressed in order to be actualized. However, since absolute freedom can only be actualized in so far as there is a political agent acting on the basis of its imperatives, Hegels dialectic reaches the French Revolution and, notably, the Terror.46 The Jacobins view themselves as embodying the will of the people, hence their actions are seen as incorrigible necessary and yet free. Their political mandate is to eliminate those who are seen to represent particular interests opposed to the dictates of the general will. However, because its victims are without any social substance, the death from terror is devoid of significance:The sole work and deed of universal freedom is death , a death which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.47 The section on Bildung, and indeed the whole chapter on Spirit, can be read in various ways. It certainly offers what Hegel understands as a philosophical narrative of the socio-political transformations that from Greek and Roman antiquity to Napoleonic Europe are said to account for the development and purification of the modern ideal of rational self-determination. It is the story of human spirit, and quite possibly even the divine spirit, reaching awareness of itself as free; yet it is also the story of the coming into being of European modernity. Perhaps most striking, though, is its provision of a philosophical account of the genesis of the modern subject. What Hegel can be read
46 For two good discussions of Hegels approach to the French Revolution, see Jrgen Habermas, Hegels Critique of the French Revolution, in Theory and Practice , trans. John Viertel (Boston:Beacon Press, 1974), pp. 12141 and Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution , trans. Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1982). 47 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit , p. 360.
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as claiming is that the modern subject is not sui generis, an abstract entity or form of spontaneity as in Descartes or Kant, but the outcome of a determinate set of dialectical experiences that together have led to its alienation from its own social substance. In all its forms, from the Roman world to the world of chivalry and absolutism, and finally to the Enlightenment and the Jacobin Terror, the subject discovers its own existence as predicated upon a loss of cultural and historical connection to other people and communal practice. As history progresses, what the actualization of freedom demands is the adoption of an increasingly abstract conception of authority, culminating with the direct worship of the universal independently of any possible acknowledgement of duties towards concrete individuals. While the individual now sees itself as an absolutely pure and free individual self, the general will can only express itself via the negation of the individual as a being existing in the universal.48 Death is the Janus face of absolute freedom. Hegels construction of the modern subject entails a notion of temporality which is hard to square with the account of temporality found in the mature system. In the system spirit is held to actualize itself through time through the self-externalization of der Begriff. History can therefore be characterized as a rational process. We may think of this as the objectivist side of Hegels vision of history. Here, however, when thinking about the fate of the subject in modernity, and hence about history from a subjective point of view the point of view of the experience of consciousness49 rather than a systematic part of the Realphilosophie Hegel describes an experience in which all social groups or classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished.50 By completing the destruction of the actual organization of the world, the subject exists now just for itself, this is its sole object, an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence, or outer extension, but is merely this knowledge of itself as an absolutely free individual self.51 This is Hegels vision of modernity:coldly utopian, it forces the individual to organize and authorize actions solely with reference to universally valid imperatives that mercilessly demand the elimination of the horizon of experience and traditional attachments. The guillotine becomes Hegels chosen
48 Ibid . 49 Ibid ., p. 56: the way to Science is itself already Science , and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness . 50 Ibid ., p. 357.51 Ibid ., p. 35960.
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image of a world in which the step into the future is made through violence and destruction, and in which the merely given historical, cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic contexts that previously gave life meaning are eclipsed. Only by sacrificing itself, as well as everything that has been of value, for the sake of the future, can the subject heed the demands of a totally rationalized lifeworld. It follows that Hegel is here presenting a picture of modernity in which the problems of transience and existential meaning overwhelmingly present. The world figured by the perverted are enlightenment of the Jacobins and the guillotine is in constant flux, permitting no lasting commitments, values, or roles to appear as authoritative or binding; and rather than anchoring the self in stable expectations and publicly endorsed structures of inference, it uproots it and leaves it to organize its conception of itself with reference only to that normative content which along Kantian/Rousseauan lines can find universal acceptance among purportedly rational agents. There emerges at this point in Hegels narrative of modernity not only a thin theory of the self but a thin theory of the good and a thin ethical experience.52 Most importantly, time theory of moral and that is, the experienced or phenomenological time of modernity has become thinned out. It now seems devoid of the features that, in the mature system and the lectures on the philosophy of history, make history sacred. The diagnosis of modernity is strikingly at odds with Hegels metaphysics. Within the framework of Hegels own thinking, it is not difficult to find a response to this apparent quandary. As already mentioned, Hegel conceives of the self-realization of spirit in history as a process in which spirit is constantly challenged by claims that would make it seem limited or one-sided. Referring to these challenges and the overcoming of them as the work of the negative, Hegel seeks to understand the abstract universality of Rousseau and the social (or spiritual) world it constitutes as a moment within spirits larger quest to purify itself of everything that does not stem from its own free selfmovement. Consequently, the Phenomenology does not end here. Having progressivism of dealt with the abstract ultra-modernism and ultra-
52 The talk of thick and thin was introduced into philosophy by Bernard Williams. For Williams, concrete concepts like cruel, generous, and compassionate are thick while more abstract concepts like good, happy, beautiful, are thin. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
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the Enlightenment and its dialectical culmination in the Jacobin period, Hegel immediately points to the Napoleonic expansion in Europe, introducing universally codified law and a regulated end to emblematic feudal privileges, as involving a return to order: These individuals who have felt the fear of death, of their absolute master, again submit to negation and distinctions, arrange themselves in the various spheres, and return to an apportioned and limited task, but thereby to their substantial reality.53 With Napoleon, the ideals of the French Revolution also reach Germany. Here, however, they are not transformed into political realities but articulated discursively and abstractly by the German idealists, whose moral views are under scrutiny in the preceding section on Morality. However, rather than interpreting the universal will as the will of the people, to act only in accordance with a universal law now becomes a demand of pure reason. At this point, we reach Hegels discussion of Kant and Fichte. There is at this point a considerable tension in Hegels narrative. On the one hand, the reaction to the French Revolution soon reinstates the validity of institutions whose mode of social temporality is not based on the desire for a radical break with the past. On the other, the critique of the moral philosophy of German idealism culminates in the dialectic befalling Fichtes extreme internalization of the self-legislating will. Suddenly we are thrown back to the kind of moral fanaticism that characterized the Jacobin revolutionaries, and the new institutionalism that made its impact felt with the downfall of the Jacobin reign seems to make little or no difference with regard to the potential for creating new forms of positivity. However, as the so-called hard heart, whose only source of moral authority is its own conscience, learns, normative authority can only be established in the socially concrete conditions of ethical life wherein moral demands arise from processes of intersubjective recognition. The hard heart, which rejects any continuity with the other,54 learns that in reconciling itself with the other, it reaches a higher form of universality that finally has the requisite authority. The name Hegel gives to this higher form of universality is religion.55
53 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit , p. 361. 54 Ibid ., p. 405. 55 Ibid ., p. 409:The reconciling Yea , in which the two Is let go their antithetical existence , is the existence of the I which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the
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It may therefore seem as though Hegel, in the Phenomenology, wavers in his assessment of modernity. There is, in his terms, a consistent orientation on the part of the subject towards shedding its own substance or immediacy. Bildung is the painful process through which this happens; thus Bildung reaches its endpoint when everything merely given the human body, nature, tradition, the past is rejected. The French Revolution with its grand project of starting history anew represents the epitome and victory of this process. Despite the continuation of progressive modernism in German idealism, however, Hegel also seems to believe that a new religious community will be able to transform the ideal of freedom from an individual to a collective standpoint. The religious community, capable of forgiving and therefore overcoming evil, will constitute an absolute position from which to think of oneself as a free and rational self-legislator. In the philosophical system in the absolute spirit this community will reach the highest comprehension of its own essence. The circle is ended and history will be seen as the continuous and rational unfolding of spirit. It is difficult to assess the status of the chapter on religion in the Phenomenology, and many commentators have expressed uncertainty about what to make of it.56 Hegel was by no means a deist, nor did he follow Kant and Fichte in seeing religion as an extension of moral life, a postulate of pure practical reason. Rather, religion is a direct expression of mans spiritual being, of the fact that man lives within a religious framework with reference to which he authorizes his beliefs and existence. Religion is the way in which man represents (vorstellen is the German term) the absolute; while expressing the consciousness
certainty of itself:it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge. 56 The classic question has been whether Hegel is ultimately a thinker of divine life, or whether he ends up with some sort of humanism, reducing God to mans selfconception. The eminent Hegel scholar Jean Hyppolite, for example, writes with a noticeable sense of uncertainty that He is certainly not a mystic and although he interprets and takes up for himself the formulas of certain mystics, he already sees in them the image of his own dialectic. Nor is his solution an anthropology in Feuerbachs sense. Hegel speaks of the universal divine man who succeeded the God-man , but his thought remains equivocal and opens the way to the diverse interpretations of his followers. Absolute spirit surpasses finite spirit and yet exists only through finite spirit, even if it is true that only in this reconciliation (which supposes both separation and unity) is spirit authentically absolute because it becomes absolute. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit , p. 544.
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a people has of itself, it represents the absolute unity of finite and infinite, albeit not as a mere substance, but as mediated by a reflective awareness, the substance (of which Hegel speaks in the preface to the Phenomenology) which has become subject. As Hegel puts it elsewhere, God is God only so far as he knows himself; his self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and mans knowledge of God, which proceeds to mans self-knowledge in God.57 Mans history is the history of Gods own reconciliation with himself in absolute otherness; hence mans self-consciousness coincides with that of God. These are grandiose metaphysical claims that I will not seek to interpret or substantiate further. One thing that can be said, however, is that although Hegel resolves the potential conflict between spirit and time in favor of spirit, seeing time itself as the eternal or perpetual present comprehending within itself both past and future, he understands the history of spirit, and modernity, in particular, as fraught with such dissatisfaction and negativity that from a purely experiential point of view it remains unclear whether religion can do the work of overcoming the disenchanted time of the abstract and universalist subject of modernity. Can such an overcoming take place without ignoring the observations Hegel has made of modernity? Historically, the nineteenth century was marked by secularization, and to rest Hegels case on a reference to de facto religious belief would therefore be unpromising. On the other hand, if Hegels case rests on his metaphysics, which is more likely given the importance he assigns to the Science of Logic, then there seems to be a conflict between that and the phenomenology. Although Hegel believes the conflict can be resolved by recourse to metaphysics, he would still be faced with the difficult task of defending the metaphysics of time underlying his account of spirits temporal development.58
57 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 299. 58 Some readers are likely to object that I do not take into account Hegels theory of the modern state as it is developed in Elements of the Philosophy of Right . In this work Hegel considers abstract right, morality, and ethical life (including family, civil society, and state) in light of the different ways in which they actualize human freedom, where freedom is understood as self-actualization. One concern Hegel has is to balance the modern requirement of individual freedom coming out of the Lutheran Reformation and the French Revolution with a more classical interest in achieving a determinate social identity. Of some interest for my project, given my preoccupation with the abstraction-claim, is whether his account of estates and corporations in that work might provide modern social life with some sort of
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In any event, the excessive character of Hegels concept of time was soon to be surmounted by the Left Hegelians, for whom time was accorded decisive priority over spirit and eternity. In Feuerbachs and Marxs philosophies of finitude, Hegels now, far from being an eternity which is immanent in time, became little more than an accidentally present point in the stream of time. A new generation of thinkers, including not only Feuerbach and Marx but Ruge, Bauer, and Kierkegaard as well, consciously elevated immanent historical change and development unfolding in a temporal dimension to be the ultimate arbiter of value. With the idea of temporally unfolding progress, however, followed an emphasis on futurity as being ethically and existentially primordial the idea, that is, that when rationally accounting for the present and ones actions in it what is to be achieved should be accorded justificatory primacy. Responding to Kants analytic of finitude, Hegel made one last attempt to provide a philosophical interpretation of a Christian conception of providence.59 Yet the new experience of social and material transformation brought about by the process of modernization led to an increased sense of contingency, which in the end undermined the credibility of the Hegelian view. The loss of eternity nevertheless engendered its own substitutes and reaction-formations, and various attempts were made to recover what had once been the unquestioned framework of human existence in time. As both religion and philosophy became incapable of
contextual or communitarian dimension. I think it could, although I hesitate to think that considerations concerning the concrete social identity to be had from membership in these institutions they are, after all, to be thought of mainly as professional associations can play a very large role in evaluating Hegels overall account of modernity. Moreover, the philosophy of right is less an account of modernity (like the one we find in the chapter on Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit) than it is a theory of what a fully rational state would look like. One may, therefore, share the early Hegels hesitations about modernity while being fully committed to the philosophy of right as an ideal account. For a useful discussion of subjective freedom versus corporate spirit, see Allen W. Wood, Hegels Ethical Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 23943. 59 Karl Lwith, Meaning and History (Chicago and London:University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 59:Fifteen hundred years of Western thought were required before Hegel could venture to translate the eyes of faith into the eyes of reason and the theology of history as established by Augustine into a philosophy of history which is neither sacred nor profane. It is a curious mixture of both, degrading sacred history to the level of secular history and exalting the latter to the level of the first Christianity in terms of a self-sufficient Logos absorbing the will of God into the spirit of the world and the spirits of the nations, the Weltgeist and the Volksgeister.
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