Normativity, meaning, and the promise of phenomenology 9781351064392, 1351064398, 9781351064408, 1351064401, 9781351064415, 135106441X, 9781351064422, 1351064428

Table of contents :
Introduction Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin Section I: Normativity, Meaning, and the Limits of Phenomenology 1. Constitutive, Prescriptive, Technical or Ideal? On the Ambiguity of the Term 'Norm' Sara Heinämaa 2. The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology, and the Normative Turn Leslie MacAvoy 3. Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics: Another Look Dan Zahavi 4. Ground, Background, and Rough Ground: Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology David Cerbone 5. Inauthentic Theologizing and Phenomenological Method Martin Kavka Section II: Sources of Normativity 6. Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity John Drummond 7. The Sources of Practical Normativity Reconsidered - with Kant and Levinas Inga Römer 8. Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good Irene McMullin Section III: Normativity and Nature 9. On Being a Human Self Mark Okrent 10. Normativity with a Human Face: Placing Intentional Norms and Intentional Agents back in Nature Glenda Satne & Bernardo Ainbinder 11. World-Articulating Animals Joseph Rouse Section IV: Attuned Agency 12. Moods as Active Joe Schear 13. Against Our Better Judgment Matthew Burch 14. Everyday Eros: Toward a Phenomenology of Erotic Inception Jack Marsh Section V: Epistemic Normativity 15. Normativity and Knowledge Walter Hopp 16. Appearance, Judgment, and Norms Charles Siewert 17. Husserl's and Heidegger's Transcendental Projects: From the Natural Attitude to Functioning Intentionality Dermot Moran Afterword A Philosophy of Mind: Phenomenology, Normativity, and Meaning Steven Crowell

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Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology

This volume aims to assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, contributors to this volume examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. Matthew Burch is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex. His research interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology and the cognitive and social sciences. He has published in Inquiry, The European Journal of Philosophy, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation. Jack Marsh is a St.  Leonard’s Scholar in Religion at the University of St.  Andrews. He is the author of Saying Violence: Levinas, Chauvinism, Disinterest (forthcoming). His work has appeared in many journals, including Philosophy and Social Criticism, Levinas Studies, and Philosophy Today. Irene McMullin teaches philosophy at the University of Essex. She specializes in Ethics and 20th Century European philosophy. In 2013 she published Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations. Her second book, Existential Flourishing: A  Phenomenology of the Virtues, was published by Cambridge in 2018.

Routledge Research in Phenomenology Edited by Søren Overgaard University of Copenhagen, Denmark Komarine Romdenh-Romluc University of Sheffield, UK David Cerbone West Virginia University, USA

Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty Edited by Komarine Romdenh-Romluc Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology Edited by Ondřej Švec and Jakub Čapek Phenomenology of Plurality Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity Sophie Loidolt Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal Jack Reynolds Imagination and Social Perspectives Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology Edited by Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago Wittgenstein and Phenomenology Edited by Oskari Kuusela, Mihai Ometiţă, and Timur Uçan Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications Edited by Frode Kjosavik, Christian Beyer, and Christel Fricke Phenomenology of the Broken Body Edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke, and Thor Erik Eriksen Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology Edited by Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Phenomenology/book-series/RRP

Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology Edited by Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burch, Matthew, 1977– editor. Title: Normativity, meaning, and the promise of phenomenology / edited by Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Taylor & Francis, 2019. | Series: Routledge research in phenomenology ; 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019006698 | ISBN 9781138479913 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. | Methodology. | Meaning (Philosophy) | Normativity (Ethics) Classification: LCC B829.5 .N67 2019 | DDC 142/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006698 ISBN: 978-1-138-47991-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06442-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Steven Crowell: Philosopher, Teacher, Friend

Contents

List of Contributorsx About the Authorsxiv Acknowledgmentsxx Introduction

1

MATTHEW BURCH, JACK MARSH, AND IRENE MCMULLIN

SECTION I

Normativity, Meaning, and the Limits of Phenomenology7  1 Constitutive, Prescriptive, Technical, or Ideal? On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm”

9

SARA HEINÄMAA

 2 The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology, and the Normative Turn

29

LESLIE MACAVOY

 3 Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics: Another Look

47

DAN ZAHAVI

 4 Ground, Background, and Rough Ground: Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology

62

DAVID R. CERBONE

 5 Inauthentic Theologizing and Phenomenological Method MARTIN KAVKA

80

viii  Contents SECTION II

Sources of Normativity99  6 Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity

101

JOHN DRUMMOND

 7 The Sources of Practical Normativity Reconsidered—With Kant and Levinas

120

INGA RÖMER

 8 Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good

137

IRENE MCMULLIN

SECTION III

Normativity and Nature155  9 On Being a Human Self

157

MARK OKRENT

10 Normativity With a Human Face: Placing Intentional Norms and Intentional Agents Back in Nature

174

GLENDA SATNE AND BERNARDO AINBINDER

11 World-Articulating Animals

195

JOSEPH ROUSE

SECTION IV

Attuned Agency215 12 Moods as Active

217

JOSEPH K. SCHEAR

13 Against Our Better Judgment

232

MATTHEW BURCH

14 Everyday Eros: Toward a Phenomenology of Erotic Inception JACK MARSH

251

Contents ix SECTION V

Epistemic Normativity269 15 Normativity and Knowledge

271

WALTER HOPP

16 Appearance, Judgment, and Norms

290

CHARLES SIEWERT

17 Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Transcendental Projects: From the Natural Attitude to Functioning Intentionality

307

DERMOT MORAN

Afterword327

A Philosophy of Mind: Phenomenology, Normativity, and Meaning

329

STEVEN CROWELL

Index355

Contributors

Bernardo Ainbinder Instituto de Filosofía Diego Portales University Ejército 260, Santiago—Chile [email protected] ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6630-458X Matthew Burch School of Philosophy and Art History University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester, CO4 3SQ Essex, United Kingdom +44 (0) 7984 662183 ORCiD: 0000-0001-9968-0808 [email protected] David R. Cerbone Professor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy P. O. Box 6312 West Virginia University Morgantown, WV 26506–6312 ORCiD: 0000-0001-8047-4043 [email protected] Steven Crowell Prof Steven Crowell Department of Philosophy (MS 14) Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, TX 77005 USA

Contributors xi ORCiD: 0000-0002-3571-7285 [email protected] John Drummond Department of Philosophy Fordham University 441 E. Fordham Rd. Bronx, NY 10458 USA ORCiD: 0000-0001-7197-2593 [email protected] Sara Heinämaa Institutional Affiliation: University of Jyväskylä Mailing address for correspondence: Meritullinkatu 15 D 42 00170 Helsinki Finland ORCHiD: 0000-0002-8458-2196 [email protected] Walter Hopp 745 Commonwealth Avenue Room 513 Boston, MA 02215 USA ORCHiD: 0000-0001-6923-0937 [email protected] Martin Kavka Department of Religion M03 Dodd Hall Florida State University 641 University Way Tallahassee, FL 32306–1520 USA ORCiD: 0000-0001-8952-6962 [email protected] Leslie MacAvoy Associate Professor and Chair Dept. of Philosophy and Humanities East Tennessee State University Box 70656 Johnson City, TN 37614 ORCiD: 0000-0002-0699-7791. [email protected]

xii  Contributors Jack Marsh St. Mary’s College University of St. Andrews St. Andrews KY16 9JU Fife, Scotland, UK ORCiD: 0000-0002-0091-0368 [email protected] Irene McMullin School of Philosophy and Art History University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester, CO4 3SQ Essex, United Kingdom ORCiD: 0000-0002-1696-6059 [email protected] Prof. Dermot Moran Philosophy Dept., Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA ORCHiD: 0000-0003-3894-3728 [email protected] Prof. Mark Okrent Department of Philosophy Bates College 7 Andrews Road Lewiston, Maine 04240 USA ORCHiD: 0000-0003-4223-6014 [email protected] Inga Römer UFR Arts et Sciences humaines (ARSH) Université Grenoble Alpes CS 40700 38058 Grenoble cedex 9 ORCHiD: 0000-0002-0157-1548 [email protected] Joseph Rouse Department of Philosophy Wesleyan University 350 High Street Middletown, CT 06457

Contributors xiii USA ORCiD: 0000-0003-3928-7937 [email protected] Glenda Satne Professor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy Alberto Hurtado University Alameda 1869, 3rd floor, 8340576 Santiago Chile [email protected] ORCiD: 0000-0001-5266-1407 Prof Joseph K. Schear Christ Church St Aldates Oxford OX1 1DP United Kingdom ORCiD: 0000-0001-7593-2679 [email protected] Charles Siewert Philosophy Dept Rice University MS-14 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, Texas 77251–1892 USA ORCiD: 0000-0001-9111-0720 [email protected] Dan Zahavi Director of Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) Main address: Karen Blixens Plads 8 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark Affiliations: Professor of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford ORCHiD: 0000-0002-2869-4951 [email protected]

About the Authors

Bernardo Ainbinder (Ph.D. University of Buenos Aires) is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Philosophy, Diego Portales University, Chile, since 2015. He is currently the President of the Iberoamerican Heidegger Society (SIEH). He was previously Postdoctoral Fellow and Junior Researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (Conicet), Argentina, and Visiting Researcher (2012–14) at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research interests are neo-Kantianism and phenomenology and their import for contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. Matthew Burch (Ph.D. Rice University) is a lecturer at the University of Essex in the School of Philosophy and Art History. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology and the cognitive and social sciences. His current research projects focus on failures of agency (e.g.,  akrasia and addiction), the phenomenology of risk, and the ideal of objectivity in science and law. He has worked on several research projects with the Essex Autonomy Project (EAP), including an AHRC-funded project on the compliance of the Mental Capacity Act (2005) with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Wellcome Trust-funded Mental Health and Justice project. In 2018, he began an Early Career Research Fellowship awarded by the Independent Social Research Foundation. David R. Cerbone (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University. He is the author of Understanding Phenomenology (Acumen, 2006), Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008), and Existentialism: All That Matters (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015), as well as numerous articles on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the phenomenological tradition. Steven G. Crowell (Ph.D. Yale University) is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, where he has taught since 1984. He is the author of two

About the Authors xv books, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge 2013) and Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Northwestern 2001), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (2012). With Jeff Malpas, Crowell edited Transcendental Heidegger (Stanford 2007), and, with Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, he is co-editor of Husserl Studies. His articles on figures and topics in the post-Kantian continental tradition have appeared in journals such as Kant-Studien, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, European Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, and History of Philosophy Quarterly. His current research concerns second-person phenomenology and the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. John J. Drummond (Ph.D. Georgetown University) is the Robert Southwell, S.J. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Fordham University in New York. His main philosophical interests revolve around issues concerning intentionality. His research has moved from the general theory of intentionality to the more ­specific—and complicated—intentionality involved in emotions, valuation, and choice. He is the author of Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object and A Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy. He has published ninety articles on Husserl, phenomenology, intentionality, emotions, axiology, and ethics in collections and in journals such as Husserl Studies, Journal of Consciousness Studies, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. He has also edited or co-edited seven collections of articles on phenomenology, including, most recently, Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance (with Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl) and (with Otfried Höffe) the forthcoming Husserl: German Perspectives. Sara Heinämaa (Ph.D. University of Helsinki) is Academy Professor (2017–21) of the Academy of Finland, leading a five-year research project in phenomenology of normality and experiential norms. She holds a chair for philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä and is docent of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. In her systematic work, Heinämaa investigates the nature of embodiment, intersubjectivity, and temporality. Her exegetic work is focused on the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Beauvoir. She has published widely in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of mind, and history of philosophy. Her most important publications include Phenomenology and the Transcendental (with Hartimo and Miettinen, Routledge 2014), New Perspectives on Aristotelianism and Its Critics (with Mäkinen and Tuominen, Brill 2015), Birth, Death, and Femininity (with Schott et al. Indiana UP 2010), and Toward A Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (Rowman and Littlefield 2003).

xvi  About the Authors Walter Hopp (Ph.D. University of Southern California) is presently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He is the author of Perception and Knowledge: A  Phenomenological Account (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and several articles on topics related to phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, and epistemology. Martin Kavka (Ph.D. Rice University) is Professor of Religion at Florida State University. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), which was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought by the Association for Jewish Studies in 2008. He is also the co-editor of four books, including Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (2014), as well as the co-editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics. Leslie MacAvoy (Ph.D. McGill University) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at East Tennessee State University. She works on issues in phenomenology and hermeneutics, and has published essays on Heidegger and Levinas. Her interests include the philosophical debates among the early phenomenologists, and she is currently doing research on the role of intentionality and temporality in the constitution of meaning in Heidegger’s phenomenology. Jack Marsh (Ph.D. SUNY Binghamton) is a St. Leonard’s scholar in religion at University of St.  Andrews, Scotland. He is author of Saying Violence: Levinas, Chauvinism, Disinterest (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor with Irene McMullin and Matthew Burch of Transcending Reason: Heidegger’s Transformation of Phenomenology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). His work has appeared in many journals, including Levinas Studies, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Philosophy Today. Irene McMullin (Ph.D. Rice University) is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex. She specializes in both ethics and in 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy from the existential phenomenological tradition, especially as it pertains to questions in ethics and moral psychology. She published a book with Northwestern University Press entitled Time and the Shared World (2013), in which she develops a Heideggerian account of moral recognition. Her forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press—Existential Flourishing: A  Phenomenology of the Virtues—brings the resources of the existential phenomenological tradition to bear on problems in virtue ethics. Her work on Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Arendt, Sartre, and virtue ethics has appeared in journals such as the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophical Topics, among others.

About the Authors xvii Dermot Moran (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin and Sir Walter Murdoch Adjunct Professor in the School of Arts, Murdoch University, Australia. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy since 2003. Dermot has published widely on medieval philosophy and contemporary European philosophy, especially the phenomenological tradition. He is the author of many books, including Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge, 2000), and The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1989); and editor of among other titles Husserl’s The Shorter Logical Investigations (Routledge, 2001) and Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (Routledge, 2001). He is founding editor of The International Journal of Philosophical Studies (1993) and co-editor of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology (Springer). He was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2012. Mark Okrent (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of Philosophy at Bates College. He is the author of three books: Heidegger’s Pragmatism (1988), Rational Animals (2007), and Nature and Normativity (2017). He has also published articles on a range of topics, including intentionality, teleology, pragmatism, normativity, Heidegger, Davidson, and Kant, among others. Inga Römer (Ph.D. University of Hamburg) is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. After studying in Hamburg (Germany) and Bordeaux (France), she finished her doctoral thesis and then her habilitation at the University of Wuppertal (Germany). She is the author of Das Zeitdenken bei Husserl, Heidegger and Ricœur (The Thinking of Time in Husserl, Heidegger and Ricœur, Dordrecht 2010) and Das Begehren der reinen praktischen Vernunft. Kants Ethik in phänomenologischer Sicht (The Desire of Pure Practical Reason: Kant’s Ethics from a Phenomenological Point of View, Hamburg 2018) as well as around fifty articles and several reviews written in German, English, French, and Italian. Her research interests concern questions of time, subjectivity, personhood, ethics, and metaphysics, and they cover the fields of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and classical German philosophy. Joseph Rouse (Ph.D. Northwestern University) is the Hedding Professor of Moral Science in the Department of Philosophy and the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image (Chicago 2015), How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago 2002), Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Cornell 1996), and Knowledge

xviii  About the Authors and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Cornell 1987), and the editor of John Haugeland’s posthumously published Dasein Disclosed (Harvard 2013). Rouse works primarily on the philosophy of scientific practice, philosophical naturalism, the history of 20thcentury philosophy as encompassing both the Anglo-American and Continental traditions, and interdisciplinary science studies. He is currently completing a book on naturalistic social ontology, tentatively titled Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. Glenda Satne (Ph.D. University of Buenos Aires) is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Alberto Hurtado University in Chile and VC Fellow at the School of Law, Humanities and Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. She is a former participant in a Mellon Foundation Project working under Robert Brandom’s supervision at the University of Pittsburgh, and former Marie Curie Experienced Researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has edited special issues in various renowned journals on intentionality, normativity, and the natural origins of content. She has published extensively on the second person, Wittgenstein, normativity, and collective intentionality. Joseph K. Schear (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Associate Professor and Official Student of Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. His main research interests lie primarily in 19th- and 20th-century post-Kantian European philosophy, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. He has authored a number of articles at the intersection of phenomenology and philosophy of mind and is currently completing a book manuscript titled Horizons of Intentionality: From Husserl to Heidegger. He edited Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World (2013), and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Philosophy. Charles Siewert (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Robert Alan and Kathryn Dunlevie Hayes Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He is the author of The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton University Press, 1998). He has published widely in journals such as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Inquiry, Philosophical Studies, and Noûs. Dan Zahavi (Ph.D. Catholic University Leuven) is Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. Zahavi’s primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind and their intersection with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry and developmental psychology. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Zahavi has mainly written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, and social cognition. His most important publications include Self-awareness

About the Authors xix and Alterity  (1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005), The Phenomenological Mind (together with Shaun Gallagher) (2008/2012), Self and Other (2014), Husserl’s Legacy (2017), and Phenomenology: The Basics (2019). Zahavi also serves as the c­ o-editor in chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all those who made this volume possible. Thanks to the editors at Routledge who believed in the project and actively supported it throughout. Thanks also to the stellar contributors who made this a high-quality volume of original work. The promise of phenomenology is evident indeed in such a wonderful community of phenomenologists. We would also like to thank those who made our work on this project possible. Matthew Burch and Irene McMullin would both like to thank the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex for providing such a wonderful environment to do phenomenological philosophy. Matthew Burch would like to thank the Independent Social Research Foundation for funding his research leave while he worked on this project. And he wants to thank his family—especially Irene, Lucy, Mary, and his parents Frank and Rose—for their unwavering support. Irene McMullin is also grateful for the many forms of support that she has received over the course of producing this collection, with special thanks to her family for their many kindnesses. Jack Marsh thanks Michael Dunstan, Amanda Abel, Timothy Erickson, Ahmed Eldemardash, Kevin Hebden and Filipe Johnson, Judith Wolfe, Daniel Chichester, David Allen, Matthew Heaney, Mercedes Salvador, Robert Hoffman, Li Jiao Jiao, Kelly Planer, Richard Cohen, Irene McMullin, Matthew Burch, Blanca Franco and Edgardo Ortiz, Denise and Robert McPherson, and especially Jenny Lorena Franco-Marsh. Last but not least, we want to thank Steve Crowell. His work cleared the path that has made all our own projects possible. We thank him for being an exemplary philosopher, teacher, and friend.

Introduction Normativity, Meaning, and the Limits of Phenomenology Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin Husserl insists that phenomenology is not a “system” deriving from the head of a single “genius” (Husserl 1965, 75), but a communal practice, a “research program” in the loose sense that analytic philosophy might be considered one. What unites this program—including Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and even Derrida—is a “reduction” from our ordinary concern with entities, beings, the “world,” to the meaning at issue in such concern. —Crowell, “Afterword,” 329–330

In the above passage, Steven Crowell draws our attention to a fact that his own philosophical work richly exemplifies: that phenomenology comes into its own when treated not as an episode in the history of philosophy but as a living method to bring to bear on philosophy’s most pressing questions. In other words, the promise of phenomenology is revealed not as a history of books and figures but rather as a communal practice aimed at solving recalcitrant philosophical problems. This volume represents an effort to fulfill that promise by bringing together a diverse group of philosophers who view phenomenology in this light and use it to tackle long-standing problems pertaining to the philosophy of mind, philosophical naturalism, the sources of normativity, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of agency, virtue ethics, the theory of emotions, and epistemology. This volume differs from much of today’s phenomenological research, then, in that it engages with the phenomenological tradition not as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer or as a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that speak to important issues in contemporary philosophy. The pieces in this collection do so in particular by treating phenomenology as above all concerned with the normative structure of meaning and the existential conditions that make it possible. Since this groundbreaking interpretation of phenomenology’s purview has been most consistently and compellingly advanced by Steven Crowell, his work serves

2  Matt Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin as a springboard for many of the chapters. Of course, being philosophers, many contributors register serious disagreements with Crowell’s approach, which Crowell weighs in on in his “Afterword.” But the ultimate aim of the collection is not to appraise Crowell’s contribution to the discipline, but rather to heed his reminder of Husserl’s original intention for phenomenology. The collection is divided into five thematic subsections, each aimed at advancing the phenomenological project by examining a different cluster of issues.

Section I: Normativity, Meaning, and the Limits of Phenomenology In this section, contributors articulate and assess the merits of the notion that phenomenology is above all concerned with the normativity of meaning—“norm” here refers not just to explicit rules but to anything that shows up as a standard of success and failure, of better and worse. Sara Heinämaa significantly advances the discussion of this topic by offering a taxonomy of normative kinds, calling on phenomenologists to get clearer on the different ways in which normative structures operate in different meaningful experiences. In contrast, Leslie MacAvoy challenges the view that meaning should be understood as fundamentally normative at all, suggesting that the “normativity-first” approach falls foul of Husserl’s powerful critique of psychologism. Must meaning always be understood as making a certain kind of practical claim on us, she queries, or does it rather have a certain kind of validity independent of its manifestation for us as an ought? Zahavi, Cerbone, and Kavka further flesh out and challenge the view that phenomenology’s paramount concern is with the normativity of meaning. Specifically, their essays consider whether there are domains of philosophical inquiry—e.g.,  metaphysics (Zahavi), epistemology (Cerbone), or the philosophy of religion (Kavka)—that phenomenology is unable to investigate. Moreover, while Cerbone aims to deflate phenomenology’s aspirations, Zahavi and Kavka, albeit in different ways, argue that the interpretation of the phenomenological method as a ­metaphysically-neutral reflective analysis of the normative space of meaning is too conservative in its estimation of phenomenology’s philosophical reach. If there are philosophical questions beyond the reach of phenomenological reflection, they ask, how should we interpret Husserl’s claim that “there is no conceivable meaningful problem in previous philosophy, and no conceivable problem of being at all, that could not be arrived at by transcendental phenomenology at some point along its way” (Husserl 1970, 188)? This section explores different answers to these questions by examining the implications and limitations of the phenomenological method understood as inquiry into the normative structure of meaning.

Introduction 3

Section II: Sources of Normativity Essays in this section consider different possible sources of normativity that have been proposed in both the phenomenological tradition and in recent analytic philosophy. Which features of meaning-responsive agency make possible the normative demands that things, ideals, and others place us under? In the first contribution to this section, John Drummond develops a Husserlian line of thought and proposes that the basic source of normativity is intentionality’s own intrinsic drive toward selfresponsible conviction about the truth. In other words, he argues that the normativity of everyday experience is anchored in the teleological structure of intentionality and its intrinsic orientation toward truth. This is in contrast to Crowell’s Heideggerian approach, revisited in his “Afterword,” which argues that certain pre-intentional conditions account for the normative responsivity of intentionality itself, in particular, a firstperson commitment that underwrites the power norms have to organize the way our lives matter to us. For Crowell, the source of normativity lies in each agent’s care for and commitment to her practical identity. Inga Römer’s contribution, on the other hand, highlights the role that other people play in normative experience. In dialogue with Kant, Levinas, and Korsgaard, she examines the prospects of approaches that attempt to locate the source of normativity in the second-person encounter. In the third and final contribution to this section, Irene McMullin incorporates aspects of all the views mentioned above by arguing that the sources of normativity are fundamentally plural—at once first-, second-, and thirdpersonal—and that the appropriate response to this normative complexity is characterized not only by resoluteness and responsibility but also by gratitude. This section thus investigates the sources of normativity, how these sources relate to the structure of agency, and how we can best respond to the normative demands these sources make on us.

Section III: Normativity and Nature The essays in this section focus on phenomenology’s long-standing and contested relationship to naturalism. Each one asks us to rethink the relationship between the “space of causes” and what Crowell (2001) has called the normative “space of meaning,” particularly with respect to the different forms of intentionality instantiated in human and nonhuman animals. In the first essay, Mark Okrent argues, against the current of most mainstream phenomenology, that the attempt to characterize human identity as an achievement fails to mark a substantive distinction between human and nonhuman animal “selves.” In a similar vein, Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder examine different ways to conceptualize the intentional agent as embedded in nature, proposing a “relaxed naturalism” in which the domains of the natural and the normative are

4  Matt Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin no longer conceived as separated by an unbridgeable chasm. Finally, with his “radical naturalism,” Joseph Rouse offers another sophisticated attempt to overcome the dualism of the natural and the normative by drawing on contemporary evolutionary theory, especially ecologicaldevelopmental conceptions of organism/environment complexes, to explain how we might think of human normative intentionality as a wholly natural phenomenon. All three chapters thus advance the current conversation about how to reconcile a broadly naturalistic framework with the norm-responsive agents studied by phenomenology.

Section IV: Attuned Agency Section IV further investigates the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing normatively structured meaning, with an emphasis on the affective dimensions of agency. Joseph Schear challenges an orthodox view in classical phenomenology that allows for the reason-responsiveness of our emotions but denies that we hold any responsibility for our moods. On this orthodox view, while we can bring our emotions in line with reality, we have no such control over our moods—they simply “assail us.” Defending an exciting alternative to this orthodoxy, Schear invites us to understand our moods as expressions of agency for which we are, at least in certain respects, answerable. In the second contribution to this section, Matthew Burch further explores the affective dimension of agency with a new phenomenological take on the traditional philosophical problem of akrasia. Burch proposes that we enrich our vocabulary in this area of research by placing actions typically called akratic into two distinct categories; moreover, he draws his proposed distinction along affective lines, breaking such actions into those taken with a clear conscience and those accompanied by negative emotions like guilt, shame, and self-directed anger. Finally, Jack Marsh asks us to think through the unique manifestation of affective intentional agency at work in the early stages of erotic love. He argues that “erotic inception” involves a mode of being with a heightened awareness of the human condition as caught in a tension between the possible and the actual, and he explores how we negotiate that tension by taking risks in love. This section of the volume thus explores different roles that affect plays in shaping norm-responsive action.

Section V: Epistemic Normativity In the final section of this volume, we turn to the kind of normativity specific to our epistemic practices. Raising a critical concern similar to MacAvoy’s worry but in an epistemological register, Walter Hopp questions whether knowledge and knowledge acquisition are best understood in normative terms. Developing an idea from Husserl’s early work— that epistemology is a purely theoretical non-normative discourse— Hopp raises a serious challenge to the “normativity-first” approach to

Introduction 5 phenomenology, and, in doing so, he motivates us to think carefully about the relationship between practical and theoretical reason. In Charles Siewert’s contribution, phenomenology is brought to bear on contemporary debates in the philosophy of perception, asking us to reflect on the recognitional norms that govern meaningful perceptual experience—norms that have been overlooked in favor of models that characterize the contents of such visual experiences in terms of “thin” low-level properties or the kind of high-level properties that figure  in our beliefs. In the final contribution to this section, Dermot Moran considers how the “attitudes” or “stances” we adopt—be they natural or ­transcendental—contribute to the specific kind of knowledge production that phenomenology strives to achieve. In particular, Moran wrestles with the question of how best to understand the distinctive shift from the empirical to the transcendental that lies at the foundation of phenomenology’s study of meaning qua meaning.

Afterword: Phenomenology, Normativity, and Meaning In his “Afterword,” Steven Crowell offers an overview of the themes brought to light in the contributions from the five preceding sections. He gathers those themes under the heading “A  Philosophy of Mind,” because the phenomenological categories under discussion ultimately answer the question of what the mind is. In the course of articulating his own view, Crowell also reconstructs and responds to some of the major criticisms our contributors raise against the “normativity-first” approach to phenomenology, using that dialectic to advance arguments he has developed in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001) and Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (2013). This final chapter should therefore be especially helpful to the reader, as it offers a tight and compelling account of phenomenology construed as an investigation of the normative space of meaning and a synthetic overview of the volume’s contributions as they relate to that account. It is our hope that this volume embodies Husserl’s original vision of phenomenology as a communal practice and a distinctive, autonomous research program. We also hope that it will encourage others to bring the unique methodological resources of phenomenology to bear on today’s pressing philosophical concerns, to treat phenomenology not just as a historical collection of manuscripts but as a living method of philosophical inquiry into the nature of normativity and meaning.

References Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

6  Matt Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1965. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Translated by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper & Row.

Section I

Normativity, Meaning, and the Limits of Phenomenology

1 Constitutive, Prescriptive, Technical, or Ideal? On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” Sara Heinämaa

Phenomenologies of Norms and Normativity In contemporary phenomenology, the terms “norm” and “normative” are used in several topical contexts. One dominant argument is that the structure of intentionality is teleological and as such normative (e.g., Madary 2015; Crowell 2013, 16–20; Kelly 2005; Smith 2011, xiii). This argument is based on the idea that all intentionality involves acts of intending that necessarily are either fulfilled or disappointed in the course of experiencing. The fulfillment of the intentional act can be partial or total, adequate or non-adequate, but the tension between the intending act and the fulfillment/disappointment of the act structures intentional experience as such (e.g., Husserl 1950, 73/34–35, 84/46).1 To put it more precisely, the intention is always focally oriented toward some object or other, and due to this fundamental orientation or aiming, it involves a built-in system of anticipations that can either be confirmed or disconfirmed. The aimed-at object will either be presented in anticipated ways in further interested experiences or not, and the aiming intention thus succeeds or fails in capturing it satisfactorily or adequately. Thus, it can be said that all intentional experiencing involves “conditions of fulfillment” or “conditions of satisfaction.” If we decide to call “normative” such anticipatory structures of intending, based on the fact that they can be either fulfilled or disappointed in the course of experiencing, and if we correspondingly conceptualize the intentional object as a “standard” or “norm” that rules over or regulates intentional consciousness, then it follows that all intentionality, as analyzed by phenomenology, is normative as such.2 The second main application of the terms “norm” and “normative” in contemporary phenomenology is related to the first one but is more specific. We find it in phenomenological discussions concerning the intentional structures of perception, more specifically in analyses concerning the fulfillment conditions of perceptual experiences (cf. Doyon 2015a, 283ff; Crowell 2013, 124ff., 264–6, 268–71). This way of using normbased terms stems from Husserl’s early lectures on thinghood and spatiality, Thing and Space (Ding und Raum [1907] 1973).

10  Sara Heinämaa However, in a closer analysis, perception turns out to involve actually two different kinds of normalizing or normative structures. In Thing and Space, Husserl distinguishes between the normativity of interested perceptions and the normativity of perceptual appearances as such, considered abstractly from all perceptions in which they may figure. Whereas the fulfilled perceptual intention is a goal that can be reached in intuition, the adequate givenness of appearances as such is a regulative idea that cannot be intuited but can merely be captured by thought (Husserl [1907] 1973, 108–9; cf. Doyon 2017, 2015a, 2015b). When perception is embedded in human practices, it is always guided and delimited by interests (Husserl 1973, 3ff., 109). This form of limitation is disclosed to us comparatively by the juxtaposition of interested perceptions and ideally by the idea of the thing as such, independently of all interests. Husserl calls “optimal” the best possible givenness characteristic of interested perception. In other words, “optimal” is the appearance that maximally or best gives the intended object for interested perception (1973, 107). This means that perceptual optima do not belong to pure “appearances as such but to the interest” (Husserl 1973, 112). In this manner, Husserl argues that we must conceptually distinguish between the type of fulfillment that characterizes interested perception and the type of fulfillment that belongs to the essence of thing-­ appearances as such, as abstracted from interested perceptions. For him, both are normalizing or normative in involving rules or norms of certain types, but whereas the norm of interested perception is “realizable” or “achievable,” the norm intrinsic in the essence of appearance as such is that of a limitless possibility of enrichment. In other words, the goal of optimal or maximum givenness in respect to an interest can be achieved, and so striving to fulfillment has a terminus in this case, but the goal of the full enrichment of thing-appearances is an idea of an unachievable goal (Husserl 1973, 105–7). Third, contemporary phenomenological ethics includes a strong Levinasian line of argumentation that traces moral norms and moral normativity to the experiential face-to-face encounter between two persons, oneself and a stranger. According to this Levinasian argument, the other’s face operates as a proto-normative command and a trace of the absolute (the third, God) and thus provides the grounds on which the properly ethical form “ought” and all moral principles with their various contents can and must be established (e.g.,  Loidolt 2018, 7; Crowell 2016, 72, 2012, 578; Smith 2011, 184). The idea is that the proto-normative command, issued by the other’s face or gaze, constitutes myself as a responsive and responsible agent, and this fundamental responsiveness operates as the ground for moral (and social) norms with their diverse contents. In other words, it is the other, the stranger, who establishes myself as a moral agent with obligations, duties, and responsibilities.

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 11 It seems to me that the terms “norm” and “normative” operate in very different meanings in these three contexts of phenomenological argumentation, having several different connotations: standard, goal, optimum, and command. Even if the basic ideas of rule-following and correctness are implied by most usages of these terms, the types of rules and the types of correctness at issue vary greatly. Moreover, the large coverage of ­topics—from the basic structures of human experience and perception to the most demanding aspects of our moral lives—suggests that the variance of meanings may be too broad for the purposes of theorization (cf. Finlay 2019; Parfit 2011; von Wright 1963, 1). If this holds, then one would need to add specifications to the terms “norm” and “normativity” in different contexts of usage. For this purpose, I turn to a philosophical source that lies outside of phenomenology belonging to the 20th-century analytical tradition. In order to organize the multitude of usages given to the terms “norm” and “normative” in contemporary phenomenological debates, I  turn to an explication that the logician and philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright provides of these terms in his Gifford lectures from 1959 to 1960, published as Norm and Action: A Logical Enquiry (1963). This source is relatively old, but its distinctions are still helpful in the organization of the conceptual field of norms and normativity. In contrast to contemporary metaethical explications developed on the basis of debates central in contemporary analytical philosophy (see, e.g.,  Finlay 2019), von Wright’s account of the various usages and senses of “norm” has three advantages that are crucial to contemporary phenomenology. First, von Wright’s explication does not start from the assumption that normativity is predominantly a property of judgments, deliberations or reasons-for-action, or some other units of thinking. This is crucial, since phenomenology is bound to study not just judgment forms but also the pre-judgmental and pre-conceptual layers of experiencing that found judgments (Husserl [1939] 1985; cf. Loidolt 2018; Dreyfus 2017, 19–44; Doyon 2015a; Siewert 2015; Crowell 2013, 26ff., 127–8ff.; Loidolt 2009; Dreyfus 1995). Second, the main aim of von Wright’s analysis is to liberate language from theoretically charged usages and bring it back “to its original home,” that is, back to everyday discourses (cf. Wittgenstein [1953] 1997, § 109, § 116, § 118, § 133; [1967] 1970, § 456). So rather than adjusting normative language to some pre-ordered ontology in the service of a theory or a science—be it an ontology of things, events, properties, facts, functions, or other, von Wright argues that the terms “norm” and “normativity” serve several different purposes in the description of phenomena of various ontic statuses. Thus, his analysis accords with what Sophie Loidolt calls the “pluralism” of contemporary phenomenology of normativity (Loidolt 2018).

12  Sara Heinämaa Finally, von Wright takes seriously the task of studying separately the norms that guide our actions and behaviors, on the one hand, and the norms that concern our being, on the other hand. He inquires into the logical structures of these two types of norms without reducing one type to the other.3 In this, he is influenced by Max Scheler ( 1913–16) and Nicolai Hartmann (1926), who both emphasize the difference between actuality, essential to deliberation and practical intentionality (cf. Husserl 1988b, 204–6), and ideality, involved in valuing and axiological intentionality.4 Whereas the norms of action and behavior concern us here and now, or at each moment, the norms of being that we strive for concern our lives as dynamic and open-ended wholes. This difference in the temporalities of the two types of norms is crucial both experientially and existentially, and the discourse on “normativity” in general tends to cover it. So it seems to me that von Wright’s explication of the meanings of “norm” and “normativity” is less charged with theoretical and metaethical concerns than contemporary analytical approaches and, on the other hand, it offers more conceptual specificity than contemporary phenomenological discussions. For these reasons, I  have chosen to use his distinctions for the clarification of the multitude of usages and senses of the terms “norm” and “normativity” in phenomenological analyses of diverse forms and levels of intentionality.5

Ambiguity and Three Basic Senses According to von Wright, the term “norm” is used in the following six senses in the analysis of human behavior: (i) constitutive or enabling rule, (ii) prescription, (iii) custom, (iv) directive, (v) moral principle, and (vi) ideal principle. Von Wright argues that all these six categories can be said to involve “norms” but in crucially different and irreducible senses. So, what we have is not six different specifications of one general concept of norm but a peculiar type of ambiguity. According to von Wright, the field of norms is not just superficially obscure but is a “bewildering conceptual jungle” that needs clarification in order to allow for proper philosophical agreements and disagreements (von Wright 1963, ix). More precisely, von Wright argues that the term “norm” is not genuinely ambiguous as is, for example, the English term “bank,” which means both a financial institution and the edge of a river. Unlike genuinely ambiguous terms, the word “norm” has several different meanings, yet meanings that are related to one another by various logical connections. This means that even if a philosophical explication of the terminology of “norms” is urgently needed, the attempt to create a general theory of norms covering the whole field would be futile (von Wright 1963, 1; cf. Finlay 2019). Von Wright’s main argument is that the term “norm” can be used in three principal senses that are different but interrelated. Norms can mean

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 13 (i) constitutive or enabling rules, (ii) prescriptions, and (iii) technical norms. What is meant by “norm” in all these main cases is some kind of direction or regulation that guides human behavior. However, the sense of directing and regulating is essentially different in these three cases. Further, von Wright argues that by taking into account these three main senses of “norm,” we can also talk about (iv) social habits or customs, (v) moral principles, and (vi) ideal principles as norms. However, when we thus extend the usage of the term “norm,” we must keep in mind that some of the main ingredients of normativity, identified in the three principal cases, may be missing and that correspondingly some new aspects may become prevalent (cf. Husserl 1988b, 103). If this also holds for contemporary debates in phenomenology, then we would need more than one term to discuss the intending-fulfilling structures of perception and experience, on the one hand, and the correctness of human action and interaction, on the other. And further, more terms would be needed for the philosophical discussion of the normative structures of emotions, beliefs, cognitions, volitions, aspirations, and vocations. In the following, I will first briefly examine the three principal senses of the term “norm,” distinguished by von Wright, and then clarify also the three additional usages that he explicates. Constitutive or Enabling Rules The first concept of norm that von Wright distinguishes is that of a constitutive or enabling rule. This is a norm that establishes or institutes an activity and/or practice. A  paradigmatic example here is the rule of a game, chess, Klondike, or basketball, for example. All games are characterized by normative concepts such as “correct,” “permitted,” “prohibited,” and “obligatory.” We can say, for example, that the basketball player is not permitted to take more than one step with the ball in her hands, and we can say that in chess both opponents are obliged to use six different kinds of pieces. However, a failure to follow the rules of basketball or those of chess is very different from the failure to obey a military command or the failure to follow the directions of use attached to a new technical device. Moreover, all these types of failures differ from the epistemic or perceptual “failures” of not capturing all relevant aspects of an object as well as from the ethically relevant cases in which one ignores an appeal or plea. Two other examples of constitutive rules are philosophically more central than the rules of games. These are the rules of grammar and the rules of logical calculi. Both resemble rules of games in delimiting forms of activity in toto. For example, the agreement rule of grammar, the rule that “demands” that the subject term of a sentence must agree in number with the predicate verb, does not just recommend a good way of speaking

14  Sara Heinämaa and writing or regulate the eloquence of literary style, but determines how sentences can be formed at all. So, what is essential to all constitutive rules is that they determine the moves or steps of the activity at issue and thereby determine and define the activity itself (von Wright 1963, 6–7). Take for instance the five-­ second rule of basketball, which states that offensive players may not remain for more than three consecutive seconds within the marked area surrounding the basket, called “key,” “lane,” and “paint.” The point of this rule is to promote continuous play and hinder stagnation at one of the opposite ends of the playing field. Or take the rule of German grammar that states that the finite verb of a dependent clause must be located at the end of a clause. This grammatic rule defines the infinite set of wellformed sentences of German and thus allows potential speakers to use this language in various circumstances and for multiple different ends (cf. Chomsky 1957, 1965). Von Wright emphasizes that failures to act according to the constitutive norms of games, languages, and logical calculi are characterized by a peculiar kind of duality of two alternative interpretations. Breaking the rules of a game can be understood in two alternative ways: we can either say that the person makes a mistake in playing and plays incorrectly or else we can judge that he is not playing at all, not taking part in the relevant activity at all (even if he seems to make the characteristic movements). Examples of the latter case involve situations such as follows: we see a basketball player walking across the field with the ball in her hands and may wonder if she has hurt herself and has stopped playing; a player suddenly takes a series of steps with the ball, and we may want to rewind the recording tape and see if she merely stumbled or was tripped by one of the players of the opposite team. According to von Wright, this duality of interpretation is a common feature that characterizes both rules of games and rules of grammar and all constitutive rules in general: Of a person who does not speak according to the rules of grammar we say either that he speaks incorrectly or that he does not speak that language. The grounds of saying the one or the other are very much the same as the grounds for saying of a person either that he plays the game incorrectly or does not play it at all. (von Wright 1963, 6–7) Von Wright draws attention also to an important difference between the constitutive norms of natural grammars and those of logical calculi. Whereas norms of grammars have long and thick histories, the histories of calculi are “poor” (von Wright 1963, 7). This essential historicity of linguistic rules is bound to their dynamic character; the constitutive norms of grammar are in a constant process of slow “natural” change. In this context, it is worth emphasizing that changes in grammars are not

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 15 established by negotiations between language users or by commands of linguistic authorities but come about in dynamic language use as such. Notwithstanding their deeply social and cultural character, the norms of languages are not coined, instituted, or established by any particular people. This means that human languages have an organic character (von Wright 1963, 7). However, there is one important similarity between the constitutive norms of grammars and those of logical calculi: both necessarily operate with symbols: “Calculating like speaking a language is a play with symbols” (von Wright 1963, 7). This means that both languages and calculi have semantics. In this respect, both types of norms differ from rules of games that do not need to involve symbols, even though many games do involve them, such as Scrabble or Pictionary. Prescriptions The second category of norms distinguished by von Wright is prescriptions. Paradigmatic cases include national and international laws, military commands, traffic rules, and parental directions. These are norms issued or given by an agent and addressed to and directed at other agents. Von Wright calls “norm-authority” the prescription-issuing party and “norm-subject(s)” the party to whom the norm-authority gives the rules or laws. The norm-authority is a willing agent of some sort, individual or collective. The king, the people, and God are well-known examples of such authorities. Prescriptive norms can be said to have their “source” in the will of the norm-authority, the authority can be said to “want” the subject(s) to adopt a certain conduct or form of action, and the giving of the norm can be said to “manifest” the authority’s will. Thus, the framework of prescriptions is, in von Wright’s analysis, fundamentally volitional or conative. In addition to this authority-subject(s) relation, prescriptions also have two other distinguishing features. First, they are promulgated or promoted on the part of the law-authority by symbols and marks, for example by written documents or by repeated forms of speech. This is an essential aspect of prescriptive norms: the authority needs to promulgate and distribute her prescriptions in order to make her will known to her subjects. Second, prescriptions always come with sanctions or threat of punishment of some sort: “In order to make its will effective the authority attaches a sanction or threat of punishment to the norm” (von Wright 1963, 7, 93ff.). Prescriptions differ from the constitutive norms of language and logical calculi in all four respects: whereas a prescription necessarily involves a norm-authority and norm-subject(s) as well as systems of distribution and punishment, a constitutive rule of grammar and a logical calculus

16  Sara Heinämaa functions independently of all norm-givers and, correlatively, the agents who follow these rules are not norm-subjects. For example, when one learns the rules of a game, say basketball, one learns certain ways of moving in the field and at the same time also the fact that certain steps are allowed while others are prohibited. These are neither prescriptions by some agent nor conditional norms that dictate that if one wants to play basketball then one needs to do this and that. Rather what we have are limiting conditions of the activity to be learned. Referees guard against steps, accidental or deliberate, that do not belong to the game, not against actions that are part of the general behavioral repertoire of humans but have been banned by a decision of some authority, individual or collective. Technical Norms or Directives The third category that von Wright distinguishes is the category of technical norms or directives. These are norms with means-ends structures, that is, norms that operate as determining means for the sake of attaining certain willed ends: “They presuppose ends of human action and necessary relationships of acts to these ends” (von Wright 1963, 15). Examples of such norms include directions of use for medicines, instruments, and technical devices. The distinguishing feature of technical norms is that they have the logical form of the conditional. Accordingly, their standard formulation is an if-then sentence in which the antecedent specifies a willed or wanted thing and the consequent specifies what must, has to, or ought to be done (or not) for the wanted thing to be achieved. Von Wright emphasizes this structural feature and argues that technical norms are logically neither prescriptive nor descriptive but exactly conditional and involve a specification of a volition in their antecedent (von Wright 1963, 10). As such, technical norms differ from both constitutive rules and prescriptions, which both are categorial in their logical form. This must not be taken to imply that all conditionals would be technical norms or involve such norms. Von Wright draws attention to two other categories of conditional norms, neither of which involves a volition (von Wright 1963, 10, 101). He calls “hypothetical” norms that are formulated by if-then sentences but do not involve a reference to a willed goal or to a means of achieving such a goal. Rather than concerning volitional aims, hypothetical norms concern contingent circumstances and order what should be done if a certain contingency arises. An example of such hypothetical behavioral norms would be the preventive measure “If the dog barks do not run!” or the instruction “You must tell me, if you hear any rumors about them.” The third type of conditional norms is called “anankastic.” These are norms that state necessary conditions between goals and actions, independently of anybody’s volitions. An

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 17 example of such a conditional is “If the house is to be made habitable it ought to be heated” (von Wright 1963, 10, 101). Thus defined, both technical norms and prescriptions depend on the human will, but in different ways: technical norms are determined by voluntarily posited goals, but prescriptions originate from someone’s will. This distinguishes both from constitutive rules that do not depend on anybody’s will or volition. On the other hand, prescriptions and constitutive rules are both categorial, lacking the conditional character of technical norms. Von Wright argues that his tripartite distinction between constitutive, prescriptive, and technical norms covers much of our talk about normativity (von Wright 1963, 15–16). These three senses are primitive in that they cannot be defined by one another and by any further sense of “norm.” However, von Wright identifies three additional senses of the term “norm” that combine elements of these basic ones but also involve other features. These additional types of norms are (iv) customs or social habits, (v) moral principles, and (vi) ideal principles.

Three Further Senses Customs or Social Habits Customs or social habits have certain similarities with both constitutive rules and prescriptions but they cannot be categorized as either since they also differ from both in important respects. Examples of such norms include the cultural norms of greeting, eating, dressing, marrying, and burying the dead. These vary across lived space and time. Customs are similar to prescriptions in directing or “regulating” behaviors and influencing the conducts of both individuals and groups. They can be said to be “acquired” by whole communities and “imposed” on their individual members. Thus, customs as prescriptions can be said to exert “normative pressure” on individuals. Moreover, they involve various punitive measures “whereby the community reacts to those members who do not conform to its customs” (von Wright 1963, 9). Despite these similarities, customs and prescriptions also differ in crucial respects: most importantly, customs lack authoritative source and promulgation methods and processes (von Wright 1963, 9, 25). On this basis, von Wright argues that even if customs may be characterized as “anonymous and implicit prescriptions” based on their similarities with genuine prescriptions, they should not be mystified or reified by suggesting that the historical communities or cultures that acquire them and impose them on their members would be norm-authorities. The second, and related, difference is that even though deviations from customs may be “punished” by social marginalization and exclusion (cf. Doyon and Breyer 2015, 1), such punishments are very different from

18  Sara Heinämaa punishments by law, both in terms of content and in terms of execution. In the former case, the norm-breaker is shunned, ostracized, and/or cast out; in the second case, she is subjected to a specific physical or economic restriction, such as fining, imprisonment, dismemberment, or death (von Wright 1963, 9). Again, one should not blur the difference between the two types of norms by talking about social “punishments” as retributions or about the social outcast as an outlaw. Customs are similar to constitutive rules in determining ways of living characteristic of whole communities. Customs and constitutive norms are also similar in having thick histories and dynamic ways of changing and developing. These similarities should not lead us to overlook an essential difference in the manners in which these two types of norms determine their characteristic activities. This difference concerns the coverage of the norm: Whereas the constitutive rules of playing, speaking, or thinking define all possible steps or “moves” of these activities, customs merely differentiate between approved and non-approved behaviors, both of which remain possible within the community. Greeting, for example, is highly customary in most communities and violations against this norm are often strongly disapproved. However, a person who never greets anybody is both thinkable and tolerable in all such communities. Eventually such a person is bound to become an outcast, but this status does not make her an outlaw nor a mere onlooker of social exchanges. By using the metaphor of gaming, we can say that the “moves” of such a person are highly unusual and also disapproved by the other “players” of “the social game,” but despite their exceptional and condemned character they are still moves of the game, moves countered by other moves and moves responded to by other players. In summary, “customs resemble [constitutive] rules in that they determine or quasi-define certain patterns of conduct—and prescriptions in that they exert a ‘normative pressure’ on the members of a community to conform to these patterns” (von Wright 1963, 16). They differ, however, crucially from constitutive rules in the manner in which they determine behavior and from prescriptions in the type of pressure that they exercise. Moral Principles Moral principles, which may also be called “moral rules,” are the second additional category of norms. The paradigmatic example of a moral norm is the one that obliges us to keep our promises. Other examples include the norm according to which children ought to honor their parents, the principle that the innocent should not be punished, and the golden rule according to which one should love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. The coverages of such principles vary greatly. Some are highly context-dependent while others are absolute. For example, the

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 19 moral rules of parenting and sexuality both seem to depend greatly on cultural and historical factors, whereas the commands “Do not kill!” and “Respect the elderly!” have a universal and absolute character. Von Wright draws attention to the fact that moral principles are traditionally and still usually taken to be either a subspecies of prescriptions or else a subspecies of technical norms. The third alternative, common in philosophical literature, is to argue that these norms are sui generis. Von Wright rejects all three analyses and argues that, in truth, moral principles do not belong to any logically distinct category of norms nor do they form a category of their own. Instead, they combine features of several other types of norms, most importantly features of constitutive norms, prescriptions, and customs. And not only this, but more: different moral principles combine different logical features of normativity. Thus, the category of moral principles is logically heterogeneous. The peculiarity of moral norms as I see them is not that they form an autonomous group of their own; it is rather that they have complicated logical affinities to the other main types of norms and to the value-notion of good and evil. To understand the nature of moral norms is therefore not to discover some unique feature in them; it is to survey their complex relationships to a number of other things. (von Wright 1963, 13) Some moral principles are, according to von Wright, similar to the constitutive rules of language and logical calculi in constituting complete forms of action while others are more like customs in being contextual or situational. For example, the obligation to keep one’s promise is similar to a constitutive rule of grammar in defining the institution of giving and taking promises. In contrast, sexual ethics includes custom-like moral principle, such as the norms against inbreeding and the norms against zoophilia and bestiality (cf. von Wright 1963, 12). Neither are all moral principles prescriptions—heteronomous or autonomous. Prescriptions have an important role to play in moral education and in the expression of morality, but this should not be taken to imply that all moral principles would have the logical character of prescriptions (Wright 1963, 12–13). In this context, von Wright also argues that self-regulating “commands” must be kept distinct from authoritybased prescriptions: “Such ‘autonomous’ prescriptions given by man to himself are . . . very unlike the ‘heteronomous’ prescriptions, categorical or hypothetical, given by a norm-authority to some norm-subjects. It is doubtful whether one should call the former ‘prescriptions’ at all” (von Wright 1963, 11). This means that philosophical discussions on self-regulation must not be modeled on authority-based regulations by others.

20  Sara Heinämaa Ideal Principles The final sense in which we speak about norms, distinguished by von Wright, is the sense of ideal principles. These are not norms of doing, acting, or behaving but are norms of being. Here von Wright draws directly from Max Scheler’s distinctions between “Tunsollen” and “Seinsollen” and between “normative ought” (normatives Sollen) and “ideal ought” (ideales Sollen) and argues that the normativity of doing and that of being must be kept distinct, since the former implies the concept of rule-following while the latter suggests that adherence to norms is like seeking something or constantly striving for something (von Wright 1963, 112–13). Examples of ideal principles include norms that articulate ethical virtues and norms that govern professional excellences. When we state, for instance, that a human person ought to be generous, truthful, and just, we express a moral norm that has the logical character of an ideal principle; and when we strive for these perfections, then we act according to this ideal principle which is part of morality. Analogously, when one points out that a university professor should be patient with her students but at the same time also firm, then one states an ideal principle of teaching. And if one then acts with firmness and patience in the class room—despite possible complaints, then one is striving for professional excellence, not merely accommodating oneself to traditional academic conventions or following the latest pedagogical directions issued from the administration. Such striving or seeking to be good may occasionally demand that one questions or abandons the traditional norms and standards that regulate the practicing of the profession in one’s own community. More radically, sometimes one may also need to act against the general conventions that regulate the profession globally across communities and even whole cultures, contemporary and past. In this way, one may become a social outcast, but that does not imply that one would have lost one’s task or obligation as a professional. Instead, one may act as a reformer or a revolutionary. Ideal principles thus differ from norms understood as customs or social habits: in the case of such norms, one’s responsibility is primarily for the ideal, not to the fellow practitioners of the profession (cf. Frankfurt 2004; Heinämaa 2014). In having this goal-oriented character‚ ideal principles may seem similar to technical norms. Von Wright argues, however, that we must not make the logical mistake of confusing our striving for professional, epistemic, or moral ideals with the processes in which we follow directions and try to achieve goals. This is because ideal principles have a constitutive and enabling character: they are not motivational causes for our actions but are conditions that define ways of being. There is a certain similarity between ideal rules and technical norms. Striving for the ideal resembles the pursuit of an end. It would

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 21 however be a mistake to think of the ideal rules as norms concerning means to ends. In order to be a good teacher a man ought to have such and such qualities. . . . But those qualities of a man which determine his goodness as a teacher are not causally related to the ideal—as the use of ladder may be a causal prerequisite of fetching a book from a shelf. The former relation is conceptual (logical). The ideal rules determine a concept, e.g., the concept of a (good) teacher or soldier. In this they are similar to rules of a game. (von Wright 1963, 15)6 For example, let us assume that the ideal principle of being a teacher includes the goal of being both firm and kind. If this holds, then a teacher must address and treat her students firmly and kindly. This must not be construed as a conditional that dictates that if someone settles to be a teacher, then she must act firmly and kindly toward students. Rather than specifying causally, functionally, or motivationally what the person needs to do in order to figure or operate as a teacher, the ideal principle defines what it entails to be a teacher. By defining ways of being, ideal principles govern actions and types of action but also modes of acting (cf. Audi 2016). Whatever the soldier does, he is obliged to act bravely and in a disciplined manner; analogously, firmness and kindness should characterize the attitude of a teacher in her various activities; and finally, the virtuous person with moral integrity is expected to act justly and honestly in all her dealings. An academic who addresses her colleagues respectfully but criticizes her students dismissingly and scornfully is not a good teacher and, depending on the gravity of her manners, may not be a teacher at all.

Open Questions and a Practical Conclusion Based on von Wright’s explications, I would like to propose some critical considerations about the usage of the terms “norm” and “normativity” in contemporary phenomenology. These concern the three use contexts introduced at the beginning of the article. I will first draw attention to specific difficulties in the conceptualizations of the norms of (i) intentionality, (ii) interested perception, and (iii) moral experience respectively, and then propose a more general diagnosis. (i) Intentionality. First, it seems to me that the terminology of norms and normativity is equivocal in the discussion of the basic teleological structure of intentionality that connects intentions to their fulfillment conditions and fulfilling experiences. On the one hand, the term “normativity” as used in this context suggests that fulfillment is a goal of some kind, not a goal voluntarily chosen or decided upon by anyone, but an implicit aim that guides all articulation or interpretation of intentional experience.

22  Sara Heinämaa On the other hand, the terms “conditions of fulfilment” and “conditions of satisfaction,” used in the characterization of the relation between intention and its fulfillment, suggest that the fundamental normativity at issue in the teleology of experiencing has the character of constitutive or enabling rules. If this holds, then these norms, rather than regulating intentional activity, would define and delimit types of intentional activity—such as perceptual, emotive, and practical and their different varieties. It is, of course, possible that the normativity involved in intending has a double character and that the norms at issue in this case resemble both goals of some type and also constitutive rules. If this holds, then the task would be to conceptualize this double function and to explicate its implications. (ii) Perception. Second, the term “normativity” is also ambiguous in the discussion of interested perception. On the one hand, the optima that govern interested perception may seem to work as technical norms which dictate that if one wants to achieve something, then one must do this or that. The examples given of perceptual norms strengthen the impression that these norms are technical in their logical form. A common example is a coffee cup held in the hand. In such cases, it is usually said that if one wants to grasp the perceivable object more adequately, then one needs to rotate it in one’s hands and study it from various sides. Analogously, in a practical context, we may state that if we want to remove a splinter in our toe, then we must see it clearly and for this purpose must study the toe in bright daylight. And for scientific interests, we may state that if we are interested in identifying a new plant found in the rainforest, then we need to observe its characteristic parts and their forms. Thus, the ifthen vocabulary used in the characterization of perceptual norms and the examples of such norms suggests that these norms are technical in their logical form. But on the other hand, perceptual optima are similar to ideal principles in involving references to the best possible. The telos of intentional fulfillment or satisfaction characteristic of perception is not just any kind of goal but is an optimal experiential state, that is, the best possible state in respect to the interests of the intending agent. This seems to imply that we are here dealing with values and not merely with goals. Further, if we take into consideration the norms of appearing as such, then our picture of perceptual normativity gets even more complicated. This is because the norms of appearing seem to operate as constitutive norms (or ideal principles) that delimit the basic structure in which specific interests can differentiate between various concrete perceptions. (iii) The face. Third, the terminology of “commands” may be misleading in the discussion of the encounter between the self and the other. Rather than functioning as a command or proto-command, the face seems to function as a limiting or constitutive condition for moral

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 23 experiences. A related problem is that if moral norms vary considerably in their logical form—from prescriptions and customs to constitutive or enabling rules and to ideal norms, as von Wright’s analysis suggests, then the face-to-face encounter with the other may be too narrow to serve as the ground for all moral norms (cf. von Wright 1963, 98–100). Even if the face would provide the proto-normative foundation for prescriptive norms, such as “Thou shalt not kill!,” we may need more grounds or other types of grounds for the establishment of the moral norms that resemble constitutive rules, such as “Do not lie!,” or for the moral norms that operate like ideal principles of being, such as “Strive for your best!” (cf. Husserl 1988a; Heinämaa 2014). (iv) Being. Finally, when ideal principles of morality and professional life are formulated by if-then clauses, they may be confused with technical norms. The logical-conceptual difference between these two usages of the term “norms” is, as we saw above, that whereas the relation between the antecedent if-clause and the subsequent then-clause is causal or motivational in the case of technical norms, it is conceptual in the case of the ideal principles that govern our professional and ethical lives. This means that in statements that concern morality or our professional lives, the subsequent clause would define a whole way of being, rather than just identifying particular motivations or reasons for acting or behaving. For example, the statement “If I am to be a teacher, then I must be kind and firm with students” would not concern our motivations or reasons for acting in this or that way but would concern the very meaning of being-a-teacher. Steven Crowell draws attention to this difference in his Normativity in Husserl and Heidegger by arguing that we must distinguish between two senses of purposefulness: on the one hand technical purposefulness, formulated by the phrases “in order to do” and “in order to make,” and on the other hand existential purposefulness, formulated by the phrase for-the-sake-of-being-something (2013, 28ff.). Crowell’s argument is based in his reading of Heidegger’s phenomenology of care that he contrasts with Husserl’s phenomenology of perception. Crucially, however, his Heideggerian account of the relations of founding between technical and existential norms of action is partially analogous to the argument that Husserl puts forward in Formal and Transcendental Logic in respect to the norms of logic. In contrast to his contemporary psychologistic philosophies of logic and psychologistic readings of Kant, Husserl argues that the prescriptive and technical norms that govern inferences have to be grounded in ideal norms of truth and being (Hartimo 2018).7 This means that phenomenology, both in its Husserlian and Heideggerian forms, involves arguments to the effect that the norms of acting and thinking—technical and prescriptive—have foundations in ideal principles or norms of being or striving. Thus, phenomenology in general can be said to illuminate the fundamental role that ideal principles of being have in both epistemic and

24  Sara Heinämaa practical normativity. Moreover, the conceptual and methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the articulation of diverse norms of being may be one of its distinguishing strengths in respect to alternative approaches that predominantly deal with norms of judgment and/or action. But in order to bring out this strength and to demonstrate its whole force, ideal principles must be distinguished clearly from other types of norms. For this purpose, one thing that needs to be emphasized is that the ideals that guide us existentially and morally may terminologically or conceptually be confused with the limit shapes and objects of the exact sciences. This is because both types of idealities can be characterized as “unreachable goals.” Moral and existential ideals always exceed what we can perform and accomplish, and the limit shapes of geometry cannot be grasped in experience but can merely be “approximated.” Notwithstanding this partial similarity, the idealities of our professional practices and morality are not similar or analogous to the limit shapes studied in geometry; and correlatively, their subjective sources are not analogous to the extrapolating activities of thinking essential to geometrical inquiries. A person may be said to act “in the image of God” or to strive for the best possible, but such imitation or striving for perfection is not an approximation or extrapolation. It is not that we take smaller and smaller “steps” toward some goal in endless repetition and thus come closer and closer to it. Rather, each of us faces the immeasurable richness of the world personally at each moment and navigates it with the help of ideal principles. These guide us in unexpected situations and in ever new circumstances, not in an idealized space of quantified measures. In other words, the principles of our ethical and professional lives regulate us in respect to the lifeworld, its indeterminate openness, not in respect to the closed universe of the sciences and their exact objectivities. After these considerations, my conclusion is that contemporary phenomenology of normativity would greatly benefit from the specification of its terminology. By this I do not suggest that we should add indexes to the terms “norm” and “normativity” and write, for example, “normativityconst,” “normativityideal,” and “normativitytech”—a solution characteristic of the analytical tradition. Rather, I  would like to argue that contemporary phenomenologists have the great advantage of being able to draw from classical and hermeneutical analyses of intentionality and from the concepts devised and developed for these analyses. These resources include the concepts of “horizontality,” “verticality,” “teleology,” “affectivity,” “ideality,” “vocation,” “existence,” and “care,” which may be burdened by long traditions but, on the other hand, involve rich potentials for the specification and differentiation of various types and layers of norms and forms of normativity. Here Husserl’s advice about concept formation still seems valid to me: rather than deciding

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 25 about terms and concepts in advance, one should fix them while progressing in the analysis: [W]e must note quite universally that in phenomenology, at the beginning, all concepts or terms must remain in flux in a certain way, always being at the point of being differentiated in accord with the progress of the analysis of consciousness and the cognition of new phenomenological strata within what is at first seen in undifferentiated unity. . . . For the beginning, any expression is good, and more particularly, any suitably chosen figurative expression which enables us to guide regard to the phenomenological occurrence which can be seized upon clearly. (Husserl [1913] 1950, 170–1/201–2)

Notes 1 The pagination given first refers to the original source, and the pagination that follows this, after the slash, refers to the English translation. Both sources are given in one and the same entry in the list of references below. 2 For the pragmatist and neo-pragmatist dimensions of this understanding, see Nenon 2017. 3 Following Wittgenstein, von Wright distinguishes the surface form of sentences from their logical form. 4 When making the distinction between norms as rules and prescriptions, on the one hand, and norms as ideal principles, on the other, von Wright refers explicitly to Scheler’s Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1916) but also to Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethik (1926) and G.E. Moore’s “The nature of moral philosophy” (1922) (von Wright 1963, 14). On the distinction between ideal principles and prescriptions in the philosophy of logic, see Hartimo 2018. 5 Three different senses of intention and intentionality converge in discussions on the normativity of experience: (i) the phenomenological sense in which each experience can be said to be intentional in being directed at an object of some sort, (ii) the action-theoretically central sense in which we can say that we intend to do something, and (iii) the general practical sense in which we can intend to reach goals and realize plans of different sorts. 6 Von Wright also uses the term “ideal rules” for ideal principles. 7 Hartimo demonstrates that Husserl diverts from both Kant and Frege in arguing that the prescriptive norms of logical inference have to have a justification in reflected ideal norms of logic.

References and Further Reading Audi, Robert. 2016. Means, Ends and Persons: The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. London: Mouton. ———. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2012. “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context.” European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 564–88.

26  Sara Heinämaa ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. “Second-Person Phenomenology.” In The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, 70–89. London: Routledge. Doyon, Maxime. 2015a. “Intentionality and Normativity.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (2): 279–95. ———. 2015b. “Perception and Self-Consciousness.” In Normativity in Perception, edited by Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 38–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. “Husserl and Perceptual Optimality.” Husserl Studies 34 (2): 171–89. Doyon, Maxime, and Thiemo Breyer. 2015. “Introduction.” In Normativity in Perception, edited by Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1995. Being-in-the-World: A  Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2017. Background Practices: Essays on the Understanding of Being. Edited by Mark A. Wrathall. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finlay, Stephen. 2019. “Defining Normativity.” In Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence, edited by David Plunkett, Scott Saphiro, and Kevin Toh. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, Harry G. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Hartimo, Mirja. 2018. “Normativity of Husserl’s Logic.” Paper Presented at Phenomenology of Norms and Normativity, organized by MEPA (Academy of Finland), University of Jyväskylä, University of Copenhagen, May 22. Hartmann, Nicolas. 1926. Ethik. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. Heinämaa, Sara. 2013. “Transcendental Intersubjectivity and Normality: Constitution by Mortals.” In The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, edited by Dermot Moran and Rasmus Thybo Jensen, 83–103. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2014. “Husserl’s Ethics of Renewal: A Personalistic Approach.” In New Perspectives to Aristotelianism and Its Critics, edited by Miira Tuominen, Sara Heinämaa, and Virpi Mäkinen, 196–212. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Heinämaa, Sara, and Joona Taipale. 2018. “Normality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, edited by Giovanni Stanghellini, Andrea Raballo, Matthew Broome, Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Paolo FusarPoli, and René Rosfort. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. [1907] 1973. Ding und Raum, Vorlesungen 1907. Edited by Ulrich Claesges, Husserliana 16. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. In English: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. ———. [1913] 1950. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischenPhilosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Edited by Walter Biemel, Husserliana 3. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. In English: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Fred Kersten. The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.

On the Ambiguity of the Term “Norm” 27 ———. [1939] 1985. Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, revised and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Felix Mayer Verlag. In English: Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. [1950] 1973. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by Stephan Strasser, Husserliana 1. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. In English: Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. ———. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–1935. Edited by Iso Kern, Husserliana 15. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1988a. Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1922–1937. Edited by Tom Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana 27. Den Haag: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1988b. Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1924. Edited by Ulrich Melle, Husserliana 28. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kelly, Sean Dorrance. 2005. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty.” In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, edited by Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, 74–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loidolt, Sophie. 2009. Anspruch und Rechtfertigung: Eine Theorie des Rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2018. “Experience and Normativity: The Phenomenological Approach.” In The Ideas of Experience: Phenomenological Explorations, Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Antonio Cimino, Carli Coenen, and Cees Leijenhorst. Leiden: Brill. Madary, Michael. 2015. “Seeing Our World.” In Normativity in Perception, edited by Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 56–72. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nenon, Tom. 2017. “Heidegger’s Pragmatist Readers.” In Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology, edited by Ondrej Svec and Jakub Capek, 39–52. London: Routledge. Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheler, Max. 1913–1916. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Halle: Verlag von Max Niemeyer. Siewert, Charles. 2015. “On Getting a Good Look: Normativity and Visual Experience.” In Normativity in Perception, edited by Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 17–37. London: Macmillan/Palgrave. Smith, William H. 2011. The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity. London: Routledge. Staiti, Andrea. 2011. “Different Worlds and Tendency to Concordance: Towards a New Perspective on Husserl’s Phenomenology of Culture.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 10: 127–43. Tuckett, Jonathan. 2018. “Spirituality and Intersubjective Consensus: A Response to Ciocan and Ferencz-Flatz.” Human Studies 41 (2): 313–31. Von Wright, Georg Henrik. 1963. Norm and Action. London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul.

28  Sara Heinämaa Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953] 1997. Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, Second Edition. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ———. [1967] 1970. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Stanford, CA: University of California Press.

2 The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology, and the Normative Turn Leslie MacAvoy

Phenomenology makes an important contribution to philosophical thinking about lived experience because of its emphasis on elucidating the world as a space of meaning. Situating the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in relation to other positions in the early 2 ­ 0th-century debates about epistemology and transcendental logic reveals that the idea of the space of meaning largely develops as an extension of the neo-Kantian notion of validity (Geltung). This background clarifies the philosophical problematic that the space of meaning aims to address, the  particular contribution that phenomenology makes to the debate, and the way in which phenomenology is transcendental insofar as it aims both to articulate the structure of the space of meaning as a condition of the possibility of intelligible experience and to explain how a philosophical understanding of that structure is possible. More recently, there has been a “normative turn” in phenomenology, which recasts the topic of validity and meaning in terms of standards and measures that are used in evaluating objects and the success and failure of actions and projects. Norms for objects, it is argued, get their normative standing in relation to norms for skills and practices to which agents must adhere in order to perform actions in an appropriate or intelligible way. It has been argued by Crowell in particular that the norms for skills and practices themselves derive their normativity from the practical identities to which they are attached, which exert a normative force insofar as an agent takes them as her own. The normative turn, then, takes the topic of meaning and validity in a direction that emphasizes practical norms for what one ought to do or to be, and characterizes the normativity of those norms in terms of the experience of obligation or binding force. Thus, the question emerges, What is the proper object of phenomenology— meaning or normativity? In this essay, I will argue that it is principally meaning. While there is a normativity to meaning, it does not consist in the understanding of normativity that has to do with a binding force or claim, nor with an “ought.” In what follows I  will explain, first, why phenomenology is concerned with meaning and how this relates to the neo-Kantian notion of validity. Second, I will examine Crowell’s version

30  Leslie MacAvoy of the normative turn to assess the legitimacy of the shift from talk of meaning to talk of normativity. I  will argue that in making this shift, his work highlights a metaethical and practical sense of normativity as involving an “ought” that expresses a normative claim. In the third section, I will question whether normativity in this sense is the proper object of phenomenology by examining the differences in the neo-Kantian and early phenomenological critiques of psychologism. I will show that while the neo-Kantians accept the view that the validity of a logical law should be understood as normativity, Husserl and Heidegger both reject it. In the final section, I argue that the normativity proper to phenomenological meaning consists instead in the validity of meaning-content, which is understood as already holding or as a priori. Developing on Heidegger’s account of involvement, interpretation, and the fore-structures of understanding, I sketch out a distinction between ontic and ontological senses of the a priori. This sense of the normativity of meaning as a priori is overshadowed by the more practical orientation of the normative turn.

The Space of Meaning and Phenomenology Phenomenology is concerned above all with analyzing lived experience with the aim of disclosing its structure. Husserl makes an important advance in seeing that meaning pertains not just to linguistic signs but also to experience in general. That is, things show up for us in terms of meaning through intentionality. Thus, phenomenology analyzes phenomena as objective correlates of intentional acts, and the particular dimension of these objective correlates that it is concerned to disclose is their sense. In this way, phenomenology aims to unpack the structures of intelligibility, as well as the structures through which sense is constituted. Despite their differences, Husserl and Heidegger both accept this basic position. Husserl refers to intentional objects and noematic correlates as senses (Sinne) and to the space of meaning opened up by phenomenological investigation as, first, phenomenological immanence and, subsequently, transcendental consciousness. Heidegger emphasizes that we engage with things in the world in a kind of practical intentionality that he calls circumspective concern. In this comportment that is essentially interpretive; we take something ready-to-hand as something in the course of our dealings with it. In doing so, we disclose it in terms of a reference (Verweisung) which is characterized as a signification or meaning (Bedeutung). What shapes the meaning that something is disclosed as having is the whole of which it is a part and which provides its context, as well as the projects in which we are engaged within these contexts. For Heidegger, then, the space of meaning is the world, the structure of significance in relation to which phenomena are disclosed as intelligible.

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 31 Crowell’s book Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning contributes valuable insights into the “space of meaning” thesis by pointing to other philosophical examples to help clarify what is meant by the term. For instance, Sellars distinguishes justifications from causal explanations and locates the former in a “space of reasons,” and Wittgensteinian philosophy holds that phenomena or sentences have their place in a “logical space.” The most important example is the neo-Kantian discussion of the “realm of validity” (Geltungsbereich), which contrasts with the domain of empirical phenomena (Crowell 2001, 3). All these versions of the space of meaning maintain that meaning is to be distinguished from physical, psychical, or naturalistic phenomena situated within a causal nexus and explained with reference to causal relations. The domain of meaning is ordered by a different set of relations, which might be characterized as rational, logical, or as making sense. Husserl argues for a version of this distinction in texts such as “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” when he distinguishes phenomenological and naturalistic considerations of consciousness. Crowell’s book makes a major contribution to our understanding of phenomenology by showing how its account of the space of meaning develops in relation to transcendental logic and the philosophical concerns that it aimed to address. Both neo-Kantianism and early phenomenology were concerned to distinguish philosophical inquiry from that pursued by the empirical sciences. Put very simply, the neo-Kantians argued that while the empirical sciences investigate what is, philosophy should investigate what holds. Thus, they argued that the proper object of philosophical inquiry is not the realm of empirical phenomena, but rather a logical space of validity (Crowell 2001, 3). The investigation of this space is the task of transcendental logic, which is concerned with the categories and principles that are valid or hold for objects a priori. For Lask, whose work has been shown to be particularly significant for phenomenology,1 transcendental logic is basically a logic for objects that investigates their categorial, logical form. What holds are categories, and they hold for objects such that an object is intelligible because of this logical form (Crowell 2001, 43–6). Since these forms are valid and render objects intelligible, the space of validity can also be characterized as a space of meaning. On this view, phenomenology is similarly concerned with transcendental logic and investigation of categorial structure. However, while Lask sees meaning and categorial form as belonging to the structure of the object as such, phenomenology emphasizes that these objects are correlates of intentional acts and therefore their categorial structures are constituted within intentionality. Therefore, for Husserl transcendental logic is an investigation into the a priori structures of constitution within transcendental subjectivity (Crowell 2001, 57–9). While for Lask this approach would make logical structure “subjective,” for Husserl it

32  Leslie MacAvoy makes that structure accessible in a way that allows us to give an account of it. If we are to give a philosophical account of logical structure, it must be possible for that structure to be given as such.2 This means that phenomenological investigation analyzes meaning, which is categorial, logical form. That form is a condition of the possibility of the intelligibility of entities. In the natural attitude, objects are given in their intelligibility, and we simply understand them without attending to the structures of intelligibility that enable that understanding. The phenomenological reduction redirects our attention from objects to the intentional structures and meanings that belong to them and make them accessible as they are. Thus, the phenomenological clarification of the space of meaning is transcendental because it involves showing not only that things show up for us as meaningful or in terms of meaning but how this is possible. That is, phenomenology inquires into what makes the space of meaning possible and thus investigates the structures of meaning that serve as conditions of the possibility of intelligible experience. But it also provides an account of what makes our philosophical grasp of the space of meaning as a space of meaning possible (Crowell 2001, 9–10), and therefore is concerned with how we can acquire knowledge of the structures described at the first level. Heidegger’s innovation is to draw attention to this meaning dimension. He emphasizes that intentionality is the structure of lived experience and the space of meaning is the world, that is, a structure of significance that functions as a background in terms of which and in relation to which things show up as intelligible in circumspection. This background of the world is understood in advance and is thus a condition of the interpretive “taking as” that occurs in circumspection. This account, then, not only invites us to consider how logical, categorial form might be embedded in the structure of the world and how our being-in-the-world might play a role in constituting these meaning structures, it also points toward the hermeneutic dimension of being-in-the-world. Thus, the thesis that phenomenology analyzes the space of meaning involves several important claims. First, the philosophical concern to investigate the space of meaning emerges out of neo-Kantian concerns with and interest in validity and the set of philosophical problems that this notion aims to address. This indicates some overlap between neoKantianism and phenomenology, particularly with regard to the critique of psychologism, but as will be shown in the third section, “Normativity, Validity, and the Critique of Psychologism,” there is disagreement about the details. Second, phenomenological investigation analyzes meaning, which is categorial, logical form. Third, phenomenology is transcendental because it investigates this form or meaning that is a condition of the possibility of the intelligibility of entities and because it offers an account of how knowledge of such conditions is possible. Finally, it points us toward the hermeneutic dimension of our lived experience,

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 33 suggesting that categorial meaning structures are constituted in our being-in-the-world.

Norms, Normativity, and the Normative Turn If phenomenology is primarily about elucidating the space of meaning, what justifies the normative turn? Prima facie talk of norms and normativity seems to have little to do with meaning, and the topic receives little attention in the work of classical phenomenologists. To determine the legitimacy of the shift from talk of meaning to talk of normativity, it is necessary to look closely at the work of Steven Crowell, whose position best represents an effort to develop and extend the phenomenological thesis about the space of meaning to the domain of normativity. However, examination of this position reveals that the normative turn emphasizes normativity as the binding force of “ought” claims, which I  will argue in the third section does not capture the normativity of meaning that is the primary focus of phenomenology. In Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Crowell redescribes the space of meaning with which phenomenology is concerned as a normative space (Crowell 2013, 1). In general terms, the rationale for this move is that intentionality relates to its objects in terms of meaning, and therefore intentional objects are always taken as something or other. The meanings in terms of which objects are grasped through the structure of intentionality function as norms insofar as to intend something is to grasp it “in light of what it is supposed to be, what it means to be such a thing” (Crowell 2013, 153, my emphasis). So taking something as something is taking it in light of a norm, where the norm is the meaning or being of that kind of thing. If phenomenology is concerned with a space of meaning, and if meanings function normatively in the disclosure of objects, then the space of meaning is a normatively structured space. While this sketch suggests that what is under consideration are norms for the being of objects, in fact the notion of norm is quite broad and is meant to include anything that serves as a “standard of success or failure” for measuring speech and behavior (Crowell 2013, 2). Indeed, Crowell argues that norms for what something is are themselves grounded in skills and practices that point back to human behavior, activity, and projects. The basic thesis about the relationship between phenomenology and normativity is given greater specificity through discussion of the work of Husserl and Heidegger and is elaborated in three primary ways. The first and most general characterization of the normative is through a contrast with the natural, echoing the distinction between the space of meaning and the realm of physical, psychical, or natural objects. Husserl’s argument in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” that phenomenology is transcendental is used to justify the claim that it is normative. Husserl argues

34  Leslie MacAvoy that consciousness, as phenomenology is concerned with it, is not a natural phenomenon subject to laws of causation but rather a transcendental one. It belongs to a realm that is ordered according to a different kind of law that pertains to the essential “forms” of conscious experience within intentionality. On Crowell’s reading, this means that intentionality and the lawfulness that pertains to it belong to a normative realm (Crowell 2013, 153). Although he disagrees that the normativity of experience can be explained with reference to consciousness alone (Crowell 2013, 153), he endorses the idea that phenomenology elucidates phenomena with regard to a dimension that exceeds causal relations (Crowell 2013, 42–3). Phenomenology must preserve the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical, but the theme of transcendental phenomenology, Crowell argues, must be the normative space of meaning (Crowell 2013, 148). A second way the topic of normativity is explored is through a discussion of intentionality. This establishes that the intentional object serves as a sort of norm for an object, i.e., a standard by which something is measured to determine if it counts as one kind of thing or another. For Husserl, intentional objects are objective unities that can be meant in multiple acts, and therefore they are unities of meaning or sense. That is, I take my experience to be of something and the notion of that something, the objective unity or unity of sense, then functions as a norm such that the experience implies that I ought to have other experiences that are consistent with the norm. Crowell explains this by pointing out that objects are given in intentional acts as having “intentional implications” that indicate something about what we can expect future experiences to be like if the present experience is true.3 The most obvious examples involve perception. In visual perception, one directly perceives only one side of the object. Yet one expects that if one were to turn the object or walk around it, the other sides would come into view, and one might even have expectations for what those other sides would be like. These expectations are based on what one takes the object to be. Thus, through intentional implications, the experience intends a unified object that functions as a norm, containing criteria or satisfaction conditions for something’s being the object that I take it to be. These satisfaction conditions can be expressed in terms of success and failure such that the object can succeed or fail at satisfying the conditions and thus at being the kind of thing identified by the norm (Crowell 2013, 26, 36). The normative dimension of intentionality is due to the fact that its structure entails a “taking as” (Crowell 2013, 125). While this “as-structure” is implicit in Husserl, it is a prominent feature of Heidegger’s phenomenology and his account of “dealings” or practical comportment. This turn toward the practical leads to the third way of developing the position on normativity, by elaborating on the normative dimension of the practical and existential context of intentionality. In its everyday

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 35 dealings in the world, Dasein encounters things as equipment ready-tohand in that it discloses them as for some purpose or other. For instance, the wooden spoon is disclosed as a wooden spoon, i.e., as an implement for stirring. This is its reference. But, as Heidegger points out, an item of equipment typically belongs with other items of equipment that are grouped together by the practices in which they are generally used. So, the wooden spoon might be part of an equipmental whole that includes bowls, whisks, measuring cups, and so on . . . in short, kitchen equipment, which includes whatever is necessary or useful for carrying out the tasks and activities that go on in kitchens. But those activities are in turn engaged in by Dasein for various purposes. So the reference of the individual item of equipment is to be understood in relation to the totality of references for the equipmental whole of which it is a part, and this whole in turn takes its orientation from Dasein’s practical activity. So Dasein’s background understanding of the whole, the totality of significations, is what allows it to disclose some item of equipment as something. Crowell recasts this Heideggerian picture in normative terms. If taking something as something amounts to taking it in light of a norm, then that means that taking something in light of a norm depends upon disclosing it in a practical context that has a normative structure because of the norms that belong to the practical activity involved. So something can only be taken as a wooden spoon to the extent that it satisfies the conditions of being one, where that entails being successfully usable for stirring. But this function and the standards for its successful performance are defined relative to the norms of a practice of cooking. So the norms for the practices, i.e., for doing certain kinds of things, determine the functions that constitute the norms for the objects or items of equipment connected with the practice. Thus, Crowell writes that “the norms that enable things to show up as something belong to the skills and practices themselves. It is they that contain the success conditions thanks to which the thing can be appropriate or inappropriate, valuable or valueless” (Crowell 2013, 162). Thus, the norms for whether something can be something are established relative to the norms for doing something. But for Crowell the norms associated with skills and practices in turn only show up as normative relative to a practical identity that is tied up with those skills and practices. So the norms for cooking are norms for someone whose practical identity involves cooking or being a chef. One succeeds or fails at being a chef to the extent that one performs the appropriate activities skillfully, i.e., in a manner that satisfies the success conditions defined by the practice. Thus, the norms for doing something that determine the norms for the being of objects are in turn grounded in another kind of norm for being, this time a norm for being a certain type of agent. Thus, Crowell maintains that “the instrumental normativity of the in-order-to relations in light of which things are disclosed as suitable

36  Leslie MacAvoy or useful can function as disclosive only so far as I am beholden to the ‘constitutive rules’ of a certain practice” (Crowell 2013, 29). Ultimately, Crowell argues that true normativity requires more than just conforming to norms. It requires being responsive to and acting in the light of norms. That is, the norms for a particular practical identity are only normative for Dasein to the extent that Dasein takes them over as her own, holds herself to them, and acts in the light of them. Thus, Crowell writes, the functional norms of the practice that establish such propriety [the propriety of a tool’s function relative to a practice] gain their own normative force from my existential commitment to them, that is, from my trying to live up to what it is to be a carpenter. Thus something (e.g., a hammer) can succeed or fail at being useful only if I can succeed or fail at being something (e.g., a carpenter). (Crowell 2013, 162) The norms for a practice and the norms for objects are ultimately only normative insofar as the practical identity with which they are associated is one with which I identify and which I take as binding. Thus, although the normative is initially just distinguished from the natural, the fuller view delineates different kinds of norms: norms for objects, action, and identities. It also articulates several dimensions of the normative and normativity. First, there is the idea of a norm as a standard or measure. Second is the idea of the normative as a relation between the norm or standard and the thing measured such that it is evaluated in relation to the norm. Sometimes this is expressed in terms of satisfaction conditions, i.e., what is measured satisfies or doesn’t satisfy the conditions specified by the norm, but sometimes it is expressed in terms of success or failure, i.e., what is measured succeeds or fails at being what it should be or at accomplishing what it should accomplish as specified by the norm. Finally, with the discussion of practical identity a third sense of normativity is introduced, namely a normative claim that a norm exerts such that it is considered binding. While one might conceive of such a claim in terms of the legitimacy or validity of a norm such that it holds, Crowell distinguishes the normative claim that he is trying to identify from this kind of validity. He writes: “the question that arises here is not how they [the norms] could ever have been valid for me . . . but how they could be valid for me now” (Crowell 2013, 204). The issue is validity in the sense of exerting a normative force: It may be true that a valid law obligates me whether or not I recognize it, but the point of Heidegger’s formulation is to highlight the way law and ought can come to have standing from the first-person point of view. (Crowell 2013, 205)

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 37 The issue, then, is how a valid norm is experienced as binding, as an ought. To some extent Crowell’s position reflects the broader normative turn in phenomenology, which can be seen in some neo-pragmatist readings of dealings with the ready-to-hand in Being and Time. Such interpretations often take a functionalist or behaviorist approach to norms and normativity such that the norm for something is defined by its function, which is determined relative to some context of use, situated within some shared social practice. Thus, a thing succeeds or fails at satisfying the norm to the extent that it can perform the function and serve the norms of the practice.4 The influence of this view is evident in Crowell’s account, but he draws it together with another, metaethical account of normativity that focuses on the authority of moral principles and emphasizes obligation and the binding force of norms.5 The third dimension of normativity as normative claim shows this influence. However, it is unclear how this sense of the normative pertains to the space of meaning. Is the normativity or validity of meaning best understood in terms of the “ought”?

Normativity, Validity, and the Critique of Psychologism The normative turn highlights the dimension of normative force, that is, the force of obligation exercised by a norm such that it is experienced as an “ought.” Indeed, this might be the most fundamental sense of the normative within the normative turn, since the position seems to be that norms are normative because of their force and only as a result have a status that warrants them being used as measures. However, this sense of the normative seems to be rejected by both Husserl and Heidegger in connection with phenomenologically disclosed meaning. To see why, it is necessary to unpack additional aspects of the critical dynamic between phenomenology and neo-Kantianism as it relates to the late 19th- and early 20th-century debates about logical psychologism. Logical psychologism maintains that the rules of logic are rules for thinking that can be discovered by empirical methods, and in the 19th century philosophers interested in this approach turned to the developing science of psychology in pursuit of this goal. Therefore, logical psychologism conceives of the logical laws as “mind-dependent,” i.e., dependent upon the existence of the mind that thinks them.6 The primary objection to this type of psychologism is that its empirical approach can only yield descriptive generalizations of observed patterns of thinking and cannot yield the ideal laws with which logic is concerned. This objection can be formulated in two ways.7 The first is that logic is objective and its laws are valid independent of the contingent features of human psychology. The second is that logical laws have a normative status such that they are binding on thought. Both formulations, however, seem to have their source in the insight that logical laws have to do with what Lotze called

38  Leslie MacAvoy validity (Geltung). In this context, die Geltung or das Gelten has to do with the status of something such that it holds, applies, or is in effect and therefore is binding. Thus, the problem with logical psychologism, it is argued, is that the laws it generates lack this dimension of validity. Psychological, empirical laws are concerned with what is, but logical laws are concerned with what holds. Many neo-Kantians understood the what is/what holds distinction as roughly corresponding to an is/ought distinction, and thus viewed logical psychologism as committing a version of the naturalistic fallacy, confusing the laws by which people happen to think for the laws by which they ought to think. On their view, then, validity is understood as normativity.8 Laws of logic are normative laws of thought, and they hold insofar as they function as norms that guide judgment and correct thinking. Thus, the laws of logic qua normative are binding on thought. Husserl also is concerned with the validity of logical laws, but his objection to the empirical approach adopted by logical psychologism is more in line with the first type of objection noted above. In the prolegomena to the Logical Investigations he points out, first, that logical laws are supposed to be necessary and a priori, but laws arrived at through an empirical approach are only vague and probabilistic, and therefore cannot be considered logical (Husserl 1970, 47). Second, the psychologistic approach tries to derive laws of correct thinking by making generalizations about the causes of acts of correct thinking or judging, whereas logical laws do not operate causally (Husserl 1970, 50). A  logical law should be determined by looking at the content of correct judgments, not at what causes those judgments. As he comments later in the Second Investigation, psychologism “suffers from the mixture of two essentially different scientific interests, one concerned with the psychological explanation of experiences, the other with the ‘logical’ classification of their thought-content or sense” (Husserl 1970, 246). Finally, he argues that if logical laws had their source in psychology, then they would have to be considered psychological laws for “matters of fact” about how people think, which leads to a “specific relativism” or anthropologism. Logic, however, is not concerned with matters of fact, and Husserl points out that this is indicated by the sense of logical laws (Husserl 1970, 51). Thus, the objection is essentially that psychologism conflates logical with psychological laws. While this point is similar to the objection expressed by neo-Kantian “anti-psychologists,” Husserl disagrees with their position. They think they are critiquing psychologism when they assert that logic should be normative. But Husserl points out that actually both positions are committed to this view (Husserl 1970, 101). Psychologism studies thinking in order to determine the laws of correct thinking, with the precise aim of using these laws normatively to guide judgment and correct bad thinking. As such, it views logic as an instrument, a “technology,” for achieving the practical goal of better thinking. But this

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 39 normative view of logic is also held by anti-psychologism. Thus, the disagreement between them is really about whether an empirical approach is adequate to produce normative, logical laws, not about whether logical laws should be normative. In fact, Husserl rejects the idea that logical laws are normative in the sense that they are prescriptive or tell us how we ought to think or make judgments, because this implies that they are practical rules and not theoretical laws (Husserl 1970, 102). He writes, we must . . . put an end to a distorted notion . . . by pointing out that logical laws, taken in and for themselves, are not normative propositions at all in the sense of prescriptions, i.e., propositions which tell us, as part of their content, how one should judge. One must always distinguish between laws that serve as norms for our knowledge activities, and laws which include normativity in their thoughtcontent, and assert its universal obligatoriness. (Husserl 1970, 101) Although the laws of logic can be used normatively to regulate thought, they are not in themselves norms (Husserl 1970, 102–3), and neo-Kantian anti-psychologism fails to make this distinction. He writes, These laws must have some intrinsic prerogative in the regulation of our thought. But does this mean that the idea of regulation, or of an “ought,” must therefore form part of the content of such laws? Can it not follow from that content with self-evident necessity? (Husserl 1970, 102) In other words, laws of logic can perform a normative function because of the validity of their meaning-content, but their essence is not to perform that function. Normativity follows from validity, but validity is not the same as normativity. Validity has to do with the content, which holds a priori. The opposite of a natural law, then, is not a normative law, but an ideal one (Husserl 1970, 106).9 According to Husserl, then, the difficulty with the neo-Kantian antipsychologist position is this: in construing logic in normative terms, it translates it into a practical rule, thereby emphasizing the role that logic might play in guiding acts of judgment. But acts of judgment are real mental events in psychological consciousness, and so conceiving of logical laws in terms of normativity contains within it residual elements of psychologism. One reason that anti-psychologism falls into this trap is that its talk of judgment is ambiguous—sometimes the term refers to acts of judgment and sometimes it refers to the content of judgment, namely propositions. But, Husserl argues, logic is not a law for acts, but for contents (Husserl 1970, 112–13). The claim, then, is that the content is what

40  Leslie MacAvoy holds, and because it does, it can serve as a guide for judgment, but its validity does not consist in the fact that it serves or can serve as a guide. Heidegger comes to a similar position about the problem of psychologism and how it ought to be addressed when he takes up the issue in his early work. He emphasizes that an empirical approach to laws of thought will only yield laws that are contingently true, whereas laws of logic are true necessarily. For instance, in commenting on a position developed by Heyman, he emphasizes that his empirical approach will yield only “factual laws” (Tatsachengesetze) that hold for the specific psychological and intellectual makeup of human beings, which could, after all, have been different (Heidegger 1978, 21–2). This remark suggests that the issue with a “factual law” is that it is contingent and leads to anthropologism. A logical law simply cannot have an empirical ground and retain its necessity. To take the empirical for the logical is to commit something like a category mistake and to misunderstand the very nature of the logical itself.10 Heidegger also echoes Husserl’s rejection of the position that logical laws are normative. In “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” he also expresses the point that it is necessary to distinguish acts of judgment and their content, maintaining that validity properly pertains to content. He argues that accounts that conceive of logical laws as exercising a constraint on thought in guiding judgment and hence as exacting a normative force fail to free themselves fully from psychologism because they construe the laws of logic as operating at the level of psychological acts of judgment (Heidegger 1978, 85, 107, 164). So, phenomenology agrees with anti-psychologism that logical psychologism conflates logical and psychological laws, and therefore that it yields laws for what is, not for what holds. However, anti-­psychologism maintains that what holds or is valid is to be understood in terms of ­normativity—that is, logical laws express rules for how we ought to make judgments and those rules are normative insofar as they guide acts of judgment. Phenomenology, by contrast, maintains that validity and normativity are not the same—a valid content can function normatively, but its validity does not consist in its being normative. Validity is just about content. Thus, phenomenology rejects the position that validity has to do with what was identified earlier as a normative claim. In fact, in the Logic lecture, Heidegger says that the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of the term “validity” can get in the way of genuine consideration of truth because it ends up “reducing it to the intrinsically unimportant question about the kind of relation [viz., “bindingness”] that truth has to the possible comportment of the ‘subjects’ who acknowledge it”11 (Heidegger 2010, 68).12 It seems that this might also be a problem for the term “normativity.” Insofar as it emphasizes that normativity consists in the binding force or claim that something has on me, the normative turn obscures the sense of validity with which phenomenology is concerned.

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 41

Hermeneutic Intelligibility and the Space of Meaning The phenomenological critique of the neo-Kantian notion of validity as normativity transforms the space of validity into a space of meaning. Phenomenology emphasizes that validity has to do with meaning-content that holds and carries the sense of the a priori. In analyzing this content, phenomenology aims to disclose its categorial structure, that is, the structure that renders a content intelligible. If we encounter phenomena as making sense, then this meaning structure or structure of intelligibility must be a priori in some sense. It must already be given and given as already holding. Crowell’s position emphasizes the normative force of a claim because he interprets the thesis that what is valid must be valid for us to mean that what is valid must obligate us, make a claim on us, or exert some binding force (Crowell 2013, 204–5). But “valid for us” could also refer to intentional relatedness—that is, whatever is valid must show up as valid for us in intentionality. There are several dimensions to highlight here. First, the “for us” means that an object or content has to show up for a subject if it is to be experienced.13 Second, when something shows up for us, it shows up as something. This points to the fact that intentionality involves a “taking as” and therefore has a hermeneutic dimension. Finally, the valid must show up as valid, and I suggest that a valid sense or meaning is an intelligible content that presents as valid because it shows up as in some sense a priori. To explore this idea further requires considering how a content can be disclosed as a priori within intentionality. If the structure of intentionality entails a “taking as,” then it has an interpretive dimension, and it makes sense to think that Heidegger’s account of interpretation and its associated structures may offer resources for thinking about this hermeneutic aspect of intentional comportment, as well as the role of the a priori in the intelligibility of experience and its constitution within our being-in-the-world. On Heidegger’s phenomenological-­hermeneutic account, something can show up for us as something because of its involvement (Bewandtnis), which is always sketched out in advance through the operation of the fore-structures of understanding. This forestructuring allows something to be given as already holding because it sketches the horizon within which it can be understood. This points toward two senses of the a priori that are important for the intelligibility of our experience: an ontic sense and an ontological sense. Although it is only possible to sketch this position here, further elaboration of these senses of the a priori can shed more light on the structure of the space of meaning and the normativity of meaning when it is understood through the lens of validity and intelligibility. Something can be taken as something in interpretation because it shows up as intelligible in terms of a reference. But equipment can only be disclosed in terms of its reference if it is disclosed as already having

42  Leslie MacAvoy a reference: “to say that the Being of the ready-to-hand has the structure of assignment or reference means that it has in itself the character of having been assigned or referred (Verwiesenheit)” (Heidegger 1962, 115/83–4). Heidegger’s point is that a reference is not added to something first encountered as present-at-hand; rather an item is given to us in advance as already “assigned or referred,” as already having a reference or already involved with other things in relation to which it has its meaning. This is its “involvement.” When an item of equipment is encountered through its involvement, it is encountered as freed for that involvement, i.e., opened up in such a way that it can refer to its possibilities.14 Thus, the involvement represents a horizon of possibility for the ready-to-hand object, which is disclosed such that it points beyond itself toward its horizon. Heidegger argues that the involvement is always sketched out or given in advance and thus is, in some sense, a priori such that a specific disclosure of an item of equipment frees it for the involvement it already has.15 To disclose something ready-to-hand with reference to its involvement in turn requires understanding it against the background of a set of relations and significations with which we are familiar and which constitute the world. This understanding of the world also functions horizonally in some way prior to our engagement with any specific thing. But that means that the world and the relations of meaning that make it up must also be sketched out or projected in advance, and things show up as intelligible for us because they are disclosed in terms of these structures of meaning. These a priori horizons result from the operation of the forestructures of understanding. Heidegger writes, “it [the act of understanding] holds itself in them [the relations] with familiarity; and in so doing, it holds them before itself, for it is in these that its assignment operates” (Heidegger 1962, 120/87). In other words, not only does the assignment presuppose the relations, but in understanding Dasein holds the relations that provide the meaning structure for the assignment or reference before or in front of itself, and this fore-structures the horizon within which something can be understood. Interpretation proceeds based on the fore-structuring effected by understanding, and the fore-structures account for the fact that we encounter things as already having significance. In discussing these structures, Heidegger focuses on the way they function together so that interpretation never occurs as a “presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us” (Heidegger 1962, 191–2/150). But it seems clear that the fore-structures are “fore” not only in that they come in advance of interpretation, but also in the sense that they are cast ahead by the projective structure of understanding (Heidegger 1962, 192/151). They allow something to show up as something by constituting a horizon within which something can make sense, and these horizons are a priori relative to the interpretation not only in that they are given in advance, but also

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 43 in that the interpretation proceeds in terms made available by the horizon. This fore-structuring of the horizon can be understood both ontically and ontologically. To understand it ontically is to look toward the particular content of what is projected through the fore-structures such that something is interpreted as one thing or another, e.g., as a wooden spoon for stirring something.16 There is something a priori about this, but only in an ontical sense. Heidegger writes: “This ‘a priori’ lettingsomething-be-involved is the condition for the possibility of encountering anything ready-to-hand, so that Dasein, in its ontical dealings with the entity thus encountered, can thereby let it be involved in the ontical sense” (Heidegger 1962, 117/85). But it is also possible to understand this letting something be involved ontologically, by considering it at a different level such that “what is  .  .  . pertinent is the freeing of everything ready-to-hand as ready-to-hand” (Heidegger 1960, 85). In other words, ontologically construed, the a priori has to do not with whether some particular thing is disclosed with reference to some involvement or another, which might be given as a priori in the ontical sense, but instead has to do with its being disclosed with reference to involvement at all, that is, its being disclosed as ready-to-hand.17 Thus, part of what is projected through the fore-structures is an understanding of being which in this case is an understanding of the being of the ready-to-hand and the structures associated with it, i.e., the general categories of “in-order-to,” “towards-which,” “for-the-sake-of-which,” and so on. In the first section, I  argued that phenomenology aims to elucidate the world as a space of meaning by disclosing the structures of intelligibility, which I  characterized as a kind of categorial, logical form. I suggest that these structures function as a priori categorial forms that are the terms within which anything is intelligible in circumspective concern. Consider: regardless of whether I  “discover” the spoon as an “in-order-to” for stirring soup, or as an “in-order-to” for something else, e.g., reaching the toy the cat swatted under the stove, I “discover” it as an “in-order-to.” What is projected through the fore-structures on the basis of which I am able to interpret the spoon as one thing or another comprises two threads or layers of sense—an ontological sense and an ontic sense. If the ontic sense, i.e., what I take the spoon as, is prefigured by the specific ontic horizons, the ontological sense is prefigured by the ontological structure of those horizons, i.e., the “in-order-to,” “towardswhich,” “for-the-sake-of-which,” etc., as such.18 Though the normative turn aspires to translate the phenomenological thesis about the space of meaning into the language of normativity, its emphasis on normativity as a binding force or claim overshadows another sense of the normativity of meaning that concerns validity and intelligibility. The sketch provided here suggests a direction for further inquiry. The space of meaning is the intelligible space that is fore-­structured and opened up to us as a priori. It forms the background for our intentional

44  Leslie MacAvoy comportment wherein we experience things as intelligible. This depends upon things being disclosed through structures of meaning that are given in advance. To unpack the dimension of meaning connected with validity, i.e., how something can show up for us as valid—as holding—requires more attention to articulating these a priori meaning structures, analyzing how they are fore-structured, and the sense of the a priori that they carry.19

Notes 1 See Kisiel 1995 and Crowell 2001, Chs. 2, 3, and 4. 2 For a discussion of the basic critical dynamic between Lask and Husserl, see Crowell 2001, Ch. 3. 3 Crowell emphasizes the normative aspect of intentional implications in various places. See Crowell 2013, 16–18, 114, 118–19; Crowell 2008, 344; Crowell (2016, 239. He calls these intentional implications ‘quasi-­inferential,’ presumably on the grounds that to call them ‘inferential’ would imply something logical in a narrow sense. Yet Husserl would likely call such intentional implications logical, and so might Heidegger insofar as his sense of the logical is derived from the notion of “logos,” which is broadly discursive. 4 See Brandom 2002, Haugeland 1992, and Okrent 1988 for examples of this approach. Talk of normativity in these cases often seems to focus more on the validity of what is measured by the norm than on the validity of the norm. 5 This sense of normativity is found in Korsgaard (1996), whose work Crowell directly engages. See Crowell 2013, Ch. 11. For another account of normativity in this sense in relation to Heidegger, see Golob 2014, Ch. 5. 6 See Hanna 1993. 7 See Anderson 2005. 8 A good brief account of the positions of important figures from the Southwest School can be found in Beiser 2009. 9 “The opposite of a law of nature, as an empirically based rule regarding what in fact is and occurs, is not a normative law or a prescription, but an ideal law, in the sense of one based purely on concepts, ideas, purely conceived essence, and so not empirical” (Husserl 1970, 106). 10 To mistake a psychological object for a logical object could be seen as a category mistake. Heidegger’s point goes beyond this, however, because he doesn’t think that psychologism just miscategorizes the logical object, but rather that it involves a kind of reductivism such that the domain of logical objects is not recognized as a distinct domain. In other words, psychologism doesn’t really recognize logical reality at all (Heidegger 1978, 161). Stewart (1979) calls this objection, which I am calling a category mistake, an ontological mistake. It amounts to the same thing. 11 The German passage in its entirety reads: “Die Wahrheitsfrage wird demnach unter der Herrschaft des Geltungsbegriffs mehr und mehr in sekundäre Bezirke und Probleme gedrängt, zuletzt in die an sich nicht belanglose Frage nach der Art des Verhältnisses von Wahrheit zu der möglichen Stellungsnahme der sie erkennenden ‘Subjekt.’ Die Veräußerlichung geht zuweilen hierbei jedoch so weit, daß man den ersten Sinn von Geltung vergißt und sogar Wahrheit identifiziert mit Allverbindlichkeit. Wahr ist, was für alle gilt, d.h. was alle anzuerkennen haben” (Heidegger 1976, 82). In context, it is clear that “der Art des Verhältnisses” refers to “Verbindlichkeit.”

The Space of Meaning, Phenomenology 45 12 Heidegger favors the language of meaning and intelligibility over validity because of this ambiguity. ‘Validity’ can refer to a ‘form of actuality,’ to an ‘objectively valid character,’ or to bindingness (Heidegger 1962, 198/156, 2010, 67f). The turn toward talk of truth and meaning instead of validity is supposed to be an improvement not only because it is less ambiguous, but presumably because it disambiguates validity in a direction that moves away from the sense of bindingness and a normative claim. 13 In discussing the category problem in the conclusion of his Habilitationsschrift, Heidegger critiques transcendental logical approaches that ignore the subject: “object and objectivity only have meaning as such for a subject” (Heidegger 1978, 403). Further: “how there can be objectivity is only a problem, if one notes that objectivity only has meaning for a judging subject, without whom the full meaning of what one calls ‘Geltung’ could never be successfully brought out” (Heidegger 1978, 404–5). I read these passages as claiming that objects must be understood within the structure of intentionality. 14 “ ‘[L]etting something be involved’ signifies that within our factical concern we let something ready-to-hand be so-and-so as it is already and in order that it be such” (Heidegger 1962, 117/84). 15 “Whenever something ready-to-hand has an involvement with it, what involvement this is, has in each case been outlined in advance in terms of the totality of such involvements” (Heidegger 1962, 116/84). 16 “Ontically, ‘letting something be involved’ signifies that within our factical concern we let something ready-to-hand be so-and-so as it is already and in order that it be such” (Heidegger 1962, 117/84). 17 “Letting an entity be involved, if we understand this ontologically, consists in previously freeing it for its readiness-to-hand within the environment” (Heidegger 1962, 117/85). 18 The ontic and ontological a priori can serve as norms for objects as described in the second section, but their normativity would derive from their a priori status (i.e., that they already hold), not from a norm for action. 19 Ginev (2013), for instance, argues that Heidegger’s account of the fore-­structures yields a kind of “hermeneutic prenormativity.” Where Ginev seems interested in the force of pre-normative interpretation, I am more interested in the structures through which the horizon of meaning is given as already holding.

References Anderson, R. Lanier. 2005. “Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (2) (May): 287–323. Beiser, Frederick C. 2009. “Normativity in Neo-Kantianism: Its Rise and Fall.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (1) (February): 9–27. Brandom, Robert. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———.  2008. “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism.” Synthese 160: 335–54. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. New York: Cambridge University Press.

46  Leslie MacAvoy ———. 2016. “Phenomenology, Meaning, and Measure: Response to Maxime Doyon and Thomas Sheehan.” Philosophy Today 60 (1): 237–52. Ginev, Dimitri. 2013. “Hermeneutic Pre-Normativity.” The Philosophical Forum 44 (3) (Fall): 275–93. Golob, Sacha. 2014. Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom, and Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanna, Robert. 1993. “Logical Cognition: Husserl’s Prolegomena and the Truth in Psychologism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (2) (June): 251–75. Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. GA 21. Hsg. Translated by Walter Beimel. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ———. 1978. Frühe Schriften. GA 1. Hsg. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ———. 2010. Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1960. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Haugeland, John. 1992. “Dasein’s Disclosedness.” In Heidegger: A  Critical Reader, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall, 27–44. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Husserl, Edmund. 1965. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Translated by Quentin Lauer, 71–147. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1970. Logical Investigations, Volume 1. Translated by J. N. Findlay. New York: Routledge. ———. 1975. Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band. Hua XVIII. Hsg. Elmar Holenstein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1984. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. 1. Teil. Hua XIX/1. Hsg. Ursula Panzer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kisiel, Theodore. 1995. “Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask.” Man and World 28: 197–240. Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Okrent, Mark. 1988. Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stewart, Roderick M. 1979. “The Problem of Logical Psychologism for Husserl and the Early Heidegger.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 10 (3) (October): 184–93.

3 Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics Another Look Dan Zahavi

To what extent is phenomenology in a position to address metaphysical problems? The question has been discussed since the beginning of the 20th century. The relation between phenomenology and metaphysics played a somewhat submerged role in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (see Zahavi 2002) but came to the fore in the schism that occurred between Husserl the moment he embraced a form of transcendental idealism and his early realist followers, who viewed phenomenology as a rejection of Kantian subjectivism and as a forceful vindication of a realist agenda. In what follows, my primary concern will not be with the early realist phenomenologists, but with the question of what role metaphysics plays in Husserl’s mature phenomenology. Did his turn to transcendental philosophy, did his endorsement of transcendental idealism, entail some kind of metaphysical commitment, as was certainly believed by his realist adversaries, or did Husserl’s employment of the epoché and phenomenological reduction on the contrary entail a suspension of metaphysical commitments? These are all complicated questions that can be addressed in different ways. In the following, my discussion will take the form of a critical engagement with an influential interpretation that has been proposed and promoted by Steven Crowell in various publications. According to Crowell, Husserl’s transcendental turn entails a kind of metaphysical neutrality. Let me start by considering his arguments in some detail.1

The Space of Meaning One of Crowell’s main objectives over the years has been to offer a new interpretation of phenomenology and to argue that transcendental phenomenology is first and foremost a philosophy of meaning (Crowell 2001, 5). For Crowell, meaning is not an empirical concept, but a transcendental concept, and it is a concept that has priority over other philosophical starting points. In fact, if headway is to be made in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, it is, according to Crowell, necessary

48  Dan Zahavi with a more focused investigation of meaning, which is exactly what transcendental phenomenology can offer (Crowell 2001, 18–19). As he puts it in Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, “I shall argue that phenomenology—all phenomenology—is transcendental insofar as it makes meaning thematic as philosophy’s primary field of investigation” (Crowell 2013, 10). In part of his work, Crowell has sought to clarify the unique character of phenomenological transcendental philosophy by way of contrasting it with neo-Kantianism. According to the neo-Kantian Emil Lask, the difference between a positive (empirical or metaphysical) investigation and a transcendental investigation can be understood as a difference between a straightforward thematization of entities that aims to uncover their basic properties and a reflective thematization of the truth structure (the intelligibility or “being”) of entities (Crowell 2001, 51). Lask consequently operates with a duality between the realm of entities (be they physical or metaphysical) on the one hand and the realm of validity (truth, intelligibility) on the other (Crowell 2001, 41, 53). This difference between what is and what holds is basically a distinction between the entity and its meaning. This in turn is no empirical or “ontic” distinction, but rather a transcendental difference between the way one and the same entity can be taken, first in straightforward experience and then again in reflective inquiry (Crowell 2001, 89). Thus, Lask is quite explicit about the reflective character of transcendental philosophy. Its first principle is not an entity, be it a subject or a substance, but something more fundamental, namely meaning (Crowell 2001, 45). Meaning belongs neither to the realm of metaphysical entities nor to the realm of physical entities nor to the psychological realm. It has its own world of validity that does not exist, but holds, and it can only be investigated properly through a transcendental endeavor (Crowell 2001, 75). According to Crowell, Lask’s view was largely shared by both Heidegger and Husserl, but for both of the latter, and this is where phenomenology departs from neo-Kantianism, the investigation of meaning has to be grounded in a theory of intentionality, since only such a theory can furnish us with a clarification of evidence and givenness, and this is needed if dogmatism is to be avoided (Crowell 2001, 88). Thus, in contrast to Lask, Husserl and Heidegger did not believe that a transcendental theory of meaning can be carried out without a simultaneous inquiry into the subjective dimension of meaning disclosure (Crowell 2001, 54, 58). To put it differently, one area where transcendental phenomenology differs from (neo-)Kantian transcendental philosophy is in its focus on the first-person perspective. Crowell is anxious to emphasize the non-metaphysical dimension and direction of transcendental thought. Transcendental phenomenology must be viewed as a metaphilosophical or methodological endeavor rather than as a straightforwardly metaphysical doctrine about the

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 49 nature and status of worldly objects. Kant’s revolutionary insight was to posit “a radical discontinuity between philosophy and all first-order cognition, whether empirical or metaphysical. Phenomenology is transcendental because it belongs to that revolution” (Crowell 2013, 11). Whereas metaphysics is concerned with establishing the real properties of its object, transcendental thinking investigates how first-order thinking is possible and how its objects can be cognitively accessible. One encounters objects as given but does normally not reflect upon what givenness means or how it is possible. Every positive science (be it empirical or metaphysical) rests upon a field of givenness or evidence that is presupposed but not investigated by the sciences themselves. In order to make this dimension accessible, a new type of inquiry is called for, a type of inquiry that, to quote Husserl, “lies before all ordinary knowledge and science, and lies in a quite different direction than ordinary science” (Husserl 1984, 176). It was precisely in order to overcome the naiveté of the natural attitude, which simply presupposes the world as a pregiven source of validities, that Husserl introduced the epoché and the reduction. These are methodological tools permitting us to gain a distance to the natural attitude, thereby making a philosophical analysis of givenness possible (Crowell 2001, 73). The true task of phenomenology is not to describe the objects as precisely and meticulously as possible, but to examine the very dimension of appearance or givenness, and to disclose its inner structure and condition of possibility. Transcendental phenomenology thematizes objects in terms of their givenness, validity, and intelligibility, and such an investigation calls for a reflective stance quite unlike the one needed in the positive sciences. As Crowell puts it, the space of meaning cannot be approached using the resources of traditional metaphysics (Crowell 2001, 182). From this point of view, a metaphysical interpretation of transcendental phenomenology entails a dramatic misunderstanding of what phenomenology is all about. It misunderstands the notion of reduction and overlooks the decisive difference between the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. In Heideggerian terms, one might say that a metaphysical interpretation of phenomenology entails a disregard of the ontological difference. Metaphysics remains to some extent a pre-critical or naive enterprise. In its attempt to map out the building blocks of reality, it never leaves the natural attitude. It doesn’t partake in the reflective move that is the defining moment of transcendental thought.

Phenomenology and Metaphysics Already quite early on, Husserl spoke of the objects of which we are conscious as objects that are “constituted as being what they are for us, and as what they count as for us, in varying forms” of intentionality (Husserl 2001, 275). As we have just seen, Crowell is keen to avoid a

50  Dan Zahavi metaphysical interpretation of Husserl’s idealism. Constitution does not create the objects it constitutes, nor is it their source, in the sense that they can somehow be deduced from or explained by its operations. Transcendental idealism is in his view precisely a “non-metaphysical idealism” (Crowell 2013, 41). Crowell’s alternative is to offer a semantic interpretation according to which phenomenology is not directly engaged in a metaphysical pursuit but is rather primarily concerned with understanding the sense of reality and objectivity. On this reading, it is the sense of reality, i.e., what it means for something to be real, rather than reality itself, that is constituted by and correlated with consciousness. To investigate the constitution of objects is to investigate the experiences in which the object is given as meaningful. I agree with the claim that Husserl is not a metaphysical idealist—to speak of constituting consciousness is not to speak of a mind that shapes the world in its own image— but I don’t think Crowell’s semantic interpretation is the right alternative. Crowell is undoubtedly right in emphasizing the difference between the object-oriented nature of metaphysics and the reflective orientation of transcendental phenomenology. But it is one thing to concede that point and something quite different to claim that phenomenology has no metaphysical implications, as if it were in principle compatible with and could live in peaceful co-existence with a variety of different metaphysical views, including eliminativism, metaphysical realism, or subjective idealism. This view, and the view that Husserl’s method is not concerned with reality but only with an analysis of meaning that has no immediate bearing on metaphysical questions about “what really exists” (Thomasson 2007, 91), cannot be correct. Had it been, Husserl would have been unable to reject both the Kantian Ding an sich and phenomenalism as unequivocally as he does on many occasions. Husserl’s phenomenological insistence on the categorical difference between the perceptual act and the perceptual object, his claim that the difference between the being of consciousness and the being of that which reveals itself for consciousness is the most fundamental ontological distinction (Husserl 1976, 159), for instance, would then have had no weight vis-à-vis claims concerning their metaphysical identity. Likewise, had his phenomenological investigations had no implication for what exists, his rich account of consciousness would have been compatible with eliminativism about experience. I find all of this unconvincing, but even more importantly, I think this quietist interpretation runs counter to Husserl’s philosophical ambitions. It is no coincidence that Husserl in Krisis declares that “there is no conceivable meaningful problem in previous philosophy, and no conceivable problem of being at all, that could not be arrived at by transcendental phenomenology at some point along its way” (Husserl 1954, 192). Many interpreters have taken Husserl’s methodology, his employment of the epoché and the reduction, to involve an abstention of positings, a

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 51 bracketing of questions related to existence and being, and have for that very reason also denied that phenomenology has any metaphysical implications. If one construes Husserlian phenomenology in such a way, it is quite natural to conclude that important topics are simply missing from its repertoire; being and reality are topics left for other disciplines. But this interpretation does neither respect nor reflect Husserl’s own assertions on the matter. As he declares in §  23 of Cartesianische Meditationen, the topics of existence and non-existence, of being and non-being, are all-embracing themes for phenomenology, themes addressed under the broadly understood titles of reason and unreason (Husserl 1950, 91). Indeed, Husserl is unequivocal in his rejection of any non-metaphysical interpretation of transcendental phenomenology: [T]ranscendental phenomenology in the sense I  conceive it does in fact encompass the universal horizon of the problems of philosophy . . . including as well all so-called metaphysical questions, insofar as they have possible sense in the first place. (Husserl 1971, 141). Phenomenology is anti-metaphysical insofar as it rejects every metaphysics concerned with the construction of purely formal hypotheses. But like all genuine philosophical problems, all metaphysical problems return to a phenomenological base, where they find their genuine transcendental form and method, fashioned from intuition. (Husserl 1962, 253). Finally, lest any misunderstanding arise, I would point out that, as already stated, phenomenology indeed excludes every naïve metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves, but does not exclude metaphysics as such. (Husserl 1950, 38–9) As Husserl also wrote in a letter to Peter Wust in 1920, phenomenology was from the beginning never supposed to be anything except the path to a radically genuine “strictly scientific metaphysics” (Husserl 2014, lxiv). Statements like these strongly suggest that it might be wrong to opt for a deflationary non-metaphysical interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental project. This, however, is not to say that it is by any stretch straightforward to interpret Husserl’s pro-metaphysical statements, since the term “metaphysics” is notoriously ambiguous and can be understood and defined in a variety of diverse ways. Here are three quite different definitions: 1. Metaphysics is a theoretical investigation of the fundamental building blocks, of the basic “stuff” of reality.

52  Dan Zahavi 2. Metaphysics is a philosophical engagement with question of facticity, birth, death, fate, immortality, the existence of God, etc. 3. Metaphysics is a fundamental reflection on and concern with the status and being of reality. Is reality mind-dependent or not, and if yes, in what manner? What complicates matters even further is that Husserl himself used the term “metaphysics” equivocally. In some of his later works, for instance, Husserl sometimes speaks of something he calls “metaphysics in a new sense,” which he characterizes as an exploration of the irrationality of the transcendental fact (Husserl 1956, 188). As I read Husserl, he had little interest in the first type of metaphysics, which is also one of the reasons why he doesn’t qualify as a metaphysical idealist. As for the second type of metaphysics, Husserl eventually came to acknowledge that the process of constitution relies on irreducible factual components, and that transcendental phenomenology itself consequently has to engage with the problem of facticity. It was this realization that eventually led Husserl to questions pertaining to the ethicalreligious domain (Husserl 1950, 182), an engagement that culminated in what has been called his “philosophical theology” (Hart 1986). Husserl’s primary interest, however, concerned the third type of metaphysis, i.e., metaphysics understood as pertaining to the realism-idealism issue, i.e., to the issue of whether reality is mind-independent. Indeed, I would claim that Husserl’s interest in this particular form of metaphysics was essential to his conception of transcendental philosophy. As I have argued repeatedly over the years, this commitment is not in conflict with Husserl’s phenomenological methodology, his employment of the epoché and the reduction, but on the contrary follows directly from it. On one interpretation, the real purpose of the phenomenological bracketing is to limit the scope of the investigation. Certain issues are excluded from consideration, certain questions that we as phenomenologists are not supposed to engage with. We might believe that we are directed at something extra-mental, something transcendent, something that is not contained in consciousness, and as phenomenologists, we should investigate this belief and our experiences of natural objects, artifacts, other people, works of arts, social institutions, etc., but we are not entitled to say anything about the being of these entities themselves. As a phenomenologist, I can claim that I experience a lemon, that a lemon is appearing, that it seems as if there is a lemon in front of me, but I cannot as a phenomenologist affirm that there really is a lemon. To do the latter would be to make an illegitimate transition from phenomenology, from a concern with how things appear and what meaning they have for me, to metaphysics, to a concern with reality and real existence. This line of reasoning, however, is based on a misinterpretation (cf. Zahavi 2003b, 2017). The purpose of the epoché was never to bracket either the world

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 53 or true being from consideration. The epoché does not involve an exclusion of reality, but rather a suspension of a particular dogmatic attitude toward reality, an attitude that not only is operative in the positive sciences, but which also permeates our daily pre-theoretical life. Indeed, the attitude is so fundamental and pervasive that Husserl calls it the natural attitude. What is the attitude about? It is about simply taking it for granted that the world we encounter in experience also exists independently of us. Regardless of how natural and obvious it might be to think of reality as a self-subsisting entity, if philosophy is supposed to amount to a radical form of critical elucidation, it cannot simply take this kind of natural realism for granted. If philosophy is to deserve its credentials as a form of radical questioning, it cannot simply prejudice the answer beforehand. On the contrary, if we are to adopt the phenomenological attitude and engage in phenomenological philosophizing, we must take a step back from our naive and unexamined immersion in the world and suspend our automatic belief in the mind-independent existence of that world. By suspending this attitude, and by thematizing the fact that reality is always revealed and examined from some perspective or another, reality is not lost from sight, but is for the first time made accessible for philosophical inquiry. Rather than making reality disappear from view, the epoché and reduction is precisely what allows reality to be investigated philosophically. This is why Husserl in the lecture Phänomenologie und Anthropologie repeatedly writes that the only thing that is excluded as a result of the epoché is a certain naivety, the naivety of simply taking the world for granted, thereby ignoring the contribution of consciousness (Husserl 1989, 173). And as Husserl repeatedly insists in this 1931 lecture, the turn from a naive exploration of the world to a reflective exploration of the field of consciousness does not entail a turning away from the world; rather, it is a turn that for the first time allows for a truly radical investigation and comprehension of the world (Husserl 1989, 178). What is eventually disclosed through the transcendental analysis is the co-dependency of mind and world. As Husserl writes in Cartesianische Meditationen, The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. They belong together essentially. (Husserl 1950, 117)2

Meaning and Metaphysics As we have seen, Crowell very much insists on phenomenology being a philosophy of meaning. But if he is right in this, does the nonmetaphysical reading he is proposing not follow automatically? On some

54  Dan Zahavi interpretations, this would definitely be the case. Consider, for instance, Dreyfus’s well-known interpretation of Husserl as an unrepentant representationalist. For Dreyfus, Husserl was committed to the view that the mind contains a number of mental representations that all have the function they have regardless of how the world is. One might consequently investigate the mental content contained in the mind without at all addressing the nature of the world, since mind and world are two completely independent realms (Dreyfus 1991, 74). In support of this interpretation, Dreyfus appeals to a certain understanding of the phenomenological reduction, according to which its main aim is to bracket everything extra-mental, in order to allow for an exclusive focus on the mental representations that make intentionality possible (Dreyfus 1982, 108, 1991, 50). This interpretation fits neatly with a certain view of the noema, according to which the latter must be distinguished sharply from the object. The noema is not that toward which consciousness is directed, but that by means of which it is directed, that by virtue of which we achieve a reference to the external object. As a result of effectuating the phenomenological reduction, our normal concern with objects is replaced with a concern for the noemata by which acts achieve their reference to objects. In short, whereas the purpose of the reduction on this interpretation is to abstract from all objects transcendent to consciousness in order to allow for a scrutiny of the very contents in virtue of which we can be directed at said objects, the investigation of the noema is taken to be an investigation of the semantic content that allows consciousness to be directed at its putative transcendent objects. Were one to accept this interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology, the idea that phenomenology is metaphysically neutral would indeed follow rather naturally from the idea that phenomenology is concerned with meaning (which remains internal to the mind). The problem though is that Crowell by no means share this Dreyfusian reading of Husserl, and for plenty of good reasons. I cannot pursue the noema discussion in any detail here, but Crowell has made his own position clear in a number of publications. He has explicitly denied that the difference between an object and its meaning is an ontological difference, and has instead argued that it is a difference in the way one and the same object is taken, first in straightforward experience and then again in a reflective inquiry. As he writes in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, “Meaning is the thing as it presents itself to phenomenological reflection” (Crowell 2001, 89), and as he puts it in Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger “phenomenology does not locate meaning in the subject but identifies it transcendentally with the object” (Crowell 2013, 17). An interpretation like this can find support in the work of classical authors, as well. Consider, for instance, remarks by Fink in his famous 1933 article “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik”—an article that Husserl himself introduced

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 55 with the words “it contains no sentence which I  could not completely accept as my own or openly acknowledge as my own conviction” (Fink 2000, 71). As Fink points out, the discussion of the noema in Ideen I is ambiguous because Husserl in that work failed to distinguish sufficiently clearly between transcendental phenomenology and psychology. As Fink then writes, If the psychological noema is the meaning of an actual intentionality which is to be distinguished from the being itself to which it is related, then by contrast the transcendental noema is this being itself. (Fink 2000, 117) The psychological noema refers to an object which is independent of it and which announces and exhibits itself within this noema. The transcendental noema cannot refer to a being beyond and independent of the infinity involved in such endless identification; the transcendental noema is the being itself, and is so in the hitherto unknown depths of its hidden meaning of being as transcendental validity. (Fink 2000, 118, trans. modified) Fink’s point is that whereas we might distinguish between the noema and the object itself as long as we remain within a psychological stance, such a distinction is no longer appropriate when we adopt a transcendental attitude. From this perspective, there is no longer any ontological distinction between the constituted validity and significance of an object and its reality and being.3 The problem obviously is whether one, on the basis of such an interpretation, can still maintain, as Crowell does, that phenomenology is non-metaphysical. As Fink himself points out in an article from 1939, only a fundamental misunderstanding of the aim of phenomenology would lead to the mistaken but often repeated claim that Husserl’s phenomenology is not interested in reality or the question of being, but only in subjective meaning-formations in intentional consciousness (Fink 1981, 44). Perhaps one could accept all of this but still insist that Husserl distinguishes metaphysics and ontology, and that we need to follow him in this. In works such as Cartesianische Meditationen, Ideen III, Erste Philosophie II, and Formale und Transzendentale Logik Husserl speaks of the ontological dimension of phenomenology and differentiates formal ontology from material (or regional) ontology. Formal ontology is the name for the discipline that investigates what it means to be an object. It is considered a formal enterprise, for it abstracts from all considerations concerning content. It is not concerned with the differences between stones, trees, and violins, it is not concerned with the differences between various types of objects, but with that which holds true for any object

56  Dan Zahavi whatsoever. Formal ontology is consequently engaged in an analysis of such categories as quality, property, relation, identity, whole, part, and so on. In contrast, material (or regional) ontology examines the essential structures belonging to a given region of objects and seeks to determine that which holds true with necessity for any member of the region in question. For instance, what is it that characterizes mathematical entities as such in contrast to social acts or mental episodes? Given this definition of ontology, ontological analyses (of both material and formal nature) are ubiquitous in Husserl’s phenomenological writings, and there is no question that Husserl would have agreed with Heidegger’s statement that “There is no ontology alongside a phenomenology. Rather, scientific ontology is nothing but phenomenology” (Heidegger 1985, 72). However, and importantly, ontology does not make any claims about whether a certain region or object exists. It is indifferent to that very question. Could it not be argued that although Husserl’s investigations might have ontological bearing, they continue to lack metaphysical impact, since they persistently ignore and avoid questions about existence? What this retort continues to ignore, however, is that Husserl does treat and analyze questions concerning reality and existence. Just think of his careful analysis of the different modes of givenness. I can talk about a slithering anaconda that I  have never seen, but which I  have heard about; I  can see a detailed drawing of the anaconda; or I  can perceive the anaconda myself. These different ways to intend an object are not unrelated. On the contrary, there is a strict hierarchical relation between them, in the sense that the modes can be ranked according to their ability to give us the object as directly and originally as possible. The object can be given more or less directly, that is, it can be more or less present. There is a manifest difference between merely thinking about an anaconda and seeing it. In the latter case, the snake isn’t merely meant but is given as present. Perception provides us with access to the object itself in its bodily presence. To speak of a spatio-temporal object that is given in propria persona, that is as bodily present, is exactly to speak of the real object (Husserl 1976, 209). Of course, ultimately, mere intuitive givenness doesn’t settle questions of existence and reality. We also need to consider the issue of rational coherence and intersubjective confirmation. In fact, one of Husserl’s main reasons for taking the problem of intersubjectivity as seriously as he did was precisely because he took reality and objectivity to be intersubjectively constituted. It is consequently decisive to realize that whereas the difference between a veridical perception and a non-veridical perception, as well as the very existence of the intentional object, was of no concern to the pre-transcendental phenomenology of Logische Untersuchungen, this limitation no longer holds true for Husserl’s mature philosophy. This is also why for Husserl it would make no sense to suppose that an object meeting the strong condition of ultimate, intersubjective confirmation could still prove to be unreal. Seriously

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 57 to entertain that possibility would, as Smith puts it, be “to uproot our notions of reality and unreality from their experiential basis in confirmations and disconfirmations, whence these notions derive all their sense and meaning” (Smith 2003, 179). Crowell might persist, however, and claim that even if the above is correct, one could still argue that Husserl is merely dealing with the question of what it means for a given object to exist and be real, i.e., Husserl is still merely dealing with the meaning of reality, and that any such investigation must be sharply distinguished from attempts to make metaphysical claims about the (f)actual existence of something. The latter is off limits to phenomenology. Phenomenology is “not a factual inquiry” (Crowell 2013, 33). As already indicated, I am not convinced of this claim when it comes to the existence of consciousness itself. I don’t see how Husserl’s transcendental idealism can be made compatible with the view that no consciousness exists. Indeed, the issue of factual existence is a topic that Husserl eventually addresses in his discussion of transcendental subjectivity. As he declares in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität III, “But the eidos transcendental I is unthinkable without the transcendental I as factual” (Husserl 1973, 385). In addition, however, it might be appropriate to point out that questions of fact are usually to be established empirically and not through metaphysical thinking or transcendental reflection. As O’Murchadha rightly points out: The philosophical question for Husserl is not whether, say, this perceived tree actually exists, but rather what it means to say that this tree exists. If the actual existence of the tree were a philosophical question, then it would be hard to distinguish the concerns of the philosopher from the lumberjack. (O’Murchadha 2008, 381) But whereas transcendental phenomenology has no interest in specifying the number of trees that are to be found in the municipality of Copenhagen, it is very much concerned with questions such as what it means for an object to be real and when we are justified in judging that it is. This is also why Husserl in Ideen I can write that the notions “truly existing object” and “rationally posited object” on his account are equivalent (Husserl 1976, 329).

Conclusion I am not sure Crowell would actually object to my interpretation of the epoché and reduction, but he would dispute the metaphysical implications that I draw from this interpretation. One way to articulate his worry is by rephrasing it in terms of a slippery slope objection. The moment one questions the metaphysical neutrality of transcendental phenomenology,

58  Dan Zahavi the moment one insists on the metaphysical implications of transcendental phenomenology, it will be difficult to stop the slide toward a metaphysics of life, of the flesh, or of the event, i.e., the slide toward positions that are situated well beyond transcendental phenomenology. On one occasion, Crowell even asked me whether my metaphysical reading meant that I was prepared to go all the way and embrace a kind of speculative realism. I am confident, however, that this question was rhetorical. In Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Crowell seems to have modified his earlier non-metaphysical reading slightly since he there concedes that Husserl’s texts are ambiguous enough to admit of various interpretations (Crowell 2013, 49). As I  read him, Crowell is now willing to concede that Husserl’s project does rule out certain metaphysical positions, and he even admits that Husserl eventually developed his own phenomenologically based personalistic metaphysics. Since Crowell, however, believes the latter to be fairly detached from Husserl’s transcendental project, he remains steadfast in his claim that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is not itself a metaphysical position. It should come as no surprise that Crowell has sympathies for Allison’s Kant interpretation (Crowell 2001, 238). For Allison, transcendental idealism must be appreciated as a metaphilosophical outlook rather than as a straightforward metaphysical doctrine (Allison 1983, 25). It investigates the epistemic conditions under which we have an experience of the world and does not make any first-order claims about what there is in the world. By contrast, I see a number of intriguing parallels between my own Husserl interpretation and the Kant interpretation recently proposed by Allais. Just as Allais argues that we should approach Kant’s transcendental idealism with a relational view as a starting point (Allais 2015, 12), I think externalism can provide a productive angle on Husserl’s transcendental idealism, and just like Allais, I also think transcendental idealism should be interpreted as a position situated between strong metaphysical idealism (read phenomenalism) and a deflationary non-metaphysical reading (see Allais 2015, 3). This is, of course, not to deny that there are significant differences between Husserl and Kant. The reason why Husserl’s idealism is transcendental rather than metaphysical is not because Husserl retained the notion of the Ding an sich and like Kant believed that “we cannot have knowledge of the intrinsic nature of reality” (Allais 2015, 232). No, Husserl’s idealism is transcendental rather than metaphysical because of the way in which he interprets the dependency relation. The mind-dependency of reality is not because worldly objects can be reduced to or supervene on the ‘stuff’ that mental states are made of. Transcendental idealism is not participating in or contributing to the debate between monists and dualists. Its adversary is not materialism, but objectivism. Its aim is to understand the status of reality and the nature of objectivity, and its claim is that the following correlational principle holds true:

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 59 No object is thinkable as actual without the actual subjectivity that is capable of realizing this object in actual cognition. One can very well say, no object without a subject, and no subject without an object, where object should be taken in the broadest possible sense. (Husserl 2002, 277–8) I do share Crowell’s insistence on the transcendental character of (philosophical) phenomenology. The problem though is that whereas Crowell and I agree on this, we don’t seem to agree on what precisely transcendental phenomenology is, or to put it differently, what precisely it means for phenomenology to be transcendental. Put simply, I don’t think transcendental phenomenology in its radical exploration of the structure and status of the phenomenon can permit itself to remain neutral or indifferent to the question concerning the relationship between the phenomenon and reality. But by having to take a stand on this relationship, phenomenology also by necessity has metaphysical implications. Phenomenology investigates the intelligibility, significance, and appearance of the world. To engage in a reflective exploration of the structures and conditions of worldly significance and appearance differs from any direct metaphysical investigation of the real word. But what needs to be stressed is that the significance and appearance being investigated is the significance and appearance of the real world, not of some otherworldly mental realm. Phenomenology has insisted upon this, and rightly so, but by doing that, it can no longer claim metaphysical neutrality.

Notes 1 This is not the first time I  am engaging with Crowell’s work. In the following, I will partially draw on material found in my original review of Crowell’s excellent book Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Zahavi 2003a) and on ideas developed more fully in Zahavi 2017. 2 For a more extensive interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, see Zahavi 2017. 3 For a more recent statement along similar lines, here is Nancy: “The ‘meaning of Being’ is not some property that will come to qualify, fill in, or finalize the brute givenness of ‘Being’ pure and simple. Instead, it is the fact that there is no ‘brute givenness’ of Being. . . . Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning” (Nancy 2000, 2).

References Allais, L. 2015. Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allison, H. E. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

60  Dan Zahavi Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, H. L. 1982. “Husserl’s Perceptual Noema.” In Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science, edited by H. L. Dreyfus and H. Hall, 97–123. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 1991. Being-in-the-World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fink, E. 1981. “The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.” Translated by R. M. Harlan. In Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, edited by W. McKenna, R. M. Harlan, and L. E. Winters, 21–55. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2000. “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism.” In The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings. Translated and edited by R. O. Elveton, 70–139, 2nd ed. Seattle: Noesis Press. Hart, J. G. 1986. “A  Précis of a Husserlian Phenomenological Theology.” In Essays in Phenomenological Theology, edited by S. C. Laycock and J. G. Hart, 89–168. Albany: SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. 1985. History of the Concept of Time. Translated by T. Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by S. Strasser, Husserliana 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentalePhänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Edited by W. Biemel, Husserliana 6. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1956. Erste Philosophie (1923/24): Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte. Edited by Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana 7. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1962. Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Edited by W. Biemel, Husserliana 9. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1971. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. Edited by M. Biemel, Husserliana 5. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935. Edited by I. Kern. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I. Edited by K. Schuhmann, Husserliana III/1–2. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1984. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/07. Edited by U. Melle, Husserliana 24. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1989. Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937). Edited by T. Nenon and H. R. Sepp, Husserliana 27. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Logical Investigations I-II. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1922/23. Edited by B. Goossens, Husserliana 35. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass

Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics 61 1908–1937. Edited by R. Sowa and T. Vongehr, Husserliana 42. New York: Springer. Nancy, J-L. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translated by R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. O’Murchadha, F. 2008. “Reduction, Externalism and Immanence in Husserl and Heidegger.” Synthese 160 (3): 375–95. Smith, A. D. 2003. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London: Routledge. Thomasson, A. L. 2007. “In What Sense Is Phenomenology Transcendental?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (S1): 85–92. Zahavi, D. 2002. “Metaphysical Neutrality in Logical Investigations.” In One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited, edited by D. Zahavi and F. Stjernfelt, 93–108. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2003a. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2003b. “Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics.” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (3): 325–34. ———. 2017. Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 Ground, Background, and Rough Ground Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology David R. Cerbone In giving explanations, I already have to use the language full-blown (not some sort of preparatory, provisional one); this is enough to show that I can come up only with externalities about language. —(Wittgenstein 2009, § 120)

My chapter  takes as its point of departure a pair of claims from the opening chapter of Hubert Dreyfus’s influential commentary on Division I of Heidegger’s Being and Time. The two claims concern the nature and status of what Dreyfus takes to be one of Heidegger’s most fundamental insights, namely, his recognition and appreciation of the importance of a background understanding of being. For Dreyfus’s Heidegger, recognition of a background marks a radical departure from the orientation and aspirations of the Western philosophical tradition. Whereas philosophy had been guided by the goal of mapping out all forms of human understanding, so as to see how they work and what makes them possible, Heidegger, by contrast, “questions both the possibility and desirability of making our everyday understanding explicit” (Dreyfus 1990, 4). Instead, on Dreyfus’s reading, Heidegger introduces the idea that shared everyday skills, discriminations, and practices into which we are socialized provide the conditions necessary for people to pick out objects, to understand themselves as subjects, and generally, to make sense of the world and of their lives. (Dreyfus 1990, 4) At the same time, Heidegger argues that “these practices can function only if they remain in the background” (Dreyfus 1990, 4).1 So for Dreyfus’s Heidegger, the understanding of being is a “nonexplicitable background that enables us to make sense of things” (Dreyfus 1990, 4). In explaining this idea of the background as “nonexplicitable,” Dreyfus offers the pair of claims that interest me:

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 63 We can to some extent light up that understanding, that is, point it out to those who share it, but we cannot spell it out, that is, make it understandable even to those who do not share it. Moreover, what we can get clear about is only what is least pervasive and embodied. Heidegger has the sense that the more important some aspect of our understanding of being is, the less we can get at it. (Dreyfus 1990, 22) That these two claims appear sequentially suggests that they fit together in some way. For example, what Dreyfus says in the second and third sentences in the passage might be understood as an explanation for what he says in the first: that we cannot “get at” what is most pervasive and embodied about our understanding of being provides a reason why we can only “light up” that understanding rather than “spell it out.” Part of what I want to do in this chapter is offer something by way of resistance to this suggestion, as I am inclined to think that the two ideas actually go in different directions. That is, each claim can be teased out so as to point toward a very different idea of the background, and it is not clear to me that (or how) they fit together. What I want to suggest is that there is a way of reading—and cashing out—the first claim that provides the notion of a background with a purely deflationary sense. But this deflationary sense pulls against the sense of mystery conveyed by the second claim, since if we take seriously the more deflationary line of thinking, there is ultimately no “there” there that we cannot “get at.” What is left instead is the question of just why we take there to be something that is ineliminably mysterious about our forms of understanding. At the risk of moving too far out of the orbit of canonical figures in phenomenology, my discussion of these two ideas about the background will be oriented primarily around remarks from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I do not take this to be too much of a departure, especially in the context of discussing Dreyfus’s contributions to phenomenology. Dreyfus often reads Wittgenstein as something of a fellow traveler in terms of opposition to the philosophical tradition in ways that often parallel—and mostly reinforce—the insights in Heidegger that most interest him. But even if examining Dreyfus via Wittgenstein constitutes something of a detour, I want to propose that if we take care to tease apart these different senses of the background, we confront a number of worries that are directly relevant for phenomenology. First, there is a serious question about just what kind of explanatory work the appeal to the background is meant to do. This is a question that arises on both the deflationary and the more mystery-laden senses of the background. For Wittgenstein, this is just as it should be, since his philosophy is directed against the explanatory endeavors characteristic of traditional philosophy, whereas it is not clear that Dreyfus would be happy with this largely negative point.2 Second, the notion of the background, in either a more deflationary or

64  David R. Cerbone mystery-laden sense, raises issues for phenomenology in terms of what it would mean for there to be a phenomenology of the background. If we understand phenomenology as broadly concerned with the idea of making sense of things as having a normative dimension—so that there are better and worse ways of making sense, that we can go wrong in how we make sense of something, and so on—then the appeal to an enabling but “nonexplicitable” notion of a background poses a problem for any kind of project devoted to making sense of these sense-making capacities: that the tracing out of our ability to make sense of things leads to a background that cannot be made explicit marks a kind of limit on making sense of this ability. We might see that there is something upon which this ability depends without being able to say all that much about it or how it works to make that ability possible. As a result, our normative capacities for making sense would appear to bottom out in something— a ­background—that cannot itself be normatively assessed or revised. We thus are confronted with the question of whether the background is a topic for phenomenology, rather than a limit on it. I will try to say something about this question in light of the more deflationary conception I offer at the conclusion.

The Background as Deflationary: Wittgenstein on Explanations of Meaning Let’s consider more closely the first sentence in the Dreyfus passage with which I began: We can to some extent light up that understanding, that is, point it out to those who share it, but we cannot spell it out, that is, make it understandable even to those who do not share it. Dreyfus is here contrasting something we can do—“light up that understanding”—with something we cannot do—“spell it out”—where the latter means making it “understandable even to those who do not share it.”3 What I want to suggest is that the contrast Dreyfus relies upon here is far less clear than it initially appears. That is, the way Dreyfus lays things out, it looks like there are two kinds of project at issue, one of which turns out to be impossible. If, however, we think through what Dreyfus says we can do, then there being a clearly delineated inability stems from a contentious—and perhaps confused—idea of how the notions of explanation, understanding, and meaning hang together. In other words, if we see—or remind ourselves of—how “lighting up” that understanding works and the way it involves our always in some way—but also in some ways possibly not—“sharing it,” the second, apparently contrasting idea dissolves.4

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 65 To find a way in here, consider what Wittgenstein says in § 87 of the Philosophical Investigations: Suppose I give this explanation: “I take ‘Moses’ to mean the man, if there was such a man, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, whatever he was called then and whatever he may or may not have done besides.”—But similar doubts to those about the name “Moses” are possible about the words of this explanation (what are you calling “Egypt”, whom the “Israelites”, and so forth?). These questions would not even come to an end when we got down to words like “red”, “dark”, “sweet”.—“But then how does an explanation help me to understand, if, after all, it is not the final one? In that case the explanation is never completed; so I still don’t understand what he means, and never shall!”—As though an explanation, as it were, hung in the air unless supported by another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to avoid a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or prevent a misunderstanding—one, that is, that would arise if not for the explanation, but not every misunderstanding that I can imagine. It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed a gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is possible only if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts. The signpost is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfills its purpose. (Wittgenstein 2009, § 87) The passage begins with an example of Wittgenstein’s explaining what he means, in this case by the name “Moses” (the passage refers back to § 78, where the example of the name “Moses” is first introduced). What follows the first dash (“But similar doubts . . .”) introduces a worry about the efficacy of this explanation in a way that threatens to prove intractable. The worry goes something like this: whenever I offer an explanation of what I mean, the words I use in formulating that explanation might themselves stand in need of explanation. The problem here is that this worry iterates, since whatever I offer by way of explaining what I mean in the first explanation might itself stand in need of explanation, and so on. So, to use the example, if I explain what I mean by “Moses” by appealing to Egypt and the Israelites, those too are words whose meaning may need to be explained. If I then explain what I mean by these words, such explanations will in turn use words whose meaning may need to be explained, and so on. We thus face a regress of explanations that we start to feel must terminate in a final explanation, which serves to found or ground

66  David R. Cerbone all of the explanations higher up; otherwise, as the quoted voice midway through the first paragraph laments, “I  still don’t understand what he means, and never shall!” Notice that the worry begins with an observation that seems undeniable: any explanation of what I mean may itself stand in need of explanation. If someone does not understand something I  have said, then it is possible that what I  say by way of explanation will itself not be understood. If we then add in the idea of iterability, it looks like we have a series of possibilities such that every particular explanation selects from—is only a fragment of—that entire series. That series is in some sense already there, with a definite order and direction, such that each explanation depends upon whatever explanations lie “further down.” An ideal or complete explanation would in some way encompass that entire series, thereby foreclosing any possible misunderstanding. We thus have in very short order the beginnings of what Wittgenstein would call a picture, whose pictorial elements, so to speak, can be understood as a set of requirements for any adequate explanation of meaning. As standing in a kind of series, there is a definite direction of explanation—a direction of definition—that fuels the idea of a direction of analysis. What we are really doing when we offer an explanation of what we mean is giving (or relying upon) an analysis of our initial expression, where the results of that analysis are in turn to be analyzed until a terminus (the endpoint of analysis) is reached. It should be noted here that this passage appears after remarks where Wittgenstein has interrogated the idea of genuine names as standing for simples, whose sense is guaranteed and directly grasped, and immediately before returning to the idea of logic as something sublime. The suggestion is that those heady ideas begin with what look like platitudes. So how does Wittgenstein interrupt this line of reasoning? And how does that interruption tell us something about the notion of the background? Let’s start with the first question. Consider Wittgenstein’s initial response to the lament in quotation marks, “As though an explanation, as it were, hung in the air unless supported by another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to avoid a misunderstanding.” What Wittgenstein is questioning here is the idea that any explanation automatically requires—or even naturally leads to—a further explanation that serves to support it in some way. While one explanation may turn out to require another, that need not be the case. As he goes on to note, the point of an explanation is to remove or avert a misunderstanding, one that has actually arisen (or is likely to arise). An explanation is thus directed at a particular misunderstanding on a particular occasion with a particular interlocutor. Such a misunderstanding may be unexpected, baffling, peculiar, or frustrating; it may be predictable given the audience, completely foreseeable, unsurprising, or avoidable; it could

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 67 be simple, easily removed, or eminently manageable. It depends on the nature and severity of the misunderstanding, why it has arisen, and what it takes to overcome it. The misunderstanding may simply be a matter of someone’s mishearing what I’ve said, in which case I can explain what I mean by repeating what I’ve said more clearly. But in other cases, the misunderstanding may have a deeper source, such as a lack of familiarity with a particular range or domain of concepts, a failure to see a connection between two ideas, a linguistic gap that needs to be filled, and so on. In these cases, there may be greater challenges in terms of what I can and cannot say by way of removing the misunderstanding. That there are a wide variety of kinds of misunderstanding suggests that explanations go in different directions, so that even if the same utterance is at issue, what needs to be explained and why might be only tangentially related in different cases. To use Wittgenstein’s example again, while we might on some occasions explain who Moses was by appeal to the Israelites, on other occasions, the explanation could just as easily go the other way: we may explain to someone who the Israelites were by citing Moses as their leader. It depends on who is asking and why. What this suggests is that there is not a well-defined structure of possibilities that any particular explanation selects from and depends upon for its efficacy. When Wittgenstein rejects the idea that an explanation might somehow address “every misunderstanding I can imagine,” it is not because this is a Herculean task that is beyond my powers; rather, it is unclear just what kind of requirement this is. What exactly is picked out by the phrase “every misunderstanding I can imagine” and how does such a notion even come into play when I  explain what I  mean to someone who has misunderstood what I say? When it comes to explanations of meaning, we might adduce at least the following features based on what Wittgenstein says here in § 87: i. Explanations are situation-specific. ii. As situation-specific, they are responsive to the particular misunderstanding they are addressing. iii. Explanations are directed to particular people, whose misunder standings may be different and may have arisen for different reasons (compare explaining to a grown-up vs. explaining to a child; explaining to a friend vs. explaining to a stranger; explaining to a fellow speaker of English vs. explaining to a non-native speaker of English; and so on). iv. What works as an explanation for one person/situation/utterance might not work for another person/situation/utterance. v. Explanations start somewhere: giving an explanation presupposes that other things are already understood. vi. Explanations end when they have served their purpose (not when everything that could possibly be explained has been explained).

68  David R. Cerbone I will note here only briefly that further attention to the top half of the above list indicates what we might call an ethical dimension of speech, in that speaking to one another involves a willingness to explain what we mean, to remove or avert misunderstandings. And that willingness in some cases may be limited or missing, which is a kind of failure to engage with one’s interlocutor. (There is also a question of willingness on the part of the interlocutor to try to understand what is being said; not every failure is the fault of one party in the conversation.) Such a failure is really a failure to care whether one is understood, and so registers an insensitivity to the audience of one’s words. But even in cases where that willingness is present, the ways in which we can be—and fail to be—responsive to the audience of our words registers different degrees of sensitivity to the particular occasion for speaking, as well as the particular audience for what one says. What I offer by way of explanation when I have not been understood, as called upon by the particular misunderstanding, will need to find the right point of entry in terms of what the audience does understand and can understand. In that search, on some occasions I may be impatient, indifferent, frustrated, or dismissive, which can in turn indicate anything from a condescending to contemptuous attitude toward whomever it is I am speaking. Speaking to one another involves and reflects a range of attitudes toward one another, which in various ways can be virtuous or not. If we concentrate on the bottom half of the list, we can begin to approach the issue of the background. When Wittgenstein points out that an explanation of meaning removes or averts a misunderstanding, one thing that suggests is that any particular misunderstanding occurs against a background of understanding. If someone is so much as able to query whom I take Moses to be, then there is already at least some common understanding between us (my listener understands enough of what I’ve said to ask for an explanation of one thing I’ve said; I understand enough of what she has said to grasp that something of what I said needs to be explained).5 Moreover, any explanation I give, if it is to remove the misunderstanding, must itself be understood. If it is understood, then the explanation I  have offered has done the trick. There is no further explanation that follows on from my initial one when it is successful: merely possible misunderstandings are irrelevant. Of course, it is possible that anything I offer by way of explanation will itself be misunderstood, and so it is possible that something I took for granted or presupposed (“I  thought you were clear on who the Israelites were”) may turn out to be mistaken. What needs to be resisted in this near-platitude is drawing out as a consequence the idea that the best or complete explanation would be one that presupposed nothing. An explanation that presupposes nothing is one side of the coin whose reverse is the notion of first doubting “everything that can be doubted, and then remov[ing] all these doubts.”

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 69 Wittgenstein’s suggestion that explanations presuppose understanding accords with Dreyfus’s idea that any kind of “lighting up” of our understanding is a kind of “pointing out to those who share it.” But for Dreyfus, this kind of lighting up is to be contrasted with a kind of “spelling out” that would make what we understand “understandable even to those who do not share it.” My point in rehearsing some of Wittgenstein’s ideas from the Philosophical Investigations has been to question what that latter idea comes to: what kind of “spelling out” are we imagining here, such that we can say of it that it is something we are unable to do? If we try to imagine a creature with whom we share nothing—no shared sense of anything whatsoever—then the idea that we could explain anything or make ourselves understood in any way at all seems to fade away.6 Where could any such project begin? What possibilities of understanding and misunderstanding are in play here? What possibilities for responsiveness are at issue? One wonders if the task envisioned here is akin to trying to make oneself understood to a fencepost. Is it a failing on my part that I cannot? As Denis McManus puts it in his discussion of Dreyfus and the background, one way of thinking about the lesson here is that we cannot stand outside of, and survey, our ways of making sense: at any stage in the project of “foregrounding”—by attempting to “spell out”—our understanding, there could then be said to remain a residual “background” of understanding which we presuppose and have not “spelt out.” (McManus 2016, 97) Put this way, however (and I  think McManus ultimately agrees), too much credit is accorded to the idea that is being rejected, as we should ultimately not see ourselves as prevented from doing something. Instead, it is the idea of “standing outside” our ways of making sense that should be unmasked as a confusion. I think Wittgenstein can be seen to be gesturing in this direction in the following passage from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics: To what extent can the function of language be described? If someone is not master of a language, I may bring him to mastery of it by training. Someone who is master of it, I may remind of the kind of training, or I may describe it; for a particular purpose; thus already using a technique of the language. To what extent can the function of a rule be described? Someone who is master of none, I can only train. But how can I explain the nature of a rule to myself? The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground.

70  David R. Cerbone For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. (Wittgenstein 1978, VI, § 31) Elsewhere in this same stretch of remarks, Wittgenstein notes, “We talk and we act. That is already presupposed in everything I am saying” (Wittgenstein 1978, VI, § 17). We might put the lesson of these remarks like this: making sense of anything we say and do itself involves talking and acting. The “illusory image of a greater depth” is the idea that we can somehow make sense of our ways of talking and acting without taking anything for granted in terms of what we say and do. This would be a kind of talking and acting that was somehow self-explanatory, that preempted every possibility of misunderstanding. We keep “finding ourselves on the old level” insofar as anything we appeal to by way of explanation is more of the same kind of talk, where it is always possible to be misunderstood.7 I referred at the outset to this way of thinking about the background as deflationary and I want now to say what I mean. Wittgenstein is famous for saying that “explanations come to an end somewhere.” One way of thinking about the background is to see that “somewhere” as naming a definite place: what we all “share” that makes language, thought, and meaning possible. My sense is that Dreyfus often thinks of the background this way, so that appeal to the background does some kind of philosophical-explanatory work (the background is what “enables us to make sense of things”). On the line of reasoning I’ve been trying to tease out of Wittgenstein, by contrast, explanations come to an end at no particular place; they come to an end whenever we have reached an understanding. Just where that is depends on who “we” are. We might put this point by saying that not everything is shared. Just how much we have in common—just how much can be relied upon or taken for granted—is not something fixed or definite, but varies in a variety of ways. I may be surprised that something I’ve said has been misunderstood, and it may be a challenge to figure out the best way to remove that misunderstanding. One way of thinking about what I referred to above as the ethical dimension of speech is that speaking involves a sensitivity to this varying, shifting background, so that making sense to someone else can sometimes require more or less work, more or less patience, more or less effort. Making sense always takes place against a background of things that are presupposed or taken for granted, but just what or how much can be presupposed or taken for granted is not something fixed or determined in advance. These are things that are discovered and amended in the ongoing process of talking to one another. For this reason, it is misleading to talk about the background, a definite place or space that we “have” or within which we “dwell,” that serves as some special kind of ground.

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 71

The Background as Mystery: The Illusion of Depth I want to turn now to the second claim in the passage from Dreyfus’s commentary, which goes beyond the initial contrast between “lighting up” and “spelling out.” Again, Dreyfus writes, Moreover, what we can get clear about is only what is least pervasive and embodied. Heidegger has the sense that the more important some aspect of our understanding of being is, the less we can get at it. The connective “moreover” is interesting here, as it leaves it unclear just how the two thoughts are related to one another. Does the second idea, wherein our difficulty getting at “some aspect of our understanding of being” varies in direct relation to that aspect’s importance, follow on from the first? In offering a deflationary reading of the first claim Dreyfus makes, such that we should see through the demand of spelling out to “those who do not share it” as illusory, my suggestion has been that the rejection of this demand at the same time casts doubt on the notion of the background as something there to be got at or not. There is always a background, but just what that is or what it “contains” is not something fixed or determinate. While I  have appealed to Wittgenstein as a way of developing this deflationary idea, it is important to note that his writings can also be mined for teasing out the more mysterious sense of the background. In a 1931 passage, Wittgenstein says as much: Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I  find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning. (Wittgenstein 1984, 16) While this remark appears quite early in the development of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (he only returned to philosophy in 1929), echoes of this idea can be found among his very last writings. Consider, for example, the following passage, written two decades later: Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it. (Wittgenstein 1969, § 501) Insofar as “the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth,” it seems fair to say that Wittgenstein himself was at the very least alive to the temptation to succumb to just such an image. There is something about “the ground” that intimates to us a “greater depth” that we

72  David R. Cerbone “seek to reach,” even though “we keep on finding ourselves on the old level.” How does this happen? As a start, consider the following passage from early on in the Philosophical Investigations: One attends to the shape, sometimes by tracing it, sometimes by screwing up one’s eyes so as not to see the colour clearly, and so forth. I want to say: this and similar things are what one does while one “directs one’s attention to this or that”. But it isn’t only these things that make us say that someone is attending to the shape, the colour, etc. Just as making a move in chess doesn’t consist only in pushing a piece from here to there on the board—nor yet in the thoughts and feelings that accompany the move: but in the circumstances that we call “playing a game of chess,” “solving a chess problem,” and the like. (Wittgenstein 2009, § 33) Attending to the color or shape of something, like making a move in chess, is something pretty much all of us are able to do. I can, when looking at someone’s shirt or a painting on the wall, look more attentively at the tones or the texture; I can pay more attention to how the shirt fits or how the painting is framed; and so on. In doing any of these things, I might do various other things, such as screw up my eyes or gesture with my hand, and also think various things, such as “That’s an amazing shade of blue!” In reflecting on such ordinary episodes, if we look only at what is readily available, we are apt to feel puzzled: the gesture of pointing, for example, does not by itself seem sufficient to pick out the color rather than, say, the shape (the two gestures look exactly the same), just as “pushing a piece from here to there on the board” does not by itself count as a move in chess. We are apt in such moments of reflection to turn inward, so that the gestures or the movements are in some way infused or informed by an accompanying thought or feeling that makes the gesture or the movement have the meaning it has. But Wittgenstein thinks, and argues relentlessly throughout the Investigations, that this maneuver inevitably fails, as it only raises again the question of what makes that accompanying thought or feeling about color or chess or whatever is at issue. If I think, “Now I’ll take his knight,” as I move my bishop across the board, what passes through my mind, taken by itself, has no more in the way of meaning than the movements of my hand (if the movements are somehow not enough, then what passes through my mind fails to “anchor” that movement). Wittgenstein is not at all denying that we make meaningful gestures, just as he is not denying that we have thoughts that are about chess moves. His point instead is that in such reflective moments, when we dim down our gaze, we neglect or forget the way these episodes of gesturing and thinking are situated in what he refers to in the above passage as simply circumstances. These circumstances serve as a kind of background

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 73 against which such gestures, movements, and thoughts have the meanings they have. Part of Wittgenstein’s aim is to expose and exorcise our tendency to forget these circumstances, to remind us of their importance as “stage-setting”8 for the sense of what we do and say. But what is it about this largely corrective (or therapeutic) appeal to circumstances that gives us an “illusory image of a greater depth”? And why is it that we find ourselves, in seeking those depths, always on the same level? My sense is that the answers to these questions lie in the indefiniteness or indeterminacy of the background. Let me try to explain what I mean here. In one of his later manuscripts, Wittgenstein writes: We judge an action according to its background within human life, and this background is not monochrome, but we might picture it as a very complicated filigree pattern, which, to be sure, we can’t copy, but which we can recognize from the general impression it makes. (Wittgenstein 1980, § 624) Wittgenstein again appeals here to the notion of a background against which we judge an action (I take it that by judge he means, most basically, picking out an action as the kind of action it is). So there is something there that makes a “general impression,” but it is not something we can form a determinate sense of while judging whatever it is that holds our attention. Insofar as we “picture it,” what comes to mind is a very complicated pattern that strikes us in a general way, but without our being able to copy it. I don’t think Wittgenstein just means that the pattern is too complicated to copy, but that what the pattern is is itself indeterminate, so that there is no one “copy” that would count as the copy. In the immediately subsequent remarks in this typescript, Wittgenstein further elaborates on this kind of indeterminacy: The background is the bustle of life. And our concept points to something within this bustle. (Wittgenstein 1980, §625) The notion of a “bustle” (the German here is Getriebe) is itself a deliberately vague notion (at Wittgenstein 1980, § 622 immediately preceding this stretch of remarks, Wittgenstein discusses the paradigmatic vague concept, “heap”); there is no saying just how much activity or what variety constitutes a bustle: And it is the very concept ‘bustle’ that brings about this indefiniteness. For a bustle comes about only through constant repetition. And there is no definite starting point for ‘constant repetition’. (Wittgenstein 1980, § 626)

74  David R. Cerbone “Bustle” is only one of several terms that Wittgenstein uses in remarks from this late period in his writings. Immediately after invoking the notion of a bustle, he adds another: How could human behavior be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly [Gewimmel], is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions. (Wittgenstein 1980, § 629, 1967, § 567) This last remark also appears in Zettel, where it is followed by the following pair of remarks: Seeing life as a weave, this pattern (pretence, say) is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations. That is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use on a single occasion. (Wittgenstein 1967, § 568) And one pattern in the weave is interwoven with many others. (Wittgenstein 1967, § 569) The idea of a pattern appears in the opening remarks of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations (what the new edition now titles “Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment”), most notably where Wittgenstein says that “ ‘grief’ describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the tapestry of life” (Wittgenstein 2009, § i). What all of these notions—weave, pattern, bustle, hurly-burly—appear to be driving at is not just the way particular actions (as well as uses of a word, applications of a concept, and so on) are embedded in broader surroundings, but the way those surroundings form a kind of indefinite backdrop. As a backdrop, it is something we sense or in some way discern whenever we pick out anything in particular, but we sense it only as a kind of indefinite presence insofar as we are attending to that particular thing. To return to the questions I posed above, we might say something like this: Wittgenstein’s appeal to the background as something indefinite, like a complicated pattern that we “cannot copy,” but which nonetheless makes an “impression” on us, suggests a way of understanding our being tempted by an “illusory image of greater depths.” In being struck by something indefinite or indeterminate, there is a kind of “pull” toward making it more definite or determinate: we want to copy the filigree pattern and in that way understand just how this background works in terms of explaining what my making a move in chess or pointing to a

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 75 color or having a certain thought finally consists in. If we could just find a way of taking in this background as a whole, then we could thereby make sense of our making sense of things in some final or comprehensive way. The problem, however, is that whenever we render some part of this background more determinate—pull out one strand from the “weave” in the “tapestry of life”—we just get more of the same kinds of things with which we started: particular gestures and movements, momentary thoughts and feelings, utterances, and expressions. In other words, we just get more foreground, which again stands out against an indefinite backdrop in terms of which it stands out in the way it does. This problem is already intimated in the passage from the Investigations that ends with the example of a move in chess. What makes up the “circumstances” is just more stuff about chess: playing a game of chess, solving a chess problem, and so on. As just more stuff about chess, none of this tells us anything more about what making a move in chess consists of beyond moving a piece across the board apart from the truism that the movement in question has to be a move within the game of chess (and all that involves). In this sense, we repeatedly “find ourselves on the old level,” i.e., back among the foreground phenomena we were originally trying to understand.

Phenomenology and the Idea of Infinite Tasks By way of conclusion, I  want to indicate briefly what I  take to be the ramifications of this more deflationary conception of the background (as just background, without the definite article) for our understanding of phenomenology. One way to think about the upshot here is as providing a new gloss or twist on Husserl’s idea of phenomenology as involving, or committing us to, a set of “infinite tasks.” On the orthodox Husserlian way of thinking, these tasks are all part of a transcendental-explanatory project, whereby we make clear to ourselves the structures in terms of which our making sense of things is possible. Among those structures are the horizonal-background structures, the “determinable indeterminacies,” whose essential role phenomenology highlights and seeks to make explicit. For Husserlian phenomenology, there is (already) a structure there to make determinate, only doing so is an infinite task. There is no getting to the end of excavating all the “sedimented beliefs” that make up the horizonal structure of experience. Dreyfus for his part rejects this Husserlian conception of phenomenology as an infinite task, since he rejects the idea of the background as a determinably indeterminate structure whose elements might be thought of along the lines of beliefs. For Dreyfus, the background cannot be made explicit because it does not have that kind of structure (again, “the more important some aspect of our understanding of being is, the less we can get at it”). To depict what lies in the background in propositional,

76  David R. Cerbone belief-like form is thereby to distort it. But Dreyfus still shares with the original Husserlian vision the idea of the background as explanatory, as contributing in some way to our understanding of how intentionality is possible. So there is still the background—something there—that plays a certain kind of role in our understanding or making sense of things, only it doesn’t look the way Husserl thought it did. On the deflationary conception of the background I’ve been sketching out via Wittgenstein, there is no there there in either the Husserlian or Dreyfusian sense, and so there is neither the infinite task of explicating it, nor the countervailing insistence that what is there must remain mysterious. Instead, there is just our talking and acting, any moment of which takes place—and makes the sense it does—against an indefinitely appearing background, which in turn consists of more in the way of talking and acting. Insofar as we neglect the way any moment of our talking and acting takes place against such a background, or insofar as we are tempted to discern an “illusory depth” within it, then the task is one of addressing the confusions such forms of neglect or temptation are apt to generate. Since Wittgenstein recognizes that “the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth,” there is the infinite negative task of returning us to what Wittgenstein calls “the rough ground.”9 This sense of an infinite negative task is registered in the character of Wittgenstein’s later writings, where there is no sense of finality, no moment of “throwing away the ladder” once and for all. But there is a perhaps more positively charged task as well, although still not constructive in an explanatory sense; this task is bound up with what I referred to in passing above as the ethical dimensions of speech. Making sense to one another is itself an infinite task, whose continual accomplishment depends upon a shared background, what Wittgenstein calls at Investigations §  242 agreement in “judgments.” That what is shared—what gets taken for granted or presupposed—is not something fixed or determined means that what lies in the background can be—or can become—a problem, something that no longer figures—or is discovered not to figure—in our shared sensibility, and can in this way become itself a part of the foreground as a topic for critical reflection. In seeking to “light up” our understanding—to use Dreyfus’s phrase—the task of phenomenology lies in cultivating an openness to that kind of critical reflection, to seeing and showing how particular ways of making sense depend upon other ways being taken for granted or assumed. Phenomenology might in this way be understood positively as addressing the ongoing ethical challenge of making sense of and to one another.10, 11

Notes 1 For Dreyfus, that these practices can function only if they “remain in the background” is part of why making them explicit is neither possible nor desirable. The latter claim, which I address only obliquely at the end of my

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 77 discussion, is motivated for Dreyfus by the idea that striving to make such practices explicit undermines our commitment to them, thereby fostering an enervating sense of detachment. It is difficult to know how to assess this claim, especially as it is coupled with the further claim that it is not possible to make such practices explicit anyway. (If it is not possible, then who knows what effect explicitation would have?) However, I am inclined to think that a great deal depends on which practices are at issue: it may well be that a loss of seriousness about some practices may on the whole be a good thing. Consider, for example, practices that, on further reflection, come to appear oppressive. 2 This is a point that has been emphasized by McManus 2008, 2016, whose discussions of Dreyfus and the background are in the background of my own. 3 Earlier in the commentary, Dreyfus characterizes this latter alternative as spelling out “these practices in so definite and context-free a way that they could be communicated to any rational being or represented in a computer” (Dreyfus 1990, 4). 4 My teasing out of a deflationary understanding of the notion of the background resonates with, and in some ways draws upon, work by Barry Stroud and Denis McManus (McManus, in turn, draws upon the work of John McDowell). See Stroud 2000, McManus 2008, and McManus 2016. Stroud’s discussion focuses on the idea of the background as it emerges in the work of John Searle. While Stroud endorses a kind of negative appeal to the notion of a background as blocking certain forms of explanation in the philosophy of mind and language, he challenges the idea that appeal to the background provides a new kind of explanatory project, such that the background is something pre- or non-intentional that “makes possible” our having or being in intentional states. McManus’s discussion focuses directly on Heidegger and Dreyfus: what I refer to here as a deflationary idea of the background accords with what he calls a “dissolving” conception. For McManus, what is being dissolved is a way of thinking about representations that makes the question of their possibility seem urgent; on such a way of thinking, appeal to the background is meant to address that urgent question. McManus argues that if we take that question seriously, the appeal to the background only serves to raise the question anew, and so provides nothing by way of a satisfying answer. 5 Consider here Wittgenstein 2009, § 30: “One has already to know (be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name. But what does one have to know?” I take it that this remark is applicable to the notion of asking what someone means. My sense in both cases is that Wittgenstein’s leaving the concluding question unanswered is deliberate, in that there is no one something one has to know or be able to do. Apart from saying something along the lines of “lots of things,” how one fills in details will depend on the particulars of the case. Compare being able to ask for the name of a pet, a best friend, a color, a foreign currency, a galaxy. Each of these enlists a different range of background knowledge and abilities. 6 Even in Dreyfus’s (somewhat notorious) example from the first chapter  of his commentary involving American and Japanese child-rearing practices, that these practices serve to inculcate in the respective babies a particular understanding of being presupposes a responsiveness on the babies’ parts in order to occur. Without that responsiveness, these practices could not find a foothold. 7 A brief remark on the concluding paragraph of Investigations § 87, where Wittgenstein refers to the signpost as being “in order” if it “fulfills its purposes” under “normal circumstances.” Signposts that fulfill their purposes in this way can be misunderstood; what matters is only that they by and large are not. Wittgenstein’s concluding with an allusion to signposts refers

78  David R. Cerbone back to  §  85, which begins with his likening a rule to a signpost. Within that remark, Wittgenstein contrasts empirical and philosophical senses of the notion that a signpost leaves room for doubt. The empirical case is a matter of signs that have been shown to be in some way confusing, vague, ambiguous, difficult to follow, and so on. These are what we might simply call bad signs. In such cases, signs may be improved in ways that strive to remove confusion, vagaries, and so on, or people may be given better instruction in the use of such signs. It depends on what the signs are for and why the problems are arising. The main thing is that in the empirical case, we are addressing actual or at least foreseeable problems. The philosophical case, by contrast, concerns what are only possible doubts, misunderstandings that could arise. The risk of emptiness here can be seen in what is guiding the philosophical case, namely, the idea of a sign that cannot possibly be misunderstood, no matter who was using it and no matter what the circumstances. Such a “sign” would be nothing short of magical. I think that § 87 as a whole, as well as much of the Philosophical Investigations more generally, can be understood as directed against various forms of magical thinking. 8 The term “stage-setting” appears in the original Anscombe translation of §  257 of the Investigations; the revised translation by Hacker and Schulte omits the term. The revised translation is certainly truer to the German, but I nonetheless find the phrase helpful. 9 In a lecture I attended many years ago, Hilary Putnam said something to the effect that Wittgenstein’s aim was to close down the philosophy shop, only he saw that it would take forever to do so. I don’t know if this is what Putnam had in mind, but his remark has stuck with me. 10 See Westerlund 2014 for one way of understanding phenomenological descriptions as providing a distinctive kind of illuminating and potentially transformative forms of reflective awareness, and so as being worthy of being called “transcendental” even without the traditional appeal to essential structures and transcendental subjectivity. See also Boncompagni 2014. I  try in Cerbone Unpublished to sketch out in a different way how this idea of “lighting up” aspects of our understanding (in a way suggested by Dreyfus himself) might be understood as allowing for possibly radical forms of self-criticism. What I say there is congruent in many ways with Boncompagni’s ideas. 11 I would like to thank audiences at meetings of the Boston Phenomenology Circle and the International Society for Phenomenological Studies and at Wake Forest for comments and discussion. I would especially like to thank Denis McManus and Joseph Schear for their detailed comments and criticisms.

References Boncompagni, Anna. 2014. “On Trying to Say What ‘Goes Without Saying’: Wittgenstein on Certainty and Ineffability.” Journal of Theories and Research in Education 9 (1): 51–68. https://rpd.unibo.it/article/view/4291. Cerbone, David R. Unpublished. “ ‘Feckless Prisoners of Their Times’: Historicism and Moral Reflection.” Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1990. Being-in-the-World: A  Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McManus, Denis. 2008. “Rules, Regression, and the ‘Background’: Dreyfus, Heidegger and McDowell.” European Journal of Philosophy 16 (3) (December): 432–58. ———. 2016. Heidegger and the Measure of Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ground, Background, and Rough Ground 79 Stroud, Barry. 2000. “The Background of Thought.” In Meaning, Understanding, and Practice: Philosophical Essays, 131–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Westerlund, Fredrik. 2014. “What Is a Transcendental Description?” In Phenomenology and the Transcendental, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Timo Miettinen, 257–75. New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1969. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1978. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Edited by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II. Edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1984. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

5 Inauthentic Theologizing and Phenomenological Method Martin Kavka

God is a problem for phenomenology. God is everywhere: in Husserl’s Ideas I, in his discussions with Sister Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, in Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Levinas’s Talmudic readings, in the work of Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jan Patočka, Karol Wojtyła, John D. Caputo, Anthony Steinbock, Emmanuel Falque, and others.1 Yet it remains an open question as to whether God should be anywhere in phenomenology, except in intellectual historians of the movement. The debates heightened by Dominique Janicaud’s The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology (2000, 16–103) are still powerful ones. To what extent is Janicaud’s claim that theological phenomenology is illegitimate simply an arbitrary imposition of secularism onto phenomenology? To what extent does the limitation of phenomenological or postphenomenological theology to a single religious denomination, as occurs in Emmanuel Falque’s Crossing the Rubicon (2016, 56–7, 106), serve merely as an excuse for an arbitrary Christocentrism in thinking? When, in other words, does current scholarship that sees itself as indebted to the phenomenological tradition evade the long-standing concerns about truth and meaning in phenomenology, and become merely a performance of an author’s personal piety? The work of Steven Crowell is not commonly understood as a contribution to these kinds of debates in phenomenology of religion. But it is. The main function of this essay is to show exactly how his contribution works. Nevertheless, my argument about why it is a contribution travels through a questioning of his work. Three sections follow this introductory one. The first stays mainly at the level of a re-narration of two of Crowell’s most important articles, “Authentic Thinking and Phenomenological Method” (2002) and “Measure-Taking: Meaning and Normativity in Heidegger’s Philosophy” (2008), in order to show that he has made two slightly different claims about the validity of theologically inflected phenomenology, forbidding it in 2002 but licensing it to a greater degree in 2008. The second section tries to mediate between these two claims by identifying a culprit for the theological appropriation of phenomenology—Heidegger’s interpretation of Husserl’s discovery of

Inauthentic Theologizing 81 categorial intuition—and hypothesizes that it might play a role in Heidegger’s developing a different account of the call in the 1943 postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” than that found in his description of the call of conscience in Being and Time, as brilliantly reconstructed by Crowell. The third section expresses a worry about the rhetoric of feeling in contemporary phenomenology, as important as that rhetoric may be. Proceeding from the emphasis that Crowell places on discourse in Being and Time, I argue that Crowell shows how to chasten phenomenology of religion’s tendency toward theological flights of fancy. ****** Whenever I introduce students to the scholarship that often goes by the name of “Continental philosophy of religion,” I assign them Crowell’s “Authentic Thinking and Phenomenological Method” (2002). The essay is a précis of a much better version of Dominique Janicaud’s The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology than the book that Janicaud actually wrote. Janicaud and Crowell make a similar claim, namely that phenomenology cannot possibly lead to any kind of theologizing that would still remain within the horizons of phenomenology. But while Janicaud’s book is a mere claim, Crowell’s article is an argument. Crowell returns us to the original contribution that Heidegger saw in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, namely categorical intuition, and uses that to draw a thick border between responsible and irresponsible forms of thinking. When Heidegger wrote in the 1963 essay “My Way to Phenomenology” that “the distinction which is worked out there [the sixth of Husserl’s Logical Investigations] between sensuous and categorial intuition revealed itself to me in its scope for the determination of the ‘manifold meaning of being’ ” (Heidegger 1972, 78)—the phrase in single quotes referring to the title of Franz Brentano’s 1862 book on Aristotle—he placed his finger on the key moment in the Investigations at which Husserl grappled with the issue of meaning’s ground. For Husserl, sensuous intuition granted little to philosophy; what were of interest to him were not percepts but perceptual statements. To say a sentence such as “I see white paper” demanded an analysis of how the perceiver could synthesize the percept in a way so as to say not simply that the white in front of one is white, but that the paper itself is white. When Husserl wrote “white paper is paper which is white” (Husserl 2001, 2.273), he saw that perception of white paper involves something more than paper and white. In addition, it involves some state of affairs that announces the relation between, in this case, paper and white. In this sentence, that relation is announced by the word “is”; it is a relation of being, one that is not sensuously intuitable at all. If our sentences are not to be senseless—and if logical vocabulary that deals with other categories in addition to the category of being is to be meaningful—categorial intuition must occur.

82  Martin Kavka For Husserl, intuition is always intuition of these states of affairs, phrased in sentential form. No intuition is therefore devoid of categorial intuition. For this reason, he described “authentic acts of thinking” as lying in fulfillments of the claims made in statements, “i.e., the intuitions of states of affairs, and all intuitions which function as possible parts of such intuitions” (Husserl 2001, 2.312). These fulfillments are not always literally perceptual, since categorial intuition is other than sensible intuition. Husserl uses “perception” equivocally to refer to any “fulfilling act of confirmatory self-presentation,” whether related directly to the object or to “the object itself in its categorial structure” (Husserl 2001, 2.280). In Crowell’s “Authentic Thinking,” this point is important as a way to get around Janicaud’s belief that the site where the “positive phenomenological project” of Husserl goes wrong is Heidegger’s notion of a “phenomenology of the inapparent” (Janicaud 2000, 28ff.), as articulated in the last of the three sessions of his seminar held at Zähringen in September 1973 (Heidegger 2003, 80). If one can “perceive” an object in its categorial articulation, even though categories themselves do not sensuously appear, then “phenomenology of the inapparent” is a fitting name for a kind of analysis that should have as its object the most everyday acts, for example those in which we fulfill abstract arithmetic claims (since numbers themselves are not perceived), or claims which use the word “unity” or even the word “and.” Phenomenology of the inapparent happens all the time. Nevertheless, simply because Crowell judges Janicaud’s rejection of the “phenomenology of the inapparent” to be unjustified, it does not follow that he endorses the theological moves of the 20th-century French phenomenologists whom Janicaud takes to task in The Theological Turn. Instead, Crowell draws a more precise boundary between phenomenology and theology than Janicaud had. Categorially articulated objects can certainly be the subject matter, as Husserl explicitly said, of authentic thinking. But Crowell expands the realm of authentic thinking, using an argument from Donn Welton, to argue that “horizonal phenomena,” which function as transcendental conditions of states of affairs, can be the subject matter of authentic thinking even though those phenomena are not directly (or even categorially) intuitable. Such phenomena are implicit in experience, as Crowell points out using the example of one’s own embodiment. Although my embodiment is not an intentional object, it is horizonally experienced, pre-given, and thus intuited along with my direct perception of objects. And only because it can be recovered, made intuitively explicit, as having been experienced, does it count as a phenomenologically established feature of transcendental subjectivity. (Crowell 2002, 35)

Inauthentic Theologizing 83 Crowell cashes out this expansion of authentic thinking (2002, 37) by classifying Levinas’s phenomenology of the face as authentic, simply because the claim of the other person is implicitly intuited in intersubjectivity: “in thinking it authentically—in carrying out the categorial syntheses that link it, as condition, with what it conditions—I do in fact intuit the face, in Husserl’s sense.” In “Authentic Thinking,” this is a quick line that appears in the last paragraph. The full version of this argument appeared in Crowell’s excellent 2015 article on Levinasian ethics, in which Crowell showed how Levinas solved problems in Sartre’s account of the look in Being and Nothingness by arguing the face is the transcendental condition of shame. On Crowell’s reading of Levinas (Crowell 2015, 578), “it is because I experience myself as judged—that is, in shame acknowledge the arbitrariness, the ‘unjustified’ character, of my freedom—that there is an Other for me, a ‘face.’ ” What is on Crowell’s account inauthentic thinking—mere signification, unfulfilled, uttered in sentences that merely follow the laws of syntax—is what is inauthentic thinking on Husserl’s account, namely thinking that is entirely unrelated to experience, thinking that cannot possibly be intuited in any categorial (much less sensuous) form. For Crowell (2002, 32), this includes Levinas’s “affirmation of the infinity and even divinity” of the face. But his main target in “Authentic Thinking” is not Levinas per se, but any self-styled “phenomenology” that gives up the demand for fulfilling intuition (in any sense of “intuition”) to verify what one has signified. In several paragraphs treating Jean-Luc Marion’s Reduction and Givenness, Crowell shows how Marion misreads Husserl’s notion of signification in the course of Marion’s argument (1998, 32) that the breakthrough of phenomenology consists solely in the unconditional primacy of the givenness of the phenomenon. Intuition and intention  .  .  . are so only through the givenness that they illustrate—and of which they deliver only modes, the ‘modes of givenness’ of that which appears. What Marion has done, according to Crowell, is confuse the temporal process of phenomenological fulfillment (I say something, and then it is confirmed) with a logical priority (there is no intuition without a prior signification as its ground). Marion’s interest here is to broaden “presence, understood as objectivity, according to the excessive measure of givenness” (1998, 37) so that phenomenology can talk about the givenness of phenomena that bear such excess. Marion’s work on the “saturated phenomenon” in the 1990s developed this further, culminating in an account of the phenomenality of revelation as a singular site of such excess, were revelation to have actually occurred (Marion 2002a, 212–47, 2002b; Marion and Derrida 1999, 54–78). As Levinas does when describing the face as the trace of God, so for Crowell does Marion

84  Martin Kavka illegitimately bring divinity into phenomenology. Theology just is inauthentic thinking. While Crowell’s remarks about theology in “Authentic Thinking” are brief, it would also seem that his arguments in this essay would extend to any phenomenology that would seek to unsay “God” by refusing to determine it as any monotheistic tradition has—as voice, as Christ, as king. When phenomenology extends itself to any nonintuitable given, Crowell claims it ceases to be phenomenology and instead becomes “groundless speculation.”2 That was 2002. Six years later, “Measure-Taking” implies a different standard for judging religious and/or theological language in phenomenology, one in which religious language is acceptable as long as it seems to be mere rhetoric that expresses the ultimacy of the necessarily normative orientation of existence. Articulating how Crowell’s position on religion changed between 2002 and 2008 requires diving into this larger argument. The first half of “Measure-Taking” is a preliminary version of Crowell’s important rereading of the call of conscience in Heidegger’s Being and Time that appears in his 2013 book Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. The phenomenon of conscience is odd, as Crowell points out. On the one hand, conscience itself takes the form of a call in Being and Time, and as Heidegger explicitly states (2010, 259), “calling is a mode of discourse.” As a mode of discourse, it articulates something intelligible (Heidegger 2010, 261). On the other hand, when the call of conscience occurs, the caller is Dasein “in the ground of its uncanniness,” in the mood of anxiety. In that mood, everything appears to be unintelligible, since anxiety is described as the collapse of the socially structured meanings in which Dasein has been absorbed, so that “the world has the character of complete insignificance” (Heidegger 2010, 266, 180). Crowell’s resolution of this interpretive difficulty is to take the call of conscience as a call into the space of reasons. What can it mean for Heidegger to say that “the self is brought to itself by the call” (Heidegger 2010, 263)? Heidegger’s answer is that Dasein has been lost in the they (it is for this uncritical stance that Dasein is guilty), and now it must actualize “the possibility of taking over in existence the thrown being that it is” (Heidegger 2010, 275). This means that while the self cannot just take up any old project it wants—I am constrained by my situation, and so my decision to become a nuclear physicist by next Friday is a laughable one—it nonetheless remains the case that my response to the call of conscience cannot amount to taking up projects simply because those projects are what various authorities (the “they”) say must be done, or because those projects are ones in which I am already engaged and they have a kind of inertial force that carries me along. These kinds of motives for taking up projects are not an adequate response to the call of conscience. To be “brought to itself” means that whether a self agrees or disagrees with an authority structure, or with the past contours of its life, that self answers the question of why it does what it does. And so the

Inauthentic Theologizing 85 self who hears the call gives reasons for engaging in the actions it does. They may be great reasons, or they may be horrid reasons. Yet they are reasons nonetheless. For Crowell, “taking over” involves seeing my context “in a normative light . . . my natural inclinations, my social situation, and my historical co-ordinates are taken up into the space of reasons, they become ‘my’ reasons” (2008, 267; see also Crowell 2013, 206–10, 219–22). For those readers who are puzzled by the vocabulary of reasongiving (which does not appear in Being and Time), Crowell points out (Crowell 2008, 268–9) that Heidegger explicitly describes this kind of taking over in the 1928 essay “On the Essence of Ground” as entailing Dasein’s giving an account of itself (Heidegger 1998, 130). To say that the self who has heard the call of conscience is normatively oriented is not to say that it is oriented to concrete norms. Conscience does not utter any norm; it only calls Dasein back to itself. Yet Dasein cannot respond to the call without making some kind of claim about which really possible course of action is best, and why. Crowell describes this (2008, 268) as reflecting an “orientation towards measure” that is part of Dasein’s ownmost being. Crowell wants to make an argument about how meaning arises in and through this orientation to measure, in both Being and Time and the later Heidegger essays that explicitly treat measure. The second half of “Measure-Taking” is a patient re-narration of Heidegger’s 1951 essay “.  .  . Poetically Man Dwells  .  .  .” Some of Crowell’s reconstruction is a dictionary of sorts, in which the vocabulary of Being and Time is translated into the language of the 1951 essay. Thrown facticity becomes “earth”; the projects of my meaningful existence become “sky”; the world of significance becomes the “dimension” that spans the space between earth and sky. That dictionary makes sense of the stakes of difficult sentences in “. . . Poetically,” for example when Heidegger (1971, 220) reads Hölderlin’s “In Lovely Blue” to say that in the utter hardship of life, “in this realm, man is allowed to look up, out of it, through it, toward the divinities. The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth.”3 As a commentary on Hölderlin’s lines (1952, 260–1), __________________Die Himmlischen aber, Die immer gut sind, alles zumal, wie Reiche, haben diese, Tugend und Freude. Der Mensch Darf das nachahmen. Darf, wenn lauter Mühe das Leben, ein Mensch Aufschauen und sagen: so Will ich auch seyn? But the heavenly, who are always good All things at once, like the rich, have these, virtue and pleasure This men may imitate.

86  Martin Kavka May, when life is all hardship, may a man Look up and say: I too would like to resemble these? Heidegger’s language in “. . . Poetically” is a scene of the human desire to orient ourselves by some normative standard, to live an existence that is something more than thrownness, in which even if projects come shattering apart as a result of various material causes outside human control, one will have engaged in that plan well. It therefore has the same function as Being and Time’s language of Dasein “wanting to have a conscience.” As Hölderlin goes on to say, “man may measure himself against the Godhead [Gottheit].” Nevertheless, such an act of measuring does not hit the Godhead. Just as conscience only communicates the guilt of Dasein, the act of measuring only expresses the desire to resemble something other than a toiling body. There is no norm readily available on earth, as Hölderlin says, and God in God’s self remains unknown. It is true that “In Lovely Blue” continues by asking, “Is God unknown? Is he manifest as [offenbar wie] the sky?/I’d rather believe the latter [dieses glaub’ ich eher].” But Heidegger refuses to read the poem here as stating the narrator’s preference to believe that God is indeed known and manifest, just as the sky is, over believing that God is unknown. Instead, Heidegger’s reading states that the answers to both questions must be in the affirmative. God is unknown, and remains concealed in God’s manifestation through the sky (1971, 222): “for Hölderlin God, as the one who he is, is unknown, and it is just as this Unknown One that he is the measure for the poet.” Since the measure remains unknown, measuring can say nothing other than what conscience does: existence is normatively inflected all the way down. Crowell (2008, 272) describes the God- and heaven-talk of “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .” as Heidegger’s “idiom.” The reader who wants to understand this essay therefore has to translate its similes. When Heidegger writes in 1951 that measuring “never grasps the measure but rather takes it [the measure] in the concentrated perceiving that remains a hearing” (1971, 223), this is analogous to descriptions in Being and Time of the Dasein who has taken up the summons of the call of conscience. When Dasein gives reasons for why it does what it does, it takes stock of its situation, and it interprets that situation in light of some norms that it takes to be authoritative (and has reasons to take as authoritative). Whether it is correct in that interpretation is unknown; whether those norms ought to be authoritative is just as unknown. But Dasein is responsive to the call of conscience in this act of giving an account of why it does what it does, just as the poet’s measure-taking is responsive to the call to take up norms, to take measure in one way or another. When Heidegger writes (1971, 223) that “the measure consists in the way in which the God who remains unknown is manifest [offenbar] as

Inauthentic Theologizing 87 this [God who remains unknown] through the sky,” this is just for Crowell a statement about how normativity works. He argues that our descriptions of things always imply a significance we take them to have, that is neither inherent in the things themselves nor inherent in us (since we did not create these things from nothing). Moving to the example of bread and wine on a table in Trakl’s “A  Winter Evening” (invoked in Heidegger’s 1950 essay “Language”), Crowell points out (2008, 273) that bread and wine are just bread and wine, but this ‘just’ cuts in two directions. As mere things they ultimately sink into their own inaccessibility, one that no meaning-giving can efface. Yet as familiar they already harbor a relation to measure, to what they are supposed to be: bread and wine are ‘familiar’ to us—we experience them as bread and wine—because the unknown God appears ‘in’ them; that is, our experience includes an orientation toward measure as such. On this reading, it is not only the case that Heidegger’s God-talk abjures theology (because there is no measure that is grasped, and there is therefore no dogma that can be confidently asserted), but it is also not really about religion at all. “God” is just a way of talking about the absent ground of normativity in an existence whose normative dimension cannot be denied. But no matter how much I might love this Heidegger, it seems to me that Crowell’s language of “idiom” misses something key about these late essays. While there may be good reasons to interpret these essays as Crowell does, Crowell nonetheless reports on these essays as if they were ahistorical, and that is not always easy to reconcile with the texts of these essays themselves. For example, in the epilogue to “The Thing” (1950), Heidegger wrote (1971, 184, translation altered): the default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness of what has been and of the presencing thus gathered, of the divine in Hellenism, in the prophetic-Jewish, in the preaching of Jesus. To what extent are these words full of idioms? Certainly what we take to be a measure, a reason for acting in this way and not that, a reason for taking a thing as bread and not as a yeast-based sculpture, can come from nowhere except the past. But here Heidegger quite explicitly states that among everything that has been, there are some moments, some gatherings, that are more authoritative than others. In the absence of any sustained biblical commentary by Heidegger, we do not know whether this is because the biblical prophets named something that could be secularized as Heidegger’s Hölderlin commentary can be in “. . . Poetically

88  Martin Kavka Man Dwells . . .,” or because they named God. In other words, we do not know whether “the unknown God” is an idiom for measure, or whether “measure” is an idiom for the unknown God. But over and above these issues, I remain puzzled as to why Crowell licenses God-talk as an idiom in “Measure-Taking” in a way that is not licensed in “Authentic Thinking.” Certainly one could argue that when Levinas wrote that the face is the trace of the divine—which itself does not come to presence—Levinas meant this in a non-idiomatic way. But even if he did, why would this be a problem? Crowell’s patient rereading of measure and conscience is a story of why we must give an account of why we take the world (and ourselves, and our acts) in the way we do. We must justify ourselves to the others among whom we live, and there is no meaningful existence without that justification. But to whom am I answerable? I am certainly answerable to the others to whom I justify myself, simply because I am speaking with them. And since the call of conscience in Being and Time comes from Dasein itself, I am certainly answerable to myself in some sense, even though I do not experience the call of conscience as from me. Yet in “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .,” the person who dwells poetically is answerable to some other agency that claims, and also remains concealed in this claiming. A  poet could not take measure without being claimed in this way. Therefore, we would be justified in describing the unknown God as the transcendental condition of any and all measure-taking. Cannot the God referred to in this God-talk—absent and unconceptualizable, but grounding—be a kind of horizonal phenomenon of the sort that Crowell treats in “Authentic Thinking,” with the face as its paramount example? If so, such a God still might be useless to professional theologians. Insofar as we orient ourselves to measure, one might idiomatically say that we all pray to the unknown God, but there can be no institutional seminary devoted to that God. Nonetheless, it would be phenomenological. What is the difference, at the end of the day, between Levinas’s claim that the face is the trace of the divine and Heidegger’s claim that the unknown God is mysteriously manifest as the unknown God, through the sky? For Crowell in “Authentic Thinking,” Levinas’s claim about the divine that does not come to presence and is only signified through its traces transgresses phenomenology, although in “Measure-Taking” Heidegger’s claim about the manifestation of the unknown God does not. The single criterion here that would govern both of these decisions escapes me. ****** Perhaps it is best to return to categorial intuition. According to “My Way of Phenomenology,” at the time when Heidegger was studying and teaching the sixth of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in the 1920s and figuring out the stakes of categorial intuition, the following question arose in his mind (Heidegger 1972): “Whence and

Inauthentic Theologizing 89 how is it determined what must be experienced as ‘the things themselves’ in accordance with the principle of phenomenology? It is consciousness and its objectivity, or it is the Being of beings in its unconcealedness and concealment?” In other words, who or what grounds meaning, at the end of the day? The subject, or something or someone exterior to the subject? And if the latter, how can it be described, if at all? It makes sense that Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition would have given rise to these sorts of questions in Heidegger’s mind. If we cannot say anything about any thing without the intuition of being as a category—for otherwise “S is P” would be unsayable—then perhaps meaning is not entirely, or not at all, up to us. According to the notes from the Zähringen seminar, Heidegger affirmed that the stakes of Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition were that “in order to unfold the question concerning the meaning of being, being must be given in order to inquire after its meaning” (Heidegger 2003, 67). Jean-Luc Marion quotes this part of the seminar in the opening pages of Reduction and Givenness in the interest of arguing that givenness must be thought outside of the intuition in which the given comes to presence. After all, if givenness is prior to all intuition—“intuition results from givenness without exception,” (Marion 1998, 15)—as is signaled by the “in order to inquire” in Heidegger’s sentence, then givenness can serve as an area for transcendental-phenomenological inquiry. Perhaps Marion’s conclusion here is too quick. After all, according to “My Way to Phenomenology,” the question of whether it is either consciousness or Being that has priority (and what kind of priority it has) in the making of meaning remains a live question for Heidegger as he grappled with categorial intuition. Crowell’s story is one in which this is just a false choice. To respond to the call of conscience by treating an inclination as a reason to do or not to do something (or to change my inclination when it seems not to justify that action)—as something that it is good for me to do or not to do—is decidedly my response. However, it is also a response to a claim. As Crowell states, “it is a kind of hearing” (2008, 268). In those words, the temptation to follow Marion is at its greatest. But to whom—or to what—is the measure-taker hearkening? In the analysis of conscience in Being and Time, the answer is that conscience is a dialogue of Dasein with itself. Heidegger spent several paragraphs in Being and Time arguing that readers should not take the fact that the call “comes from me and yet over me” as evidence for the caller being some kind of alien power: “The fact that the call is not explicitly brought about by me, but rather, ‘it’ calls, does not justify looking for the caller in a being unlike Dasein,” such as God (Heidegger 2010, 265). The reason why this is the case is that any kind of explicit voice that would belong to such an other being would simply render Dasein lost again. The point of the analysis of conscience is to serve as some fulcrum by which the

90  Martin Kavka “who” of Dasein, passively determined by the “they” and their norms, can return to a sense of itself as having possibilities. A God who speaks in conscience by claiming that one determinate path is the path to take does not lead Dasein back to itself and its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. The voice of God determines the proper course of action, and so God is an illegitimate candidate for the caller of conscience. Hannah Arendt (2003, 107–8) understood this well: Within the realm of religious experience, there can’t be a conflict of conscience. The voice of God speaks clearly and the question is only if I will obey it or not. Conflicts of conscience in secular terms, on the other hand, are actually nothing but deliberations between me and myself; they are not resolved through feeling but through thinking. When does Dasein find itself thinking, engaging in the “two-in-one” which Arendt regularly associated with thinking in her late essays (Arendt 2003, 98, 105ff., 184)? When does Dasein find itself split? In the experience of uncanniness in anxiety. There Dasein is literally not at home with itself. Once the system of significance of the world of the “they” has shown itself arbitrary in the experience of anxiety—what if marriage doesn’t lead to happiness, what if all this education leads to a job I hate, what if I die before I finish this essay, what if it all sinks away, what if what if. . . —then I have to figure out what to do and why to do it in the light of some measure. I have to think, as I am called out of my customary way of life by another voice in me that throws obstacles in my way by saying “this is all utterly insignificant,” places the previously accepted norm into question, and demands that I develop an account of significant action.4 In the 1943 postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger once again wrote of a voice that spoke silently, that did not utter any proposition, and that spoke in the experience of anxiety, “attuning the human being in his essence to its claim.” But this voice is no longer part of an inner dialogue. Readiness for anxiety is a Yes to assuming a stance that fulfills the highest claim, a claim that is made upon the human essence alone. Of all beings, only the human being, called upon by the voice of being, experiences the wonder of wonders: that beings are. The being that is thus called in its essence into the truth of being is for this reason always attuned in an essential manner. (Heidegger 1998, 234) The function of the voice is the same as in Being and Time, yet the caller/ claimer is no longer Dasein, but being. Why this difference? Perhaps it does not amount to much. It is not too hard to read certain parts of

Inauthentic Theologizing 91 the “Postscript” along the lines of Crowell’s translation of “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .” To say that the thinking that is ready for anxiety, “essential thinking,” is one that “heeds the measured signs of the incalculable and recognizes in the latter the unforeseeable arrival of the unavoidable” (Heidegger 1998, 237), is to say that the measures taken are no more than signs, and that the future remains contingent. To say that the measures taken are no more than signs is to say that the act of measure-taking is, when done best, an act that knows that it cannot grasp the measure because the measure is not out there to be found; norms are at best hypotheses that are revisable as we discover whether they have measured up to the measure. To say that the future remains contingent is to say that the future cannot be determined or planned as a result of such measuring. Dasein has fallen, and will fall again. But if this translation is possible, then why could one not say that this is another scene of dialogue along the lines of Being and Time? Why would Heidegger have described the voice as the voice of being? When Jean-Luc Marion worked through the “Postscript” in the last chapter of Reduction and Givenness, he pointed out (1998, 176–81) that part of the answer must be that in the “Postscript,” Heidegger is deeply invested in narrating anxiety as an encounter with being. If the argument of “What Is Metaphysics?” is that in anxiety, Dasein is held out into the nothing (beyond all determinate projects and systems of significance), the “Postscript” departs from the earlier essay by claiming that the nothing “essentially prevails as being” (Heidegger 1998, 233). But as Marion points out (1998, 183), this claim has no justificatory scaffolding behind it: “Heidegger seems to admit the irremediable gap between . . . [being and nothing] precisely by trying so hard to reduce it.” Only if the nothing prevails as being, can readiness for anxiety be a response to the claim of being. But why/how the nothing prevails as being, or why that prevailing should lead us to interpret the nothing as being (as opposed, say, to articulating a rift between nothing and being) is left unanswered in the postscript. In the postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger made a decisively different argument than that in the phenomenology of the call in Being and Time—it is being and not Dasein who calls. But on what grounds could one sanction Heidegger negatively for going in that direction? Could it not have seemed as if categorial intuition already invites that path? If being must be given in order for the question of meaning to arise, as the notes from the Zähringen seminar claim about Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition, then the appearance of the things themselves as the things themselves is not determined by consciousness. And if the attempt to argue that being as such is that which determines is an attempt that falls apart because Heidegger fails to justify the claim that the nothing holds sway as being . . . well, then why not say that the determining ground of phenomenality is other than being, or beyond it, or infinite?

92  Martin Kavka After all, this is how Marion ends Reduction and Givenness, by capitalizing on Heidegger’s brief phenomenology of boredom in the 1929 “What Is Metaphysics?” If Heidegger argues that profound boredom “manifests beings as a whole”—everything appears just as insignificant stuff—Marion will supplement this by claiming that boredom is a suspension of worldhood itself, in which the I deserts the world and itself, and Dasein becomes “deaf to the call through which Being claims it” (Marion 1998, 194). And here something like theology is able to rush into the vacuum (1998, 196): “if boredom liberates the there from the call of Being, it sets it free only in order better to expose it to the wind of every other possible call” and specifically mentions Heidegger’s example of the claim of Christ in “Letter on Humanism” and Levinas’s rhetoric of being claimed by God in the face of the other person as two examples of such calls. Here Marion transgresses phenomenology in the name of revelation, as others have shown in their analyses of his work (Burch 2010; Schunke 2015). Nevertheless, it is not clear that this transgression is a fault. For it is also the case that Marion transgresses phenomenology in the name of Heidegger, who in 1943 no longer could see the call as a dialogue of the self with itself, and in his late reflections on categorial intuition, hinted that it was categorial intuition that authorized placing the ground of meaning in something that transcends. ****** In a recent article on Jean-François Lyotard and Stephen Darwall on alterity, Crowell (2016) has argued that a phenomenology of call or obligation gives us no ability to identify the caller or obliger. There is only the “feeling of obligation,” and that opens up the dimension of my own existence that is constituted by others. As to the issue of “whether the unmarked position of the addressor” of a call or an obligation can be filled in with any name, “the phenomenology of obligation” and of the feeling of obligation “cannot help us” (Crowell 2016, 81). This argument entails the claim that the problem with any and all theologization of phenomenology is that theology determines. Near the end of Otherwise Than Being, Levinas claimed (1981, 149) that to acknowledge in one’s ethical “self-extradition to the neighbor” that the ground of meaning does not come to presence—a stance for which he used the idiom of prophetic witness—is “before all theology; it is kerygma and prayer, glorification and recognition.” The words after the semicolon do not necessarily give hope that Levinas was able to take the words before the semicolon all that seriously! But while Levinas often hinted in his corpus that biblical and Talmudic texts named the one who fundamentally obliges, it remains possible for us to read this passage from Otherwise Than Being differently, as arguing that the real referent of all of this theological vocabulary was not to some being named “God” but an ethical

Inauthentic Theologizing 93 stance toward the other person. Whether one thinks that the ground of meaning is some hidden transcendence—Heidegger’s “unknown God” or Levinas’s “illeity”—or a generalized field of alterity, the point remains that normative existence and its practices of measuring (and remeasuring) do “not consist in appeal to some dogmatic revelation” (Crowell 2008, 272). The inability to get around this point has been one of the foremost problems in Marion’s thinking. It is true that the freedom from the call of Being, found in the phenomenology of boredom in Reduction and Givenness, does not lead him to say that any one of the possible other (religious) calls must be privileged. Similarly, in Being Given, Marion insists (2002a, 235) that he is only examining how revelation would give itself phenomenally without committing himself to the claim of whether it has ever done so. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to disbelieve Marion on this point. For Marion, if revelation is defined from the get-go as excessive—for otherwise it would just be reasoning and not ­revelation—then it gives itself as paradox, as the “possibility of impossibility” according to the way of the world. It must therefore be “perfectly unforeseeable” and “radically heterogeneous” to any conceptual scheme and horizon (Marion 2002a, 236). Nevertheless, it still remains the case that Marion’s example of revelation in Being Given (Jesus of Nazareth qua Christ) is not quite heterogeneous enough. If the manifestation of a Christ or a Messiah—a figure who manifests the unknown God—were to be an example of the phenomenon of revelation, it would still have been completely expected for this manifestation to be biologically male. This, anyone in Jerusalem in the first century CE could have foreseen, and did “foresee.” Here at least, the promise of maintaining a knowledge of God that exists outside of any concept that would represent and domesticate God—a promise that Marion has continued to make in his most recent work (2017, 173)—falls apart. Marion’s criterion for good phenomenological theology is that what counts as a good phenomenological account of revelation is marked by its dissimilarity from the world and from humans’ horizons of expectations. But if Jesus is not radically ­dissimilar—if he was, as was expected, a biological male—then the boundary between this purportedly good phenomenological theology and mere idolatry becomes difficult to determine.5 To return to the language of “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .,” Marion’s method leads him to fall into the temptation to mistake the sky for God. It may be the case that Christianity can defend itself phenomenologically, but this kind of phenomenology is not going to do the trick. Yet I wonder whether staying with a phenomenology of a feeling of obligation invites those who want to name the addressor (as God, as any person who claims to speak divine words) to do so, despite all of Crowell’s insistence on forestalling this move. To what extent is alterity opened up primarily by affect? Crowell and others, following Sartre, make much of the experience

94  Martin Kavka of shame as the primordial experience of the self as an object for others, thereby stripping the ego of its claims to primacy. But readers of Levinas need not root a claim of the primacy of alterity in an experience. On several occasions, Levinas argues for the primacy of alterity through an analysis of discourse; the other is primary because alterity is a condition of the possibility of language use. In other words, one gets to the primacy of alterity through the kind of horizonal analysis that Crowell had endorsed in 2002 in “Authentic Thinking and Phenomenological Method.”6 The focus on discourse is one of the main contributions of Crowell’s interpretation of Being and Time in Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. The turn from the analysis of Dasein in its everydayness in Division I to the existential analysis of Division II is a turn in which discourse plays an important role. After all, as Heidegger points out, when Dasein in its everydayness is lost in the they and “disburdened” by “them,” this is because Dasein does not speak for itself: “they” have taken “the responsibility [Verantwortlichkeit] of Dasein away from it” (Heidegger 2010, 124). If the call of conscience marks the turn between the divisions, because it is that experience that calls me back to the possibility of being myself, then the Dasein that has responded to the summons of the call of conscience takes itself to be answerable (verantwortlich) to others, and so gives an account of the justifiability of its actions, in accordance with the narrative that Crowell has given in “MeasureTaking” and more extensively in Normativity and Phenomenology. In order to explain how answerability works, John Haugeland, in “Truth and Finitude,” gives the example of the responsible physicist who refuses “to accept any discovered impossibilities” in her inquiry, and demonstrates that those apparent discoveries were proclaimed in error (Haugeland 2013, 214–15; see also Crowell 2017). One could draw a parallel for the responsible philosopher of religion who has been schooled in phenomenological thinking. She would call theologians (and crypto-theologians) out of their houses of worship—at least t­ emporarily—and into the world of the unknown God beyond all measure. There, she would not so much demand reasons from them for their various theological decisions, but would argue that (many of) their claims to know the measure of all things either fail or cannot be known to succeed, and that in their insistence that religious traditions have single forms, their  theologizing becomes lost and inauthentic. Regardless of her own religious commitments (or lack thereof), she would show how commitment to a religious tradition might involve taking back some of the theological opinions of its epigones, since being traditional need not be equivalent to being traditionalist.7 And she would admit to her own mistakes, whether in reading a religious tradition or in reading the tradition of phenomenological inquiry, simply because she is answerable to those in the communities she studies. In this mode, philosophy of religion would retain the “deeply important critical role” that Crowell (2002, 37) has wanted for phenomenology at least since “Authentic Thinking.”

Inauthentic Theologizing 95 Phenomenological theology need not therefore always be inauthentic, even though there is much inauthentic phenomenological theology out there. As Crowell himself has shown in “Measure-Taking,” the call of conscience can be heard in many idioms. Perhaps when scholars of religion speak those idioms, a community could be created that responds to the summons of conscience, and commits itself to living out the normative difficulties and risks that arise when its members refuse to accept something that Heidegger and Crowell have shown to be impossible— that the unknown God is (or is in, or is above) the sky.

Notes 1 See Husserl 1983, 187n.; Jaegerschmid 2001; Heidegger 1998, 39–62; Levinas 1990; Henry 2003; Chrétien 2004, 6–32; Patočka 2016, 175–80; Wojtyła 1979; Caputo 1997; Steinbock 2012; Falque 2016. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in all quotations are from the original. 2 Crowell 2002, 31. This position is also implicit in Crowell’s application of Husserl’s criticism of transcendental realism in Cartesian Meditations to the issue of inferring the existence of a divine being from transcendental phenomenology. See Crowell 2001, 236–40. 3 Occasionally, I have silently changed the translated text of Heidegger 1971 in order to follow the translation in Crowell 2008. 4 For conscience as putting up obstacles, see Arendt’s quotation of the Second Murderer’s monologue on conscience in Shakespeare’s Richard III (1.4.144– 6): “’Tis a blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles.” See Arendt 2003, 185–7. 5 Some enterprising “phenomenological theologian” would do well to offer a phenomenological account of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, resolving the issue of whether they count as saturated phenomena, and if so, what that means for theology. See Wilcox 2018. 6 See Levinas’s “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, especially at Levinas 1998, 7, 1969, 66, 1981, 35. There is also much to be said about Crowell’s use (2017, 84) of a sentence from Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1969, 86) in order to justify an empirical basis for the argument of the primacy of alterity. The sentence in French (1961, 59) reads, “Si la philosophie consiste à savoir d’une façon critique, c’est à dire à chercher un fondement à sa liberté à la justifier, elle commence avec la conscience morale où l’Autre se présente comme Autrui et où le mouvement de la thématisation s’inverse.” To what extent does Levinas imagine an analysis of “conscience morale” as an experience of conscience that we can allegedly all recognize? To what extent does it instead call for a kind of horizonal thinking that gives “conscience morale” as a kind of moral consciousness of how alterity works, even if I do not feel the presentation of alterity in the face of the other person? 7 I borrow this distinction from Kellison 2014, who puts it to good use in an analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre and just-war theorists in religious ethics.

References Arendt, Hannah. 2003. Responsibility and Judgment. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken. Burch, Matthew L. 2010. “Blurred Vision: Marion on the ‘Possibility’ of Revelation.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67: 157–71.

96  Martin Kavka Caputo, John D. 1997. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 2004. The Call and the Response. Translated by Anne A. Davenport. New York: Fordham University Press. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. “Authentic Thinking and Phenomenological Method.” The New Year Book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2: 23–37. ———. 2008. “Measure-Taking: Meaning and Normativity in Heidegger’s Philosophy.” Continental Philosophy Review 41: 261–76. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context.” European Journal of Philosophy 23: 564–88. ———. 2016. “Second-Person Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, 70–89. New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Competence over Being as Existing: The Indispensability of Haugeland’s Heidegger.” In Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland, edited by Zed Adams and Jacob Browning, 73–102. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Falque, Emmanuel. 2016. Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology. Translated by Reuben Shank. New York: Fordham University Press. Haugeland, John. 2013. Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger. Edited by Joseph Rouse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1972. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1998. Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Revised by Dennis Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press. Henry, Michel. 2003. I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1952. Hölderlin: His Poems. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Pantheon. Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Translated by Fred Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2001. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge. Jaegerschmid, Adelgundis. 2001. “Conservations with Edmund Husserl, 1931– 1938.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 1: 331–50.

Inauthentic Theologizing 97 Janicaud, Dominique, Jean-Franciou Courtine, Jean-Louis Chretien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur. 2000. Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press. Kellison, Rosemary B. 2014. “Tradition, Authority, and Immanent Critique in Comparative Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 42: 714–41. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1981. Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1990. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002a. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2002b. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2017. The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib. Translated by Christina Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc, and Jacques Derrida. 1999. “On the Gift.” In God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Patočka, Jan. 2016. The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem. Translated by Erika Abrams. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schunke, Matthew. 2015. “Revealing Givenness: The Problem of Non-Intuited Phenomena in Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology.” Studia Phenomenologica 15: 473–94. Steinbock, Anthony. 2012. “Evidence in the Phenomenology of Religious Experience.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 583–606. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilcox, Melissa. 2018. Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody. New York: New York University Press. Wojtyła, Karol. 1979. The Acting Person. Edited by Anna-Teresa Tyminiecka. Dordrecht: Riedel.

Section II

Sources of Normativity

6 Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity John Drummond

Intentionality, according to Edmund Husserl, is the “main theme of phenomenology” and “all the riddles in the theory of reason and metaphysics lead back to this wondrous property” (Husserl 2014, 161–2). Heidegger criticized Husserl’s notion of intentionality in his 1925 lecture course on the concept of time: “in elaborating intentionality as the thematic field of phenomenology, the question of the being of the intentional is left undiscussed” (Heidegger 1992, 113). Later, in correspondence with Husserl concerning the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, Heidegger expands upon the issue: We are in agreement on the fact that entities in the sense of what you call “world” cannot be explained in their transcendental constitution by returning to an entity of the same mode of being. But that does not mean that what makes up the place of the transcendental is not an entity at all; rather, precisely at this juncture there arises the problem: What is the mode of being of the entity in which “world” is constituted? (Husserl 1997a, 138) Steven Crowell in his important and excellent Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (2013), following Heidegger, argues that there is something more fundamental than intentionality, something that is a prior condition for intentionality. Crowell’s contribution is to focus Heidegger’s ontological considerations through the lens of the question concerning the ultimate ground of the normativity that accompanies intentionality. Crowell’s negative claim is that Husserl’s intrinsically intentional, absolute consciousness cannot be the sufficient ground for the normativity of intentional acts directed toward objects. Crowell’s positive claim is that intentionality has prior and preintentional conditions: intentionality (the “discoveredness” of entities) depends on Dasein’s transcendence—that is, on the prior disclosedness of being-in-theworld—[and] disclosedness is a matter of three equally necessary aspects

102  John Drummond of Dasein’s being—understanding, affectedness, and discourse— none of which are intentional acts in Husserl’s sense. (Crowell 2013, 70) Normativity, in Crowell’s view, has its ultimate ground in the authentic response to the modification of the care structure in the face of the breakdown of the meaning and significance of the world. The authentic response to this breakdown is anticipatory resoluteness, that is, the selfresponsible “taking over” as my norms, the norms proper to a social practice, whether taken over from the understanding of das Man or revised in authentic care. My aim in this chapter is to provide an alternative to Crowell’s account, an alternative that grounds normativity in intentionality itself. There are several things I  shall not do in the chapter. First, I  shall not evaluate Crowell’s work as an interpretation of Heidegger; I am interested in his phenomenological claims. Second, although I shall say quite a bit about Husserl, I  am not primarily interested in interpreting or defending his views. Third, I shall not try to determine whether Husserl or Heidegger is the better philosopher, and, fourth, I shall not try to settle questions about the various influences they might have exerted on one another. Instead, I shall argue, against Crowell, that intentionality is a “primitive” or “basic” notion that is sufficient to disclose the realm of meaning and to account for the normativity we find in human experience. By a “primitive” or “basic” notion I mean one for which there are no prior conditions, even though there are many interesting things to be said about it. Hence, intentionality is a self-grounding disclosure of the significance of things. This alternative view appeals both to insufficiently emphasized features of Husserl’s account and to my revisions to that account. In this sense, I shall not present Husserl’s view but a Husserlian one or, if you prefer, a neo-Husserlian one, or—dare I say?—the existential Husserl. The upshot of the alternative view is that intentionality can satisfy the desiderata driving Crowell’s critique—a ground for intentionality’s disclosure of meaning and its attendant normativity—without appeal to prior and pre-intentional grounds.

Intentionality In the course of his critique of Husserl, Crowell says: Husserl often equates transcendental subjectivity with “absolute consciousness,” but this equation  must be resisted. Transcendental subjectivity is the person, properly understood; Geist—the “personal” ego as embodied, practical and social—is responsible for the order of meaning. (Crowell 2013, 154)

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 103 I agree with this claim and its rejection of a transcendental ego understood as an absolute consciousness prior to the concrete, personal ego. Husserl discovers absolute consciousness in his reflections on the experience of a temporally extended object, for example, a melody. At the same time, these reflections provide an account of self-awareness, that is, the subject’s awareness of the temporally extended experiencing of the temporally extended melody. Husserl claims, on pain of infinite regress, that there must be a non-temporal consciousness that accounts for the awareness of both the temporality of experiences and the temporality of objects. There must, he says, be an absolute consciousness that ultimately grounds the constitution of every intending experience and, beyond, every intended object as having the significance for us that it does. Husserl characterizes this non-temporal consciousness as a “flow” that constitutes itself, that is, that brings itself to appearance (Husserl 1991, 77; see also Brough 1991, xix), although since it is non-temporal, it cannot actually be a flow. Crowell takes Husserl along a different path to absolute consciousness, but the argument is fundamentally the same. I take something as something, Crowell argues, because I have projects to which features of things are relevant insofar as they are meaningful for the successful realization of those projects. Crowell then argues that the experiences of things are also given (in self-awareness) with an as-structure; they are given as perceptions, as judgments, and so on. Hence, there must be something that constitutes them as what they are. In other words, according to Crowell, Husserl’s absolute consciousness constitutes acts not only as temporal but also as intentional acts of some kind. In order, then, to avoid an infinite regress, this absolute consciousness cannot itself be intentional; it must be “pre-intentional.” Crowell summarizes Husserl’s position as follows: Here Husserl faced a dilemma: if the intentional acts (noeses) that constitute noematic unities of meaning are themselves identifiable unities within the stream of consciousness, what constitutes them cannot have the character of an intentional act. Husserl’s analysis of temporality thus purports to uncover an “absolute” self-constituting and pre-intentional [my emphasis] “flow” of consciousness as the ultimate basis for genetic phenomenology. (Crowell 2013, 50; see also 62) Crowell is correct that to the extent that intentional acts are identifiable unities within the flow of experience, they cannot, on pain of infinite regress, be constituted by a higher-order intentional act. Crowell argues that the pre-intentional character of absolute consciousness is inconsistent with Husserl’s view that consciousness is intrinsically intentional, that is, comprised of intentional acts. This conclusion follows, however,

104  John Drummond only if the notion of intentionality is univocal. If it is not univocal, the fact that whatever “constitutes” intentional acts cannot itself be an intentional act does not entail that it cannot be intentional in another sense.1 I have argued elsewhere that Husserl’s view of the consciousness of inner time is ambiguous (Drummond 2006, 199–220; cf. Zahavi 2011, 22). If we understand “intentionality” broadly as meaning “directedness to” and then distinguish a narrower conception of intentionality as directedness to an object, we can reinterpret the differentiation between the ground of temporality and the unified flow of temporal experiences as a distinction between a form and the concretum it informs rather than as a distinction between a constituting stratum and a constituted one. Husserl, at least occasionally, explicitly makes just this connection: “The fundamental form [my emphasis] of this universal synthesis, which [form] makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the allencompassing consciousness of inner time” (Husserl 1970b, 75–6; see also Husserl 2014, 157). The identification of the form of the universal synthesis—a synthesis that is equivalent to the whole of a conscious life— with the consciousness of inner time maintains the distinction between the ultimate time-constituting form of experience—a form that is not itself temporal—and the concrete flow of temporally extended experiences. It maintains this distinction, however, without putting the form and the concrete ego into a constituting-constituted relation on the model of an intentional act directed to an (immanent) object. Briefly put, my proposal is this: the impressional-retentional-protentional form of the momentary phase of experience is something akin to Aristotle’s noûs, a form that is itself a “thinking.” The form of a momentary phase of experience is a sheer intending comprising both object-intentionality— directedness to an object, which Husserl characterizes as Querintentionalität (“transverse” intentionality; see Husserl 1991, 86)—and an intentionality, corresponding to Husserl’s Langsintentionalität (“horizontal” intentionality; see Husserl 1991, 85) that is directed to the flow of concrete experiences it informs (Drummond 2006, 217–18). On this view, the momentary phase of experience is an openness both to the concrete, experiencing self and to the world. The momentary phase of experience, in short, is awareness of (i) the “inner temporality of the appearing (e.g., that of the perceiving of the die),” (ii) “the whole of conscious life” as unified synthetically (Husserl 1970b, 41–2; translation modified; see also Husserl 2014, 161–2), and (iii) the object upon which the experience is directed. The subject, however, is pre-reflectively and non-thematically aware of itself always as a subject and not as the constituted “object” of a constituting absolute consciousness. On the view suggested here, there is no prior and pre-intentional absolute consciousness understood as Crowell does, and we can resist the identification of such an absolute consciousness with transcendental subjectivity. There is instead the ultimate, intentional form of the concrete flow of intentional experience,

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 105 a form that structures the transcendental dimension of a minded being experiencing the world. Intentionality, on my view, belongs primarily to mind “as a whole” and pervades particular mental events or states. This is precisely because the fundamental structure—the ultimate form—of intentionality encompasses the self as a whole. Mind “as a whole” is intentionally, but prereflectively and non-thematically, directed to the self as subject and also to the world “as a whole” that is the ultimate horizon of meaning (Drummond 2012, 125; cf. Crowell 2013, 45). The term “mind,” however, is best understood as a gerund. Mind is “minding” things (“Mind the gap when exiting the train”), attending to them (“Mind your manners”), showing an interest in them (“Mind your own business”), and caring for and about them (“Can you mind the children tonight?”). “Minding” is a present participle, and “mind” can be understood as a shortened gerundial form of that participle. There is no thing that is a mind; minding is the activity of self-conscious beings consciously directed to the world, but mind is not itself a being (Sokolowski 1978, 156). Mind is the activity of an individual, concrete subject—in the case of humans, the person.2

Person Crowell (2013, 123) acknowledges that Husserl was moving toward a fuller account of what the subject must be beyond merely a conscious subject. I shall here outline a view that maintains the primitive character of the notion of intentionality but also addresses the “being of the being who is intentional.” In particular, I  shall consider aspects of minding that allow us to see that the transcendental subject—the person3—is an embodied, social, and practical minded entity whose life and experiences are normed by the structures of intentionality itself. Crowell (2013, 137), in discussing normativity in perception, summarizes Husserl’s discussion of “the covariance relation that obtains between my bodily movements and the appearances that accompany them.”4 Crowell contends that Husserl, because of his focus on consciousness, thinks the body must first be constituted by consciousness before we can make sense of the covariance relation between bodily movements and appearances. On my view, however, the living body is an aspect of the subject’s constituting agency. I do not first experience my body as in the world and then note in reflection its constitutive role. I  am aware of myself as an embodied agent acting in relation to objects of perception, even when the object appearing is my own body as one thing among others in the world. I must, for example, raise my hand in front of my eyes to see it, or I must lower my head and eyes to take in those parts of the body that I can perceive. I must move in relation to worldly objects to experience them as self-enclosed, spatial individuals, and so forth (Drummond 1979–80). And since higher-order experiences are rooted in our

106  John Drummond perceptions, this dependence on embodiment and the body’s constituting activity is carried through to all levels of sense and meaning. Embodiment is an irreducible aspect of a person’s facticity. The consideration of pure perception also reveals that mind is social. The structure of Crowell’s complaint regarding the sociality of the person as well as the response to it resemble what was said of the body. Husserl suggests that in order to have objective knowledge I must first empathically grasp other subjects; hence—so goes the complaint—Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity is not inherently social or intersubjective. The response is, once again, that the perceptual experience that is empathy— the empathic constitution of an “object” as another subject—is already and fundamentally intersubjective. Husserl identifies three senses of intersubjectivity: (1) “open intersubjectivity” (see Husserl 1973a, 289, and also Zahavi 2001, 50ff.); (2) the concrete and fulfilled experience of other subjects both like me and irreducibly different from me (Husserl 1970b, 106ff); and (3) the intersubjectivity that establishes a linguistic, cognitive, and practical normality (Zahavi 2001, 86ff). While much of the attention devoted to Husserl’s discussions of intersubjectivity has been directed to the second kind of intersubjectivity, it is important to recognize explicitly the constitutive role played by the first kind of intersubjectivity. Open intersubjectivity is constitutively present, for example, in our sense of an identical material thing as enduring through time and as having its own space and position therein. The identical material thing is accessible not only to me but to (possible) others, even though the richer and more complete senses of intersubjectivity and objectivity are not yet present. It is part of my sense of, say, a seen spatial object that other subjects (can) simultaneously see the object from different perspectives or under different aspects. As Husserl puts it: “The existence-sense (Seinssinn) of the world and of Nature in particular, as Objective Nature, includes . . . thereness-for-everyone” (Husserl 1970b, 92). In other words, the other subjects with whom I  co-intend the world, even if not always thematically and concretely experienced, are always and from the first non-thematically grasped as co-subjects in my encounter of the world and its objects. All experience already includes other subjects as co-subjects. This point is clear as well in the discussion of the second sense of intersubjectivity. In experiencing another experiential agency, I  grasp the other’s animate body as another body in the world. This body, like any other, whether animate or inanimate, is experienced as a spatially enclosed object with its own position in space. The awareness of the other’s body as having a space and position of its own requires, however, that that body be presented in a manifold of appearances, a manifold of sides or aspects. I can individually experience these other sides or aspects in a temporally extended and continuous experience. But the sense of a body presented as having many sides and aspects, all of which endure,

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 107 rather than process, through time, includes the sense that the different sides of the spatial body temporally coexist and can be simultaneously seen. It is part of the sense of an object—even the other’s body—having its own space and position—part of the very objectivity of the object— that it be experienceable by “an intersubjective community of embodied subjects” (Zahavi 2017, 105; see also Husserl 1973b, 371). The objective world is the correlate of this embodied, intersubjective community, and the “co-existence of self, others, and nature (world) amounts to an irreducible facticity” (Zahavi 2017, 127). Finally, and again even at the level of perception, intentionality has a practical aspect. A perception, like all intentional experiences, is ordered toward fulfillment. Given that we can never experience an object in all its manners of appearing without cycling through an infinite number of appearances, at what point can we say that perceptual fulfillment is, for all practical purposes, achieved? Husserl answers this question by appealing to a defining “practical interest”—for example, being able to read clearly the title on a book cover or finding my car keys—that governs and limits our perceptual life (Husserl 1997b, 106, 111; see also Drummond 1983, 182–3). The practical interest both limits the goal of the more precise determination of the perceptual intention to those features relevant to our practical interest in the object and indicates the degree of precision necessary for that interest to be satisfied. Practical interests, in brief, call forth certain qualities for attention and demand that the object be given, with the help of bodily activities, such we can best experience those qualities. The teleology of perception, therefore, is directed not to complete or adequate givenness but to a “maximal” or “optimal” givenness relative to the perceiver’s practical interest (Husserl 1997b, 105–7). To attain the optimal appearance of a thing in a temporally extended perception is to experience an increase in the richness of the qualitative determination of the thing relative and relevant to such a practical interest. While pure perception with its purely cognitive sense is a possibility for experience, this is not our ordinary and immediate way of experiencing the world and the things in it, as the descriptions of the natural attitude in Ideas I (Husserl 2014, 49–50), the personalistic attitude in Ideas II (Husserl 1989a, 183–94), and the lifeworld in Crisis (Husserl 1970c, 121–89) reveal. Pure perception is an abstraction and does not, as Husserl often seems to suggest, have experiential primacy. That primacy belongs to the concrete experiences that make up a person’s life, and these experiences encompass our embodiment, our intersubjective nature, and our practical interests. The person experiences objects as having useful functions in relation to human purposes and as having aesthetic and moral worth. The person encounters other persons with their own purposes and their own sense of the worth of things. The person places herself in various kinds of relations with these others; she speaks with them, writes to them and about them, reads about them, associates with them, adopts various

108  John Drummond practices with them, establishes moral and political relations with them, and establishes institutions embodying these practices and relations. Central to the intersubjective experiences in which we take objects as utensils, tools, sculptures, paintings, literary products, insignias, seals, vestments, icons, sacred spaces, and so forth is the phenomenon of intentionality. Intentional life, the life of the minded person—from the lowest level of a purely perceptual sense to the highest level of concrete experience incorporating cognitive, affective, and practical senses in a single, concrete experience—is temporal, embodied, social, historical, and practical. The fact, however, that our immediate experience of things is from the beginning a mixture of cognitive, affective, and practical significance both necessitates a revision of Husserl’s notion of founding relations and introduces a relation among senses that involves a counter-movement to founding relations. I turn first to the revision of the doctrine of founding relations. Husserl locates founding relations in the experiential dimension of intentional acts—in Husserl’s jargon, in the noeses rather than the noemata. I have argued elsewhere that we should understand these founding relations noematically (Drummond 2002, 2013). If we emphasize the concrete character of our immediate experiences of things, I argue, we should understand founding relations as obtaining among the various moments of sense (cognitive, axiological, practical) encompassed in the unified experience. For example, in the experience of an object O as valuable for realizing some end, there are distinguishable layers within the sense of O such that a cognitive layer—the sense of O as having the nonaxiological properties x, y, and z—founds axiological layers of sense— the sense of Oxyz as valuable (Drummond 2013, 252–3; cf. Crowell 2013, 69). For example, the evaluation involved in fear presupposes that O, feared as dangerous (a value-attribute), possesses cognitively grasped properties that make O something that can cause harm to me or someone close (physically or emotionally) to me. And in choosing to perform action A (say, fleeing), we presuppose valuations not only of O as dangerous but of the good (safety) we seek to realize and of A as conducive to realizing my safety. From this perspective, the founded layers presuppose the founding layers. Practical reason, because it is founded on the others, is the “highest,” most encompassing form of reason. From another perspective, however, the higher levels of sense at work in a concrete experience determine what features of things are salient for the experience in question (Husserl 2014, 230, 234). Let us call this “downward” relation “salience-determination.” Salience determination flows from the practical interest in the experience and calls forth those features of the object that are valuable in the light of that practical interest or, more generally, in light of one’s projects. This relation, in contrast to a founding relation, moves from the more comprehensive to the less comprehensive. If, for example, I am trying to reach a box of cereal on

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 109 a high shelf and something on which to stand is unavailable, I look for something with which to reach the shelf and gently knock the box off the shelf so that I can catch it. Seeing such an object nearby, I recognize it as valuable for the task at hand (cf. Crowell 2013, 272). I shall return to the notion of salience-determination in the next section. I have briefly unpacked how I understand transcendental subjectivity and the minded person as well as the facticity of the person as temporal, embodied, social, and practical and, by virtue of her temporality and sociality, historical. Crowell thinks such a conception of the person does not and cannot account for the normativity he seeks. His positive claim is that a set of prior and pre-intentional conditions ground n ­ ormativity— that is, the possibility of success or failure—and normativity makes possible the intending of objects as significant. I now turn to a response to this claim in order to show that the account of person provided here is sufficient to serve as this ground. The key is to show that the person’s moods and projects are grounded in the mind’s intentional structure.

Affectivity, Praxis, and Normativity Crowell’s positive claim is summarized in the following: the intelligibility of things derives from Dasein’s practical gearing into the world, its “projects.” Self-understanding is not initially a theoretical self-awareness but is embedded in these projects—that is, in practices that involve my abilities and skills. Abilities and skills entail norms of success or failure, and because they do, things can show up in significant ways—that is, as hammers that “nicely fulfill” their function, or as bicycles that are “too rickety to ride.” . . . [T]he normative conditions inherent in such projects are what make intentionality in the Husserlian sense possible. (Crowell 2013, 68) Projects—committing myself to be something, trying to be something— are, according to Crowell (2013, 29), not themselves intentional acts. Nor do care and significance, Crowell argues, have an intentional structure; rather, all these are more primordial than intentional acts (Crowell 2013, 146–7; see also 120). Affectedness or disposedness (Befindlichkeit)—an aspect of the care-structure—is tied to “the pre-intentional disclosure of being-in-the-world as a whole (Crowell 2013, 70–1).” Mood, the ontic manifestation of disposedness, is the pre-intentional disclosure of the manner in which the world as a whole matters to the subject (Crowell 2013, 71). By virtue of being “thrown” into a world with established practices, the subject is social but lives “inauthentically” in das Man, taking for granted the norms governing these already established practices, taking for granted what “one does.”

110  John Drummond In the breakdown of significance, however, the subject is thrown back upon her own resources. She must “take over” responsibility and be answerable for the norms proper to the practices in which she is engaged (Crowell 2013, 210). She must “decide” for herself what projects will give meaning and significance to her life such that she can “avow” that this is who and what she is. Authenticity captures “the ontological ground of such responsibility” (Crowell 2013, 276). Authenticity—being resolute—“is to act as I-myself, that is, in ‘anticipation’ of the ‘possibility’ of breakdown . . . to act in light of what is disclosed in breakdown, namely, my responsibility for the normative force of those standards (reasons) in light of which I  act” (Crowell 2013, 300). Crowell gives detailed and insightful analyses of these—and other—issues and a short summary cannot do them justice. But it serves to set the framework for my discussion. In order to respond to the positive claim in Crowell’s position, I must consider whether a sense of “project” and of things “mattering to us” in the light of a project is internal to the nature of intentionality rather than prior to it. I shall consider in more detail the role of self-responsibility, practical identities, and moods. To begin, intentional experience involves a teleological striving for evidence, where “evidence” is understood as an experience that directly and intuitively grasps the object in a continuous course of experience that is harmonious with our non-evidenced sense of the object (Husserl 1970a, 765; 1969, 123). Husserl believed that in all three rational domains—the theoretical, the axiological, and the ­practical—the aim of experiential life is the same: to live a life of intuitive evidence, to live the life of a truthful, rational agent. The telos of experience, in short, is truthfulness, that is, (i) cognizing, judging, and theorizing things and states of affairs as they are, (ii) having appropriate affective and evaluative attitudes (emotions) toward them, and (iii) acting rightly in response to and on the basis of our truthful cognitions and attitudes. The achievement of evidenced truth in all the domains of reason is the full exercise of reason (Husserl 1989b, 33), and it involves a certain kind of autonomy or self-responsibility. An agent is rational when in a fulfilling experience she confirms a judgment in one of the spheres of reason, thereby achieving an evidential insight into the truth. She is autonomous when she reflectively and consciously appropriates what is evidently experienced as her own conviction. In so doing, she becomes self-responsible, responsible for her beliefs, attitudes, and actions, responsible, that is, for herself, for who she is. A conviction—a “habituality,” as Husserl calls it (1970b, 66)— becomes an enduring part of that subject’s experiential life, one to which the subject can and does return again and again. The more continuous and consistent the confirmation is (or the subject takes it to be), the more the conviction determines future experience. It takes on the character of an “abiding habitus” that is dispositional in character (Husserl 1970b, 67). This accounts for the “downward” salience-determination

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 111 of practical judgments and the evaluative judgments achieved in emotional experience. The subject experiences certain features of the object or situation as salient relevant to the practical or evaluative or theoretical context of the experience. Since truth is inherently and necessarily intersubjective, an agent’s convictions must be tested against those of others. The person can express her convictions in both words and action and can continually reflect, in concert with others, on the truth and falsity of these convictions. The self-responsible, rational agent contrasts both with the agent who merely accepts passively what others claim to be true, good, or right and with the agent who judges without evidence, who merely supposes that such and such is the case. In either contrasting case, the agent does not evidently determine for herself what is true, good, or right. She is, therefore, not responsible for her judgments and is not fully rational. The selfresponsible, rational agent thinks for herself but not by herself. The person in the fullest sense, then, is the self-responsible, truthful agent, and I take this to be the eudaimonistic moment in phenomenology (Drummond 2010, 422). What, however, does it mean to develop abiding convictions and to be self-responsible with respect to a project or what Husserl calls a “vocation” or what is today often called a “practical identity” (Korsgaard 1996, 101)? In what sense is a project, vocation, or practical identity a matter of intentionality? And in what sense could things matter to me in the light of such a project, vocation, or practical identity? For Heidegger and Crowell, understanding (Verstehen) functions as project (Entwurf; see Crowell 2013, 70); it is the “projection of the possibilities for being” (Crowell 2013, 201). This understanding is, on Crowell’s account, pre-intentional, and it grounds our resolute commitments to particular practical identities and the normativity proper to them. While Husserl does not address the question of the ground of our practical identities directly, the accounts of intentionality and the intersubjectivity inherent to it provide some clues. In particular, Husserl describes the interplay between the passive reception of the person who is not yet self-responsible and the active appropriation of the self-responsible person in a subsection of Ideas II titled “The Influence of Others and the Freedom of the Person” (Husserl 1989a, 281–2) and in the essay “The Origin of Geometry” (Husserl 1970c, 353–78), both of which reveal how the development of a person and her identities is tethered to a cultural inheritance transmitted to us through the communicative medium of both other individuals and tradition. Husserl says: The development of a personality is determined by the influence of others, by the influence of their thoughts, their feelings . . . [and] their commands. Other’s thoughts penetrate my soul. They can in shifting circumstances—that is, relative to my psychic situation, the stage of

112  John Drummond my development, the formation of my dispositions—have a different effect, either huge or small. The same idea has a different influence on different people in the “same” circumstances. Opposed to the thoughts of others are my own thoughts, ones that “arise originally” in my mind or are inferred by me from my own premises (that might perhaps rest on the influence of others) and suppositions. The same is true of my own feelings, ones that have their originary source in me, and the feelings of others that are acquired, felt, but inauthentic. What comes from others and is “taken over” by me . . . can be characterized as issuing from the other subject  .  .  . as an imposition, to which I yield perhaps passively, perhaps reluctantly. Alternatively, I might appropriate it on my own accord, and it becomes my own. . . . Besides what proceeds from other persons, there appear in the intentional form of indeterminate generality, the impositions of morality, of custom, of tradition, of the spiritual milieu: “one” judges so, “one” holds a fork so, and the like—that is, the demands of the social group, of the class, and so forth. One can passively comply, or one can actively take a stand, freely choose. Therefore the autonomy of reason, the “freedom” of the personal subject, consists in the fact that I do not yield passively to the influence of others but instead decide for myself.5 (Husserl 1989a, 281–2) Tradition’s transmission across generations calls attention to the historicality proper to both an individual’s and a community’s experience. A tradition, in brief, is a complex form of intersubjective—better, ­communal—intentionality.6 Tradition shapes an individual’s openness to the future in the light of the community’s past. The aforementioned third level of intersubjectivity that establishes a linguistic, cognitive, and practical normality embodies itself in the form of a normal world-apprehension on the basis of linguistically transmitted and sedimented meanings, practices, and institutions. This normal world-apprehension manifests itself as conventions, as ordinary ways of encountering the world, as what “one” thinks or should think. Traditions account, then, for our initial understanding of empirical concepts, emotion concepts, value concepts, and moral concepts. It is against the background of this traditional understanding that, in becoming fully rational, we critically weigh the “proposals” before us and appropriate or modify or reject them. These proposals include suggestions about the kinds of projects one might undertake and the kinds of practical identities one might adopt, as well as the norms that govern those projects and identities. A person’s self-responsible thinking and agency, then, always occurs and must always occur within this concrete horizon of pregiven traditions. Individual self-responsibility must be understood in a way that

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 113 recognizes the social and historical character of reason. The truthful apprehension of what is the case, the evaluation of goods (including moral goods), decisions about how best to realize those goods, and evaluative judgments about our own actions, the actions of others, and social practices and institutions all arise against the background of a “common” knowledge embodied in our collective determinations of empirical, evaluative, and moral concepts, of choiceworthy goods, and of praiseworthy actions. This common knowledge is passed from one generation to the next, and it continues to be worked out, criticized, modified, and reappropriated within successive generations in our encounters with one another, especially with those whose opinions or reasoning might differ from our own. In summary, one becomes self-responsible in the transition from passively accepting beliefs handed down in tradition or proposed by others to the appropriation of a judgmental content as one’s own conviction, one for which one has intuitive evidence and which has been tested against the convictions of others. The presentation of possibilities for one’s life and the choice of a practical identity both arise by virtue of the social structure of intentionality, and the norms embedded in this practical identity are binding on us precisely because the self-responsible person has secured evidence for the cognitive and evaluative beliefs proper to this identity as well as the rightness of the practices in and through which the identity is realized. The full exercise of reason, in summary, entails both evidential truthfulness and self-responsibility; to exercise reason fully is to be a truthful agent responsible for what one believes, for one’s evaluative attitudes toward things, and for what one does, and also for one’s arching commitments, one’s practical identity. It is, in short, to be responsible for who one is. Embedded in this account of evidence and self-responsibility is both an ambiguity and a bifurcation in the notion of the good. The account points both to the goods that are pursued as the object of our first-order, contingent desires—what I  call goods for an agent—as well as to the second-order goods of self-responsible, truthful agency that is the fullness of rational personhood (Drummond 2010, 420). The goods of agency are realized in an agent’s making sense of the world as she truthfully seeks to know what is true, what is good for herself and others, and what is right to do. They are, in other words, superveniently and necessarily realized in those first-order pursuits when those pursuits are virtuously realized. Hence, first-order goods are both necessarily transformed by and yield to the second-order goods of agency. If one is to be self-responsible, a chosen action as conducive to first-order goods must not frustrate (or frustrate least) the realization of necessarily valued second-order goods of agency for myself or for others whose flourishing as a rational agent is intertwined with my own.

114  John Drummond This description of the flourishing rational agent might sound bloodless. When we attend more closely to affectivity, however, we can note how moods and the emotions they motivate register the evaluatively salient and practically relevant features of things and situations with the “sort of resonance and importance that only emotional involvement can sustain” (Sherman 1991, 47). Moods and emotions, in short, serve to buttress us in our practical commitments to the goods—the practical identities and their associated beliefs and practices—we value. Heidegger and Husserl offer significantly different accounts of mood, and the difference between them is relevant to the discussion of whether intentionality is a primitive notion. For Heidegger, disposedness or affectedness (Befindlichkeit), along with understanding and discourse, is an ontological structure of Dasein. On Crowell’s view, it is pre-intentional (Crowell 2013, 70). Disposedness manifests itself in Dasein’s affective life and, in particular, in moods. Mood accounts for the disclosedness of the world as a whole (Heidegger 2010, 133), and it underlies emotions, which are directed to particular entities within the pattern of meaning structured by mood. For Husserl, by contrast, a mood is a unity of intentional feelings (Gefühlseinheit), which Husserl conceives as a “passive association of feelings.”7 This unity, in my view, is best understood as a kind of Gestalt that organizes the varied feelings of a subject into a dominant affective attitude toward the world as a whole (cf. Lee 1993, 36). Recalling my discussion of mind, we can say that mood is the affective dimension belonging to intentional mind as a whole. A mood arises from an emotion whose defining characteristic informs—Husserl uses the well-worn metaphor “colors”—a subject’s entire outlook on the world: If I am in a good mood, then it propagates itself easily, as long as contrary tendencies or opposite affects do not intervene. . . . In the process the mood always retains an “intentionality.” I  distinguish between what is given, its value-character, and what, motivated by them, serves as my mood. This is a unitary feeling (Gefühlseinheit) that lends a color, a unitary color, to everything that appears—a unitary glow of joy, a unitary darkness of sorrow. . . . Is this cheerful mood itself intentionally directed? We must affirm this.8 I believe Husserl’s account is, from a phenomenological point of view, correct. Moods arise from emotions—that is, from particular intentional experiences—and are distinguished by the emotions from which they arise. An exceptionally joyful experience gives rise to a cheerful mood, and a pattern of fearful experiences gives rise to an anxious mood. Moods are themselves affective intentions directed to the world as a whole, and they also dispose us to experience further emotions. A person in a cheerful mood is more likely to experience emotions such as serenity,

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 115 gratitude, kindness, contentment, and enthusiasm. Similarly, someone who is depressed or anxious is more likely to experience negative emotions such as worry, frustration, hopelessness, and despair. The particular emotions and the bodily comportments belonging to them are manifestations of mood. Mood as an affective state directed to the world as a whole is the frame for all our affective experience. Salience-determination relations obtain, then, between mood and the emotions and cognitions toward which it disposes us. Heidegger also noted the fact that moods reveal Dasein’s thrownness. “Mood assails,” says Heidegger (2010, 133), thereby disclosing Dasein to itself “before all cognition and willing and beyond their scope of disclosure” (2010, 132; Heidegger’s emphases). The view of mood I am developing here runs counter to this view. It claims instead that moods arise out of the emotional experiences of particular objects and dispose us to further emotional experiences. Does this mean that moods do not assail us? No. Since emotions are rooted not only in non-axiological properties of their objects but also in an object’s relation to a subject’s physiological constitution, experiential history, interests, concerns, and commitments (Drummond forthcoming-1), it is possible to recognize that all these subjective conditions can contribute to a mood’s assailing us. For example, a person’s genetic inheritance (physiological constitution) can dispose one to depression or, at the least, make one vulnerable to it. Medical conditions (e.g., physical conditions such as paraplegia, substance abuse, cancer) can all occasion depression. Childhood experiences (experiential history) can motivate depression, or a previous, strongly negative emotional experience associated with a place can, upon returning years later to that place, motivate a depressed mood, or if the earlier experiences were positive, a nostalgic mood. Continuing and permanent frustration in satisfying one’s interests, concerns, or commitments—current stressors, as it were—can occasion irascibility or depression. And so on. Hence, the origin and salience-determination of moods can be quite complicated, but whether or not they assail us, they arise out of emotional experiences that have an intentional character that is preserved in the mood.

Conclusion There is no doubt that my position, rooted in Husserl’s understanding of intentionality, moves in the direction of Heidegger, and there is no doubt that Crowell’s position, rooted in Heidegger, acknowledges Heidegger’s Husserlian roots. No matter how closely Crowell’s view and my view converge—and they are in many respects compatible—they do not fully merge. The decisive difference concerns the primitiveness of intentionality. I  have argued against the view that absolute consciousness constitutes the empirical flow of experience as its (inner) “object.” I claimed instead that the form of time consciousness inheres within the concrete

116  John Drummond flow itself, that the person is the subject of this concrete flow, and that the person is identical to the transcendental subject who discloses the significance of things. I have also argued that the person is best characterized as a reflection-capable, embodied, practical, social, and historical entity and that the person’s historical situation, sociality, projects, moods, and embodiment can be accounted for within the intentional structures of mind. My characterization of minding as carefully and truthfully attending to things in thought, emotions and moods, and action is wholly intentional and fleshes out my claim that intentionality is a primitive notion. Central to my view regarding normativity is the teleological structure of mind. Minding the world has as its telos getting to the truth of the matter in all the domains of reason. This, we know, is an endeavor that we, as individuals and as communities, will never fully achieve, but it is nevertheless the goal that governs our experiential life. This interest in truth motivates in us the search for evidential insight with the aim of being a truthful, rational agent. To put the matter another way, the demand for self-responsibility is grounded in the truth-interest proper to intentionality itself, an interest that establishes the governing norm for all human activity, namely, truthfulness (Drummond 2010, see also 2013, 2017; forthcoming-1, -2). What accounts for the normativity of one’s beliefs, feelings and attitudes, actions and practices is one’s self-­ responsibly appropriating norms on the basis of evidenced cognitions, emotions, and choices. The normativity of our everyday norms is, in other words, grounded in our self-responsible convictions about what is true, appropriate, and right rather than, as Crowell would have it, a self-binding anticipatory resoluteness. Since achieving self-responsible convictions across the domains of reason just is to be a truthful agent, I also consider my view to be an account not only of individual, everyday norms but also of moral—better, ethical—normativity, an account of what it is to live a full and fulfilling human life.

Notes 1 While Crowell (2013, 118 n. 13) concedes that Husserl allows for a sense of “intentionality” that is not “act-intentionality,” i.e., not directed toward objects, his critique of Husserl’s account of consciousness is circumscribed by the notions of intentional acts and act-intentionality. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in all quotations are from the original. 2 Crowell (2013, 154 n. 4) in the end finds the terms “mind” and “person,” as Husserl uses it, inadequate. I, however, shall use these terms. By “mind” I mean the subject’s (ultimately, the person’s) openness to itself and the world, and by “person” I mean a minded being that is reflection-capable, embodied, practical, social, and historical. 3 This might, given Husserl’s claim that phenomenology discloses the nature not just of human rationality but of rational agency as such, seem an important modification of Husserl’s view of transcendental subjectivity. The issue concerns the level of generality in phenomenology. I  shall argue in what

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 117 immediately follows that a certain set of bodily movements motivate a series of objective appearances. These movements are the movements of a body having the sensory systems and motility characteristic of human subjects, and they condition the manner in which the object appears to human subjects. But this motivational and conditional relation of sensory systems and capacities to appearances is present in any entity capable of perception. These relations in general hold universally even if they are specified differently when the sensory systems and motility of that entity differ from those of the human. 4 Crowell correctly characterizes Husserl’s position as claiming, more specifically, that the covariance relation obtains between kinaesthetic sensations and what Husserl calls “presenting contents” (darstellende Inhalte, see Husserl 1997b, 40) that present the objective, sensible determinations of the object. I see no phenomenological justification for claiming that presenting contents are a moment of the perceptual correlation (Drummond 1978, 15–17), and it makes little sense to speak of a flow of (kinaesthetic) sensations motivating a flow of (presenting) sensations. This was the basis for my claim (1979–80, 23–32) that the covariance relation, properly conceived, obtains between the movements of a living body and the object’s appearings. Consequently, I agree that Crowell’s more general way of stating the covariance relation better captures what occurs in perception. 5 The language of “decide for myself,” with its suggestion of decisionism, can be misleading. I prefer the language of “appropriation,” which Husserl uses above in the same sense that he uses “decide for myself.” 6 I have discussed tradition at greater length in Drummond 2000. 7 Husserl, unpublished archival Ms. A VI 34, 19. I thank Julia Jansen, the Director of the Husserl Archives, Leuven, for permission to quote from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. Affective experience encompasses several related and interwoven, but non-identical, experiences and states: intentional feelings, emotions, affective traits, character traits, sentiments, and moods. See Drummond forthcoming-1 for a more complete—but still incomplete—discussion of different kinds of affective experience, including an account of intentional feelings and their relation to bodily feelings, emotions, and moods. 8 Husserl, unpublished archival Ms. M III 3 II 1, 29–30.

References Brough, John. 1991. “Translator’s Introduction.” In On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), edited by Edmund Husserl, xi–lvii. Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. New York: Cambridge University Press. Drummond, John J. 1978. “On the Nature of Perceptual Appearances or Is Husserl an Aristotelian?” The New Scholasticism 52: 1–22. ———. 1979–80. “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space: The Role of Kinaesthesis in Visual Perception.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40: 19–32. ———. 1983. “Objects’ Optimal Appearances and the Immediate Awareness of Space in Vision.” Man and World 16: 177–205.

118  John Drummond ———. 2000. “Time, History, and Tradition.” In The Many Faces of Time, edited by John B. Brough and Lester Embree, 127–47. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2002. “Complicar las emociones.” Translated by M. Oyata. Areté: Revista de Filosofía 14: 175–89. ———. 2006. “The (Cases) of (Self-)Awareness.” In Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, edited by Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford, 199–220. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2010. “Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia.” In Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, edited by Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens, 411–30. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2012. “Intentionality Without Representationalism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 115–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. “The Intentional Structure of Emotions.” Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy/Philosophiegeschichte und Logische Analyse 16: 244–63. ———. 2017. “Having the Right Attitudes.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 15: 142–63. ———. Forthcoming-1. “The Varieties of Affective Experience.” In The Routledge Handbook on the Phenomenology of the Emotions, edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer. London: Routledge. ———. Forthcoming-2. “Acting, Choosing, Deliberating.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Phenomenology of Agency, edited by Christopher Erhard and Tobias Keiling. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1900–1914. Unpublished archival manuscript M III 3 II. ———. 1931. Unpublished archival manuscript A VI 34. ———. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970a. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1970b. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970c. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973a. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1973b. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Dritter Teil: 1929–1935. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1989a. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Intentionality and (Moral) Normativity 119 ———. 1989b. Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1922–1937. Edited by Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1997a. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan, and Richard E. Palmer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1997b. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Translated by Anthony Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Nam-In. 1993. Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sherman, Nancy. 1991. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 1978. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2001. Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique. Translated by Elizabeth A. Behnke. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 2011. “Objects and Levels: Reflections on the Relation Between TimeConsciousness and Self-Consciousness.” Husserl Studies 27: 13–25. ———. 2017. Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

7 The Sources of Practical Normativity Reconsidered— With Kant and Levinas Inga Römer

Beginning with Max Scheler’s famous book Formalism in Ethics and Material Ethics of Values, there has been a widespread critique among phenomenologists with respect to Kant’s ethics: Kant would subsume the individuality of the person and the specific character of his or her concrete situation under an impersonal law of anonymous reason. Kantians, on the other hand, have often had the impression that phenomenological ethics constitutes a dogmatic ethics of value (in Scheler), a subjectivist existentialism (in Heidegger and Sartre), or an irrational, theologizing excessive altruism (in Levinas), all of them falling back on a position which had already been overcome by Kant for good reasons. Phenomenological and Kantian ethics are thus apparently antagonistic or at least alternative positions. However, in recent years, this thesis of incompatibility has become less convincing. In the English-speaking world, it is especially Steven Crowell who has emphasized a certain continuity between Kant and Heidegger, thereby showing that Heidegger’s presumed existential approach in Being and Time does not have to be understood as a radical break with Kant but can rather be taken as a transformation of his position. In what follows, I would like to show that there is also such a line of continuity and transformation from Kant to Levinas, a line which takes its departure with Levinas’s own reception of Kant and which can serve as a basis for reconsidering the question of the sources of practical normativity. To develop my argument, I  will proceed in two steps. The first part lays out Levinas’s perspective on Kant and shows how it changes quite radically over the years. The second part situates the proposed reading of Levinas with respect to the contemporary debate on the sources of normativity, more specifically with respect to Korsgaard and Crowell, and I will argue for the systematic strength of the Levinasian perspective. The study closes with an epilogue, which situates the three positions discussed with respect to Kant’s arguments in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and in the Critique of Practical Reason.

The Sources of Practical Normativity 121

Levinas on Kant: Toward an An-archic and Rational Desire for the Infinite It is essential to notice the fact that there are two distinct phases of Levinas’s reception of Kant. Up until the 1960s, Levinas had made critical comments on the aesthetic and the analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the 1970s, however, Kant becomes a positive reference point with regard to both the dialectic of the first Critique and the conception of pure practical reason developed in the second Critique. This section outlines the main ideas of his interpretations.1 Levinas initially reads the transcendental analytic of the first Critique as a philosophy of the same and of ontology. The theory of transcendental apperception with its “I think” means a “primacy of the same,” a “narcissism,” a moment of “appropriation” and “exploitation of reality.”2 At the center of Kant’s transcendental analytic, Levinas finds an I that understands everything given to it by its own categories and thus in a certain sense absorbs all that is exterior to it into its own realm. Since the synthetic unity of apperception synthesizes everything given under the categories for possible objects in general, Levinas is justified in calling the order produced by this highest synthesis ontology. “Ontology as First Philosophy,” however, “is a philosophy of power” (Levinas 1980, 16 (46)). If the ontological order produced by the I is an order created by the power of its own categories, then ontology itself becomes a philosophy of the power of the controlling I. Levinas’s interpretation of the transcendental aesthetic is directly linked to this. He praises Kant for separating sensibility and understanding, for “the independence of the ‘matter’ of cognition with regard to the synthetic power of representation,” but this independence exists “only negatively,” in the sense that Kant considers the sensible merely as that which is not yet synthetized as an object (Levinas 1980, 109 (135–6)). Levinas interprets Kantian space as the pure form of intuition with his own notion of the “there is,” the anonymity and impersonality of being in its character as a verb, reappearing behind every negation of a definable and graspable thing.3 Thus for him the transcendental analytic and aesthetic belong to ontology and to its abyss of senselessness in the “there is.” Kant’s practical philosophy is less present in Levinas’s earlier writings and, when it is considered, it is treated critically. In the small text “The I and the Totality” (1954), Levinas still seeks a positive notion of totality (Levinas, 1998a). To this end, he draws upon a critical distinction in the Kantian notion of reason. He opposes the intimate community of two lovers on the one hand and the society of communication on the other hand. His thesis is that morality must take the “difficult turn” by the “third” exterior to the community of love in order to achieve justice: “Law takes precedence over charity” (Levinas 1991, 33 (23)).

122  Inga Römer In a Kantian tone, he states that the “reciprocity of this respect” is “the condition of ethics” (Levinas 1991, 45 (35)). However close to Kant this may seem, Levinas concludes with a clear critique: “totality cannot be reduced to a kingdom of ends” since “[t]he totality rests on a relationship between individuals, other than the respect of reason” (Levinas 1991, 37 (27)). Kant is read as a defender of “an impersonal reason,” while Levinas himself aims for a totality in which the “speech between singular beings” generates a “universality” in the sense of an “interindividual meaning” (Levinas 1991, 35, 36 (25, 26)). The few passages where the earlier Levinas refers to Kant’s transcendental dialectic are also critical. “The Kantian notion of infinity figures as an ideal of reason, . . . the ideal completion of what is given incomplete,” but here “the infinite presupposes the finite, which it amplifies infinitely” (Levinas 1980, 170 (196)). The Levinasian objection is that an infinite expansion of finitude thinks of the infinite as derived from the finite and does not reach a “positivity of the infinite” (Levinas 1980, 170 (196)). Levinas, however, seeks a positivity of the infinite and, indeed, had already found it in Descartes’s idea of the infinite, if only in a theoretical sense. In Descartes, the idea of God in me is just such a positivity of the infinite, since the infinite of this idea is fully there at each moment. And Levinas is looking precisely for such a positivity of the infinite, but with an ethical sense that he did not find in the Cartesian argument. Levinas’s reading of Kant’s practical philosophy changes significantly in the 1970s. A manuscript from 1971 bears the title “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason.” In this manuscript, Levinas states that Kant founds “free action” upon a “complete disinterestedness,” by which he arrives at the singular idea of a “disinterested interest” (Levinas 2004a, 198 (449)). It is obvious that Levinas now discovers in Kant’s practical philosophy a predecessor for his own notion of dés-intér-essement in the metaphysical desire of the Other. He finds a “subordination of knowledge to an interest” in Kant, which as an “interest of pure practical reason is beyond the interests of the sensible nature” (Levinas 2004a, 201, 202 (451)). Because of the idea of a pure practical reason and because of the primacy of this, Levinas now regards Kant as a thinker of the beyond being and no longer as a mere philosopher of ontology and impersonal totality. As he puts it: If one had the right to retain one trait from a philosophical system and neglect all the details of its architecture . . ., we would think here of Kantianism, which finds a meaning to the human without measuring it by ontology. . . . The fact that immortality and theology could not determine the categorical imperative signifies the novelty of the Copernican revolution: a sense that is not measured by being or not being; but being on the contrary is determined on the basis of sense. (Levinas 1978, 166 (129)

The Sources of Practical Normativity 123 Kant’s philosophy of pure practical reason is for Levinas a philosophy of the sense beyond being, a sense that is essentially ethical.4 In Otherwise Than Being, the subject is understood as substitution, as a subject in the accusative, as “one-for-another” (Levinas 1978, 16 (13)). In a passivity beneath the difference of passivity and activity, in an “anteriority [that] is ‘older’ than the a priori” (Levinas 1978, 127 (101)), a signifying call of the Other has always already generated the self as substitution. While Totality and Infinity still operated with a self of separation from the elemental that is then called by the Other, the self of separation in Otherwise Than Being is nothing more than a structural condition for the self of substitution: the self of substitution is always already generated. However, for Levinas this generation of the self as substitution is a generation of what he calls an “an-archic reason”; the word “an-archic” is to be taken with reference to the literal sense of the Greek word ἀρχή (arché), i.e., a reason that “does not have the status of a principle” (Levinas 1978, 212, 30 note (166, 188 note)). Instead of being a principle, the signifying ethical sense in the face of the other is pure disturbance, confusion, restlessness, and refusal of synthesis.5 It is this an-archic reason bound to the ethical sense in the face of the Other that is “the rationality of reason” itself, a “pre-original reason,” “reason is the-one-for-the-other!” (Levinas 1978, 203, 212 (160, 166, 167)). Its “rational” or “reason-able” character stems from the fact that it introduces the realm of sense into a mere struggle of forces and power. It is a reason beyond being and finitude, which is not merely “to be otherwise [être autrement], but otherwise than being [autrement qu’être]” (Levinas 1978, 3 (3)). Transcending the sphere of being and of satisfaction, this an-archic reason opens up a disinterest or dés-intér-esse-ment in which the self is intrinsically bound to an ethically signifying, an-archic and reasonable desire of the infinite in the face of the Other.6 Triggered by the ethical sense in the face of the Other, an-archic reason is the form the desire for the infinite takes on; and as such, it disturbs every claim to a presumed ontological order. However, if one reads the manuscript on Kant and these passages from Otherwise Than Being together, it becomes clear that Levinas sees Kant’s notion of a pure practical reason as a precursor to his own idea of an an-archic and rational desire for the infinite. Kant has become an ally for Levinas. But he transforms Kant’s conception of pure practical reason in at least three fundamental ways that need to be emphasized. First, Levinas’s transformed pure practical reason is anchored in the desire for the infinite itself. The Kantian opposition of reason and sensibility is transformed into the opposition of a desire for the infinite and mere need. Second, for Levinas the autonomy of the self is inaugurated by the ethically signifying call of the Other. While Kantian autonomy means that the subject gives the rational moral law to itself, it is the signifying call of the Other that inaugurates a new kind of autonomy in Levinas. One might have the impression that Levinas’s

124  Inga Römer thinking is essentially a philosophy of heteronomy insofar as the subject in the full sense is constituted by the call of the Other. But Levinas himself conceives of this rather as a “reverting of heteronomy into autonomy” (Levinas 1978, 189 (148)), because the self is only truly autonomous when it is constituted by the an-archic and rational desire of the infinite in the face of the Other. In a certain proximity to the Kantian idea that only the self determined by pure practical reason is an autonomous self, Levinas believes that the self is truly autonomous only when it is determined by reason—but for him by a reason constituted by the call of the Other. Third, for Levinas the an-archic reason that is inaugurated as the desire for the infinite develops as an insurmountable tension between the  claim of the Other and the claim of the third. In Otherwise Than Being, the third is described as “all the others than the other” (Levinas 1978, 201 (158)) who also claim me always already in the face of the Other. On the one hand, the third thus “troubles” and “interrupts” the ethical significance in the relation to the Other and demands the development of a “comparison of the incomparable” (Levinas 1978, 103, 191, 201 (82, 150, 158)). The result of such a comparison of the incomparable is at each time a common measure, a rule by which different and in the end incomparable cases are made comparable. On the other hand, however, the orders of the third, generated by this comparison, are constantly subjected to a “disturbance” (Levinas 1978, 113 (89)) by the call of the Other, which implies an ever renewed challenge to the established orders. The Other disturbs the orders of the third, just as the third troubles and interrupts ethical significance in the relation to the Other. For Levinas, an-archic reason is essentially this double disturbance of the claim of the Other and the third. At this point, one might think that Levinas has left Kant behind; the idea of a singular supreme law of pure practical reason seems to be too far away from the idea of a double disturbance by the Other and the third, a tension whose unfolding is an-archic reason. However, the difference is less sharp than it seems: Kant’s moral law is an idea of pure practical reason that transcends every concrete law and every concrete maxim that respects its claim, and as such it is oriented toward the infinite. In this sense, Levinas’s an-archic and rational desire for the infinite is certainly an important transformation of Kant’s letter, but not one that would entirely leave his spirit. But did we not overemphasize reason in Levinas? Even if he does speak of an-archic reason, pre-original reason, reason as the-one-for-the-other, is it not finally a certain type of divinity which is for him the ultimate source of ethical normativity? Isn’t there something divine in the call of the Other that makes it binding for me? To answer this question, we need to turn to another term introduced by Levinas. This term is “illeity.” The word “illeity” contains references to the French “il” (he) and the Latin “yonder” (ille). Levinas claims that the “he” or the “yonder” of this illeity “is the third person,” “[t]he beyond,” “from which the face is

The Sources of Practical Normativity 125 coming.”7 This “third person” is clearly not the third in the inter-human relationship, but another third person. It is a third beyond the Other and the third, a third person which seems to have a divine character. Commentators have often thought that this was a rather delicate idea of Levinas, insofar as it would come close to converting Levinas’s position into a theological ethics. Bernhard Waldenfels and László Tengelyi, for instance, adopt Levinas’s position in different senses, but each one without making use of the term “illeity.”8 Didier Franck, on the other hand, places Levinasian illeity at the center of his interpretation and understands this term as designating a non-ontotheological divinity of justice (see Franck 2008, 241). Even if I do not follow Franck all the way,9 I agree that illeity is an essential element of Levinas’s position, one that does not commit him to an ontotheological foundation of ethics. In my reading, “illeity” is rather Levinas’s name for the dimension of ethical significance as such, a dimension which develops as a tension between the Other and the third. However, this is neither an ontotheological God nor a religious dimension distinct from the ethical. “Illeity” is rather defined in the following way: “[t]he mode of the infinite [is] to hint at, in the heart of its desirable essence itself, non-desirable nearness” (Levinas 1993, 257). “Illeity” is thus a “mode” of transforming an in itself non-desirable other into a desirable other, desirable then in the sense of the desire for the infinite that develops in ethical significance. Understood in this way, “illeity” is the dimension of ethical significance and relation as such. And this dimension takes different forms in the relation with the Other and the third. Both the relation with the Other and the third are relations to illeity understood as ethical significance as such. On the one hand, the claim of the third interrupts my relation to the Other, insofar as he also makes a demand on me, a demand that takes my attention away from the Other and urges me to find measures by which to compare the uncomparable; but on the other hand, the Other interrupts the measures elaborated with respect to the third. This interruption, which goes incessantly in both ways, is not at all a synthesis, not even directed at a synthesis. On the contrary, it is pure disturbance, confusion, restlessness, and refusal of synthesis.10 It is important to note that Levinas does not understand the dimension of the third as something other than ethical significance, but rather as a different mode of it. In his own words, this reads as follows: in the “relationship with the third party,” there is a “betrayal of my an-archic relationship with illeity, but also a new relationship with it” (Levinas 1978, 201 (158)). Illeity is this double disturbance between the other and the third, and the unity of the term has its reason only in the fact that it signifies the double sense of ethical significance in opposition to pure need. In an interview, Levinas states the following on this issue: A certain God and a certain way to think God, as it was characteristic for the positive religious institutions, has undoubtedly come to

126  Inga Römer an end. But that, what counts as the divine, is something else than his force and all might. . . . The negation of God by Nietzsche was confirmed by the 20th century; the God of promise, the giving God, the God as substance—all of that is not tenable any more, of course. But the first fact, the wonder of all wonder consists in this, that one human being can have a sense for another human being. (Levinas 1995, 133) This quote states quite clearly what Levinas takes to be an acceptable notion of God today: it is ethical significance. For him, this ethical significance cannot be derived from theoretical reflection, its existence is simply a fact; and that this fact exists at all is so astonishing that Levinas speaks of it as a miracle with divine character. This means that the only tenable philosophical notion of God is that of ethical significance. God is not even a necessary postulate, a necessary idea for the possibility of the highest good as in Kant, but the divine is the dimension of ethical significance itself. There is no God beyond ethical significance that would be the source of ethical normativity. But the “divine” is the miraculous fact that one human being can have a sense for another human being, an ethical sense that transcends all relations of appropriation and domination, without ever arriving at nor even aiming at a synthesis of the other and the third. It is important, however, to notice a significant difference between Kant and Levinas with respect to this dimension as such. While for Kant, the existence of this ethical dimension seems to be stable, even though people rather seldom follow its commands, for Levinas ethical significance as such is in danger in our times—threatened by nihilism. In Kantian terms, the fact of operative pure practical reason could vanish, and no theoretical demonstration would be in the position to save it.

The Sources of Practical Normativity Reconsidered After having shown how the late Levinas reads Kant as a precursor to his own conception of an an-archic and rational desire for the infinite in the face of the Other, and after having argued for an interpretation in which Levinasian illeity is the name for the mode of ethical significance as such, we will now turn to the contemporary debate on the sources of normativity, more specifically to the question of the sources of practical normativity. Even though the expression “the sources of normativity” is the name for a philosophical problem, it will nowadays also be taken as a reference to Christine Korsgaard’s book with the same title. This book has become one of the most central references with respect to a contemporary type of Kantian ethics. Even if Aristotle has become more and more important for Korsgaard herself over the years, it is still her fundamental approach from 1996 that needs to be discussed if one wishes

The Sources of Practical Normativity 127 to introduce an alternative version of Kantian ethics today. In contemporary phenomenological debates, however, Korsgaard’s work exercises little influence. Current phenomenological contributions to ethics can be roughly divided into two main fields: material value ethics (which often seeks dialogue with positions from analytic philosophy) and the ethics of alterity. With respect to both realms, Kant and Kantian versions of ethics are mostly considered too “abstract,” working “from top to bottom” rather than starting with concrete ethical experience. However, there are some exceptions to these tendencies, exceptions that take up Kant’s and also Korsgaard’s approaches in a positive way in order to develop another perspective on phenomenological ethics. One of the most elaborated perspectives of this kind is the one proposed by Steven Crowell, especially in his most recent book Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, published in 2013. In this section, I will first sketch the main elements of Korsgaard’s argument proposed in The Sources of Normativity, and I will then outline what I take to be the most essential aspects of Crowell’s position as it is developed in Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. In a third and final step, I will return to Levinas and the interpretation proposed in the first part. I will show in which sense the Levinasian approach might be more convincing than the other two perspectives discussed. The fundamental premise upon which Korsgaard builds her entire approach is this: “The human mind is self-conscious” insofar as it “is essentially reflective” (Korsgaard 1996, 92). For Korsgaard, it is only because we are self-conscious that we are not automatically dominated by our impulses; that is, our reflective nature allows us to ask ourselves, “Is this desire really a reason to act?” (Korsgaard 1996, 93). At the same time, self-consciousness generates the problem of practical normativity: Where can we find such a reason to act? Korsgaard’s first answer is that we find such reasons for action in our “practical identity” (Korsgaard 1996, 101). A practical identity is defined as “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking” (Korsgaard 1996, 101). Such descriptions can be “a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, a member of a certain profession, someone’s lover or friend” (Korsgaard 1996, 101). The idea is this: if I  understand myself as Anna’s friend, Anna’s being in need will be a reason for me to help her, and thus the conception of myself as Anna’s friend functions as the source of practical normativity—I ought to help her. However, Korsgaard sees that this is not enough for practical normativity in the moral sense, since the “ought” of a specific practical identity depends on a particular self-understanding that not everyone shares—after all, not everyone is Anna’s friend. Practical identities are contingent. To overcome this worry, Korsgaard identifies a universal practical identity, what she calls our “identity simply

128  Inga Römer as a human being, a reflective animal who needs reasons to act and to live” (Korsgaard 1996, 121). The argument for this identity as a human being is the following: as self-conscious beings, it is necessary for us to “be governed by some conception of . . . practical identity” (Korsgaard 1996, 120), because otherwise we would lose our grip on ourselves “as having any reason to live and to act at all” (Korsgaard 1996, 121). And it is precisely this reason for adopting some conception of practical identity that has its sources, not in any particular practical identity, but in our identity as a human self-conscious being as such. So if there is practical normativity at all, it has its final source in the “value of humanity” (Korsgaard 1996, 121), in our valuing our identity as human beings. This value is not entirely unconditional, but we need to accept it if we want to have any reason to act at all. And since our self-conscious nature sets us the problem of finding a reason to act, our self-conscious nature motivates us to value our own humanity and to adopt some practical identity as a source of the reasons we need to act. However, this identity as a human being is at the same time a “moral identity” (Korsgaard 1996, 121) only if it somehow requires us to value the same humanity in the persons of others as well. Korsgaard presents an argument in two steps by which she intends to show that we are in fact bound to value the humanity of others as well. The first step is a Wittgensteinian move, the second might be said to have a phenomenological inspiration. In a variation of Wittgenstein’s argument against a private language, Korsgaard argues that there is no such thing as a private reason for action, a reason that would essentially be a reason only for me: “to say that R is a reason for A is to say that one should do A because of R” (Korsgaard 1996, 137f). So this reason concerns anyone who can understand reasons. In other words, it would be a contradictio in adiecto to speak of a private reason, since a reason is a reason only if it is in principle intelligible as a reason for everyone who is able to understand and act on reasons. Once this is established, a second question comes up: how can I be sure that there is in fact someone else who operates with reasons and to whom I need to answer with reasons? Korsgaard’s answer might be said to have a phenomenological character: as soon as another person is in front of me, talks to me or is even just visibly in need, I simply understand his or her reasons. To be precise, though I might misunderstand their actual content, I understand his or her expressions as reasons: “We do not seem to need a reason to take the reasons of others into account. We seem to need a reason not to” (Korsgaard 1996, 140f). But insofar as the other is immediately present to me as someone who has reasons and acts on them, I already understand him as someone with a human identity. In this sense “there is no gap to bridge” between myself and the other, since this gap is always already bridged in human encounter (Korsgaard 1996, 143). As soon as someone else appears to me, I find myself confronted with the appeal to

The Sources of Practical Normativity 129 defend my reasons in front of him, reasons that I need to understand as essentially shareable. We see clearly that Korsgaard grounds her entire account on the idea of self-consciousness experienced in what is nowadays called the “firstperson perspective”: because of my self-conscious reflective mind, I need reasons to act and to live; this is my identity as a human being; on its basis I adopt a particular practical identity that serves as the source of my concrete reasons to act; but insofar as reasons are essentially shareable, I need to understand all of my reasons as reasons which other self-­conscious human beings can in principle accept, and which I must actually justify to those human beings who appear before me; this makes my identity as a human being a moral identity. Korsgaard’s position has been an important inspiration for Crowell’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. However, Crowell only goes so far with Korsgaard, and he ultimately offers a Heideggerian critique of her view. This critique stems from Crowell’s existential phenomenology of normativity. I  will now sketch what I  take to be the most important steps of his argument.11 For Heidegger, the self of Dasein is, first and for the most part, a oneself, a self determined by “the One.” For Crowell, this means that Dasein does what one does by following established social standards. Thus, Dasein as oneself understands itself by means of anonymous roles of the social order in which it is living: father, doctor, etc. A social role is, in Crowell’s reading, what Korsgaard calls a “practical identity” (see Crowell 2013, 176). But if my practical identity stems at first and for the most part from the social order of the One, the reasons it provides are not really my reasons; rather, they are the reasons of the One: as a father one has a reason to care for one’s children, as a doctor one has a reason to care for one’s patients, etc. The essential question is thus: how can the reasons of the One be transformed into reasons that are really my own? It is at this point that Crowell formulates an important objection to Korsgaard’s view: mere self-consciousness, the constitutive aspect for human identity in Korsgaard, is not enough to answer this question. It is not enough to simply reflect upon the reasons of the oneself to transform them into my reasons. For Crowell, Heidegger offers a viable answer to this question: the answer is an existential transformation triggered by the mood of anxiety and by the call of conscience.12 The call of conscience triggers a breakdown of the oneself, its practical identities and of the reasons grounded in them. This breakdown results in a first-personal selfawareness that is “radically indexical” (Crowell 2013, 176) insofar as it does not determine any content of the self. Therefore, conscience is only the condition of authenticity but not yet authenticity itself.13 Crowell’s original and essential thesis is now the following: this call of conscience is the “origin” of “the capacity for reason” (Crowell 2013, 184). In Crowell’s interpretation, the call of conscience demands of Dasein to no longer

130  Inga Römer take its reasons from the One. The call demands that Dasein think and act in the light of an idea of the good I have actually made my own and to assume the responsibility for the reasons emerging from it. Crowell understands this passage from the reasons of the One to my own reasons as an entrance “into the depth dimension of reasons” (Crowell 2013, 197). Here, Dasein passes from the sphere in which the ends and thus the reasons are determined by the One, to the deep sphere of reasons in which the ends constitutive of my identity and the reasons springing from them are truly appropriated by myself and thus fall into the realm of my ownmost responsibility. At this point of Crowell’s argument, one might have the impression of an extreme individualism, one in which the personal ends of a singular Dasein determine the realm of reasons. But Crowell insists that this is not the case. As soon as I give myself a measure which constitutes my identity and for which I  alone assume responsibility, I  necessarily must understand the reasons springing from this measure as universal. This is so because “a measure . . . includes in itself a reference to that public character and can be contested not just by force, but discursively, in terms of ‘what is best’ ” (Crowell 2013, 227). And insofar as Dasein is always already being-with (Mitsein), I need to be able to justify my reasons to others. The result is that the call of conscience ultimately demands the praxis of giving and taking reasons. The call of conscience is the condition for distancing myself from the One, for finding my very own ends constitutive of who I  am, ends which provide me with a measure and with reasons in the deep sense, reasons that I need to defend in public discourse with the others who are always already constitutive of my being. While both Korsgaard and Crowell take the first-personal perspective seriously in reformulating a Kantian type of ethics, Crowell’s original transformation of Heidegger’s argument adds an important existential dimension to Korsgaard’s theory of practical normativity:14 self-­consciousness is not enough, anxiety and the call of conscience are necessary to distinguish myself from the oneself and to enter into the depth dimension of reasons in which my reasons are not merely bound to social roles but emerge from the ends and thus the identity I have truly made my own. In spite of her distinction between practical identity and identity as a human being, Korsgaard’s formal argument cannot account for the important difference between a space of socially accepted reasons and a space of reasons in the deep sense that has its source in authentic Dasein. The compelling strength of Crowell’s argument notwithstanding, one might still raise the following doubt: do we get the right kind of ethical practical normativity when we attempt to ground such normativity on the measure of my authentic Dasein? Even if I  am required to give an account of my reasons to others, does such an account not tend toward a certain ethical self-conceit? If I am the ultimate source of measure, even if I  need to defend this measure with respect to others in order to not

The Sources of Practical Normativity 131 contradict myself by taking my reasons to be private ones, does this view not place the self at the center of ethics? Crowell is very much aware of this objection and has addressed it in a more recent article entitled “Second-Person Phenomenology” (2015). In § 5 of this work, Crowell argues that the Heideggerian call of conscience is in itself a second-personal phenomenon. Two main reasons justify this claim. First, because of Dasein’s ontological being-with, the call of conscience already implies being accountable to others. This seems to be the same argument as in the book: if I adopt a measure and if I am beingwith, this implies that I need to justify my reasons toward others. Second, Crowell argues that the uncanny Dasein is an unmarked addressor of the call and as such cannot be taken to be I-myself. The call would rather have to be understood as a transcendence of the normative and as such as a second-personal address. As I stated above, I am not entirely convinced that the first reason is sufficient to overcome the objection: Dasein’s selfgiven measure is at the center, even if it implies an answerability due to ontological being-with. And even the second reason leaves me with some doubts. As Crowell himself quotes, Heidegger claims explicitly that “[t]he call comes from me and yet overcomes me” (Heidegger 1993, 275 (320)). Sections  56–8 of Being and Time develop a threefold structure of the call: (1) the Dasein in its uncanniness, (2) calls in silence upon the One-self, and (3) to be an authentic self. The only transcendence and strangeness in this structure is the transcendence and strangeness of the uncanny Dasein with respect to the One-self. Even if one might say that the call of the uncanny Dasein is “second-personal” with respect to the “I-myself” of the One-self, it is ultimately Dasein itself that is just as much the caller as the called. Having said this, it seems to me that neither Crowell’s nor Korsgaard’s approach is entirely free from the sort of objection formulated above. It is not an objection with respect to the internal structure of their arguments, but with respect to the kind of argument they propose. It is at this point that Levinas seems to open up a different path, a path that avoids this problem. To show this, I will now turn back to the interpretation of Levinas developed in the first section. In Totality and Infinity, a bathing in the elemental, a general indulgence (jouissance) in what is given, is interrupted by the fear that the possibility of such indulgence might come to an end. This fear triggers the separation from the elemental and brings about a first version of the self, a self that works, appropriates goods, builds a dwelling, and so on. Insofar as the elemental is experienced as having the character of a mythical divinity, separation also means atheism for Levinas.15 It is this self of separation and atheism that is, still in Otherwise Than Being, the condition of the possibility for the call of the Other reaching the self. And it is only the call of the Other in the mode of illeity that makes the self a self of substitution, of true autonomy and of an-archic rationality.

132  Inga Römer It is nothing less than the call of the Other that institutes the self of true autonomy, of an-archic and rational desire for the infinite, pursued in the tension between the Other and the third. While in Crowell, the self is first and for the most part a oneself of the social order, from which it can then distance itself by way of the call of conscience, Levinas starts with a being bathing in the elemental, from which the first version of the self emerges by way of separation. However, the self of separation from the elemental is not yet the self that enters the “depth dimension of reasons.” It is only the call of the Other that installs that dimension of rationality, which develops in the an-archic and rational desire for the infinite. It is only by being bound to the Other and to the third in my desire that I am responsible for giving them reasons in such a way that this giving and taking of reasons takes on an ethical character. This Levinasian line of argument is in my eyes more convincing than Korsgaard’s and even Crowell’s approach, because it can avoid the above-mentioned objection. It seems indeed impossible to generate ethical rationality within myself (and then extend it toward others) without falling into a sort of ethical self-conceit—ethical rationality can only be installed by the call of the Other binding my desire and obliging me to answer him and the third by giving reasons. But what happens, if I do not experience this call of the Other that inaugurates ethical rationality? The Levinasian answer would be that I find myself within nihilism, within the pure noise of the “there is,” a theater without a temple,16 a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The ethical dimension as such would be lost and we would be reduced to an existence within the realm of force, power, manipulation, and the instrumentalization of the other for our own ends—and no philosophical argument would be able to demonstrate the necessity of adopting an ethical attitude. Can we blame Levinas for thinking that this is indeed a risk of our times?

Epilogue The aim of this epilogue is to situate the three positions discussed with respect to Kant’s arguments concerning the foundation of the validity of the moral law in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the third section of the Groundwork, Kant advances the following thesis: “Freedom must be presupposed as a property of the will of all rational beings” (Kant 1968a, 447). The argument justifying this thesis can be said to adopt a “first-person perspective”: in my praxis, I must take myself as free if I claim to have a will that is my will, because a will determined by external determinants would simply not be a “will of [my] own” (Kant 1968a, 448). But insofar as Kant has stated that “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same” (Kant 1968a, 447), he can conclude that the necessary self-ascription of freedom implies already

The Sources of Practical Normativity 133 the validity of the moral law for me. He thus proceeds from an argument for the necessary self-ascription of freedom to the validity of the moral law. It is important to see, however, that Kant does not take this argument from the necessary self-ascription of freedom in action to be a proof of freedom in the transcendental sense.17 In the analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant develops a different argument. He now states that the consciousness of the moral law and the moral law itself are a “fact of reason” (Kant 1968b, 31, 47), and it is only from this fact of reason that a “deduction . . . of freedom” (Kant 1968b, 47) is possible. The freedom thus deduced is now indeed freedom in the transcendental sense. So in the second Critique, Kant proceeds in the opposite direction, no longer from freedom to the moral law but rather from the moral law to freedom.18 Elsewhere, I have tried to show that the fact of reason is to be understood with reference to the Latin word factum as both, the act of pure practical reason by which (or through which) the executive faculty of volition (Willkür) is determined, and as the result of this determining act; this act produces the validity of the moral law, and its result, the consciousness of this validity, is thus sufficient to testify to the validity of the law.19 What is essential for our purpose here is the underivability of the act by which pure practical reason determines the executive faculty of volition and thus produces the validity of the moral law: it just happens and thereby institutes morality and with it freedom as autonomy. How can the approaches formulated by Korsgaard, Crowell, and Levinas be situated with respect to Kant’s two arguments? It seems that Korsgaard comes closest to the argument of the Groundwork, Crowell lies between the two, and Levinas continues the line of the second Critique. In which sense? When Korsgaard states that we are self-conscious beings who cannot but act under the idea of reasons guiding our actions, we can see this as a variation of the Kantian argument for the necessary self-ascription of freedom that we identified in the Groundwork: if I want something, I need to take myself as free, because otherwise it would not be me who is willing, says Kant; if I want to act freely and not only be determined by impulses, I need to do so on the basis of reasons I take to be justifying my actions, reasons that derive from the identity I have adopted. And as Kant passes from freedom to the moral law, Korsgaard’s argument passes from my needing reasons for free action to moral identity and in a more general sense to moral normativity. Crowell’s existential approach seems to be situated between the two Kantian arguments. For Crowell, the call of conscience allows me to enter the depth dimension of reasons, and this priority of the call can be read as a reference to the Kantian fact of reason from the second Critique: it just happens, it comes over me, and thus inaugurates freedom in the sense that it allows me to adopt a measure that is truly my own (and

134  Inga Römer not the one of the One). However, the further part of Crowell’s argument seems to follow rather the line of the Groundwork: it is on the basis of the measure of the good, which I have authentically made my own, that I then also have to defend my reasons in the public space of being-with. In this part, the argument does rather proceed from my freedom to moral rationality in the universal sense. Levinas’s transformation of Kant, on the other hand, seems to imply an unambiguous structural proximity to the argument of the second Critique: that the ethical sense in the face of the Other that triggers my desire is just as underivable as the determining act of pure practical reason—it just happens. And it is by this inauguration of ethical rationality that my freedom as autonomy is instituted, in the later Kant as in Levinas, even though Levinas understands autonomy as a reverting of heteronomy into autonomy. However, while Kant is optimistic that this inauguration actually happens in all human beings, Levinas has his doubts with respect to our times: in his eyes, ethical significance as such is in danger nowadays insofar as it is threatened by nihilism. And one might wonder whether he would not detect a sign of such nihilism in a certain contemporary tendency to generate moral rationality from consistency arguments taking their starting point in the self. On one point, the later Kant and Levinas agree: it is impossible to generate ethical rationality by starting with my very own freedom and then extending it toward others; ethical rationality and normativity can only be installed by an underivable fact, the fact of reason generating the validity of the universal moral law or the call of the Other binding my desire and obliging me to answer him and the third by giving reasons.

Notes 1 A detailed analysis of Levinas’s interpretations of Kant can be found in my book Römer 2018, chapter 3.4. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in all quotations are from the original. 2 The first two quotes are from “La philosophie et l’idée de l’Infini” (1957), in Levinas 1994, 167 (49), the second two quotes are from Levinas 1980, 16 (46). The page number in parentheses refers to the English translation. 3 See Levinas 1980, 164ff. (190ff.). 4 In other respects (for example with respect to the regulative ideas, the transcendental ideal, the doctrine of the postulates), Levinas remains ambivalent toward Kant. We cannot develop this here (see again my above-mentioned book). But the sections on Kant in Levinas 1993, 67–82, 177–81 (57–65, 153–7) are an important point of reference. 5 See the notion of “anarchy” in Levinas 1978, 128 note (194 note). 6 See Levinas 1978, 2 (3). 7 This quote is taken from “La trace de l’autre” in Levinas 1994, 199. 8 See Waldenfels 2007, 299–312; Waldenfels 2002, 128–30. And see Tengelyi 2007a; Tengelyi 2007b. 9 See Römer 2018, chapter 3.4.3.

The Sources of Practical Normativity 135 0 See again Levinas 1978, 128 note (194 note). 1 11 Our summary is based on the third and the fourth part of Crowell 2013. 12 See Crowell 2013, 181ff. 13 See Crowell 2013, 179. 14 In this article, I  am not discussing the question whether Crowell’s appropriation of Heidegger can be understood as a convincing interpretation of Heidegger’s position in Being and Time. For some doubts with respect to this point see my review on Normativity in Husserl and Heidegger in the Husserl Studies. See also my own reading of Heidegger with respect to Kant in Römer 2018, chapter 3.2. 15 For these analyses see the part “Interiority and Economy” in Levinas 1980, 81–158 (107–83). 16 See the section “Divine comedy” in Levinas 2004b, 108–15, here 115 (65– 70, here 60–70). 17 I have shown this in Römer 2018, chapter 2.2.1. 18 However, I do not think that this means a radical change of position in Kant. It is rather a more sophisticated line of argument that Kant only discovers in the second Critique. I have argued for such a continuity thesis in Römer 2018, chapter 2.2.2. 19 See also Römer 2018, chapter 2.2.2.

References Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Second-Person Phenomenology.” In The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, 70–92. New York and London: Routledge. Franck, Didier. 2008. L’un-pour-l’autre: Levinas et la signification. Paris: PUF. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1993. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Kant, Immanuel. 1968a. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 385–463. Berlin: de Gruyter. ———. 1968b. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1–163. Berlin: de Gruyter (AA V). ———. 2006a. “Critique of Practical Reason.” In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by M. J. Gregor, 137–271. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006b. “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by M. J. Gregor, 37–108. New York: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Autrement qu’être. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1980. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’Exteriorité. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” Translated by Alphonso Lingus, 47–59. In Levinas, Emmanuel. Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

136  Inga Römer ———. 1991. Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Grasset. ———. 1993. Dieu, la Mort et le Temps. Edited by Jacques Rolland. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle. ———. 1994a. En découvrant L’existence Avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin. ———. 1994b. “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason.” Translated and Annotated by Blake Billings. Man and World—An International Philosophical Review 27 (4): 445–53. ———. 1998a. Entre nous: On thinking-of-the-other. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998b. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Edited by W. Hamacher and D. E. Wellbery. Translated by B. Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. God, Death and Time. Translated by B. Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2002. Totality and Infinity. Translated by A. Lingus. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2004a. “Le Primat de la Raison Pure Pratique/Das Primat der Reinen Praktischen Vernunft.” Introduced, Translated and Annotated by Jakub Sirovátka. In Kants Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie, edited by Norbert Fischer, 179–205. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 2004b. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, second enlarged ed. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2004c. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by A. Lingus. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel, and Hans Joachim Lenger. 1995. Emmanuel Lévinas: Visage et violence première (phénoménologie de l’éthique). Une interview (1987). Translated by Arno Münster, 129–43. In Levinas, E., Münster, A., Petitdemange, G., Petrosino, S., Rolland, J. and Weber, E. La différence comme nonindifférence: Éthique et altérité chez Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Éditions Kimé. Römer, Inga. 2014. “Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger.” Husserl Studies 30 (3): 283–91. ———. 2018. Das Begehren der reinen praktischen Vernunft: Kants Ethik in phänomenologischer Sicht. Hamburg: Meiner. Tengelyi, László. 2007b. “Gesetzesanspruch und wilde Verantwortung.” In Erfahrung und Ausdruck: Phänomenologie im Umbruch bei Husserl und seinen Nachfolgern, edited by László Tengelyi, 251–63. Dordrecht: Springer (Phaenomenologica. Vol. 180). ———. 2007a. “Antwortendes Handeln und ordnungsstiftendes Gesetz.” In Erfahrung und Ausdruck: Phänomenologie im Umbruch bei Husserl und seinen Nachfolgern, edited by László Tengelyi, 265–89. Dordrecht: Springer (Phaenomenologica. Vol. 180). Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2002. Bruchlinien der Erfahrung: Phänomenologie Psychoanalyse. Phänomenotechnik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2007. Antwortregister. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

8 Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good Irene McMullin

By all accounts, Heidegger’s account of authentic resoluteness offers valuable resources for understanding what it means to be a normatively responsive and responsible agent. According to Heidegger, it is possible to come face to face with one’s responsibility for normativity in the breakdown condition of anxiety, in which the contingency of the norms governing the meaning possibilities of the world is revealed as such. Heidegger’s account of resoluteness is meant to clarify what it means to gear back into the world from out of that breakdown condition, living authentically in light of the truths revealed within it. Hence, resoluteness names the condition in which an agent is no longer paralyzed by Angst but rather engages with the normatively structured world in a way that is informed by a recognition of its contingency and one’s own responsibility for its bindingness. Understanding resoluteness, then, is essential for understanding what norm-responsive agency looks like. Though a good deal of work has been done on the active, projective dimension of resoluteness—wherein we understandingly take up our abilities to be in a transparent and responsible manner—less has been written on the affective manifestation of resoluteness—or what Heidegger calls “readiness for anxiety.” In what follows, I  will discuss what he could mean by this, suggesting that what shows up as mattering to Dasein in resoluteness is a condition of normative plurality that Angst reveals as a necessary condition for the possibility of being in the world. In readiness for anxiety, Dasein displays a responsive attunement to this normative pluralism and the condition of irrevocable normative tension to which it gives rise. This is not a purely negative experience, however. Rather, I will argue that gratitude for these sources of normativity is an essential affective component of resoluteness.

Angst Resoluteness names the authentic mode of being in the world in which Dasein takes up again the practical identities and abilities-to-be that collapsed in existential death—but in a way that is somehow inflected with

138  Irene McMullin the insight gained through that breakdown. It is therefore important that we make a distinction between the condition of breakdown itself and the resoluteness by which Dasein returns to worldly significance in a qualitatively different way. Following the account put forth by Steven Crowell, we can see that breakdown reveals not the authentic or resolute self but rather the capacity for first-person self-awareness that is a hidden condition for the possibility of both authentic and inauthentic modes of existing (2013, 179, 183).1 Explicit awareness of this first-personal “I-myself” is only possible when ordinary modes of self-awareness collapse in Angst and Dasein can no longer understand itself through the lens of worldly things and practices. In such a condition, the generic roles and categories that ordinarily provide the saliences and motivations that structure my being in the world cease to have a grip on me (Heidegger 1962, 233–4). Indeed, these worldly meanings are revealed as never having been the determinate authorities I had treated them as being, but rather as contingent possibilities of self-understanding. In breakdown, Dasein recognizes that there is a degree of indeterminacy characterizing its relationship to worldly measures—a recognition predicated on the experience of another component in the normativity game: the claim that each Dasein recognize itself as responsible for applying those norms in its particular life. Thus the fundamental revelation of this kind of first-person self-disclosure is the fact that I am a being capable of acting in light of norms—not simply following them in a mechanical conformism (Crowell 2013, 171). The standards governing success and failure articulated in each worldly possibility have their authority not simply from the practices themselves, but from the fact that I myself am at stake in them. Being at stake in the standards of success and failure to which I commit myself is not itself an ability-to-be (Seinkönnen) but rather a transcendental condition for the possibility of agency, which remains even when all of my worldly abilities to be have been stripped from me (Crowell 2013, 181).

Orientation Toward Measure As Crowell characterizes it, this first-personal mode of self-awareness that underwrites all abilities to be is best understood as an orientation toward measure as such. Namely, a condition whereby I “grasp myself in terms of the very idea of better and worse” and I understand myself as answerable for the ways in which I respond to this normative distinction (2015, 187). Crowell thematizes this ontological orientation toward the normative in terms of “the Good”—a notion that Heidegger, following Plato, sometimes invokes (Crowell 2013, 187; Heidegger 1984, 184). As soon as I act, I have to make use of some understanding of what is best in order to orient myself such that my acts are intentional and not simply random movements. What is revealed when all publicly articulated possibilities are stripped away, then, is the condition for the possibility of such intentional—that is, norm-governed—action. Namely, an orientation

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 139 in which I understand that all my choices—if they are to be choices at all—must be governed by distinctions of better and worse, whatever the content of those distinctions might turn out to be. Thus the ultimate outcome of breakdown is that my status as a being oriented toward the good is revealed—along with an understanding that conventional norms don’t give me direct access to the good in the way that I had believed them to do. As a result, I can no longer think of myself as simply subject to those conventions in the same way that physical objects are subject to the laws of physics. Instead, I now recognize that I  am a being who needs standards by which to orient my intentional action; that I am at stake in how I take up my orientation toward such standards; and that there is a degree of indeterminacy characterizing my relationship to conventional standards—despite inauthentic efforts to pretend them to be absolutely binding causal laws. According to Heidegger, there are two possible ways to respond to these truths revealed in Angst: I can attempt to submerge myself again in convention in a passive way, taking up again the causal model for interpreting my own norm-responsiveness, despite the failure of this project that was revealed to me in Angst. Alternatively, I  can actively choose to choose the distinctions by which I engage in intentional action, doing so on the basis of a greater understanding of what is at stake. Namely, in light of the radical responsibility of the first person ‘I’ capable of acknowledging a norm as normative—“that is, as a claim addressed to me—and not merely as a pattern descriptive of ‘one’s’ normal behavior” (Crowell 2013, 186); a pattern whose authority over me was—prior to breakdown—implicitly modeled on causal interactions but which now shows up as something for which I alone am responsible in my life. But how is this latter authentic possibility actually cashed out in everyday life? The fact is that this bare sense of the self as “at stake” and “needing measures” is essentially empty. “The self to which the appeal is made remains indefinite and empty in its what” (Heidegger 1962, 319).2 Resoluteness takes place on the other side of the disengagement accomplished in breakdown—i.e., when Dasein actually has to act again. But we have seen that we cannot act without staking a claim to what is best, and we have no access to the form of the good that would allow us to definitively know what that is. In other words, the purely formal selfgivenness of the responsible “I  myself” provides none of the required normative content necessary for actually navigating the world in terms of better and worse—it simply tells me that I must do so. Hence, in order to act in light of my ontological structure as norm-needy, I  have no choice but to look outside of this purely formal I-myself for sources of measure by which to make the distinctions of better and worse on which intentional action depends. For Dasein to act, then, it requires normative resources that go beyond both the transcendental I-myself—the bare orientation toward measure revealed in Angst—and the simple givens of das Man convention. Typically, accounts argue that authenticity is a way

140  Irene McMullin of being in which Dasein accomplishes a particular kind of transparent relationship between the two. And while I agree with this, I will argue in what follows that it cannot be the whole story. Indeed, I will argue that many such accounts risk sliding into a picture of authenticity as a kind of neurotic decisionism that cannot be squared with the positive light in which Heidegger and others regularly cast the concept.

Normative Plurality Once we lose the normative monomania that characterizes inauthentic Dasein—its dogmatic insistence that convention neatly solves its normativity problem in a way that requires no thought, effort, or risk—a space opens up for recognizing the plurality of normative resources that Dasein must accommodate when it gears back into the world.3 Unlike inauthentic Dasein—which engages in the pretense that it can meet all of its normative needs through convention alone, turning a blind eye to inconsistencies that throw this possibility into doubt—resolute Dasein recognizes itself to be in the grip of three different sources of normative content that it must responsibly negotiate: not only the third-personal or general public conventions of das Man, but also Dasein’s first-personal and idiosyncratic sense of what is best and its second-person recognition of the authority of other Dasein to make distinctions between the better and the worse.4 None of these sources of normative orientation is sufficient on its own to satisfy Dasein’s normative neediness, but in resoluteness Dasein recognizes all three as forming the unavoidable backdrop against which it must act. Before turning to a more detailed examination of the first- and secondperson normative resources, we should first note that resisting the inauthentic tendency to treat public convention as the whole normative story is not the same thing as rejecting it entirely. Public norms are essential to the project of acting resolutely in the world; we inevitably return to them as sources of normative content for guiding our intentional action. We can and do find answers about what counts as “better” and “worse” by looking to the established practices and meanings by which we navigate the public world. Dasein is being-in-the-world and being-in-the-world is public.5 Thus experiences of breakdown do not remove these public and conventional answers from the purview of Dasein’s efforts to meet its normative needs; they simply reveal that they are not fully adequate to the task and that we must be careful to avoid the tendency to relinquish normative responsibility that their averageness can promote.

Being Yourself Once the normative fixation on convention is overcome, it becomes possible to recognize that Dasein always already inhabits the conventional

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 141 standards governing a particular practical identity in a way that is responsive to a different kind of first-person claim than the bare, formal I-myself by which Dasein understands itself as at stake in what it does. These substantive first-person claims offer a different kind of normative resource for acting in light of the good than that offered by convention alone. These are the normative resources arising from the idiosyncratic self—the unique set of preferences and abilities that define the self and shape its understanding of what is best.6 The specificity of the I includes a particular assemblage of givens that are not inert facts but rather ways the world shows up as mattering to me. I attempt to be a philosopher or a physicist because those practical identities—however conventional— speak to me as live options for realizing a sense of myself as flourishing: for accomplishing a kind of self-world fit in which I settle on a compelling answer to the question “Who am I?” When the normative monomania of inauthenticity falls away, resolute Dasein is able to recognize when a particular practical identity is a more or less successful vehicle for accomplishing the kind of self-world fit that it takes to be the inner promise of that practice. And this means that the resolute person experiences a gap between the public rules and the desired condition toward which she understands them to be aiming—a gap that she honors by enacting that identity in her own particular way, giving it meaning for her life by acting in light of what she takes to be best about that generic possibility. In this sense, the resolute person is in the game of tailoring existing norms to embody the valued condition that she sees those norms to be approximating or trying to realize. The resolute agent tries to uncover the inner truth of the practice, but she can only do so by making use of the guidance provided to her by her individual sense of what is good; her idiosyncratic and inchoate sense that she is or is not on the right track in being who she is when she takes up that possibility.7 Hence, convention provides the content that authentic Dasein tailors in response to first- and second-person claims, whereas inauthentic Dasein treats convention as a one-size-fits-all set of normative constraints that requires no such appropriation and adaptation work. Further, insofar as we all occupy multiple practical identities, it is not enough to talk only of what is at stake within a particular practical ­identity—we must also address the fact that in my choice of which practical identities to take up I am aiming toward an ideal understanding of the meaning of my life as a whole. Resoluteness demands caring about the extent to which the relationship between the different practical identities one occupies embodies what one takes to be best. Norms governing the different practical identities that I inhabit can come into conflict, and I experience myself as responsible not simply for interpreting norms internal to those identities, but also for negotiating competition between them in light of my sense of what is best. This tailoring work is deeply personal—since again one must rely on one’s enigmatic and inchoate

142  Irene McMullin sense of “fit” in taking a stand on how to best occupy the public norms in question. In both of these cases, then, we see Dasein making normative distinctions on the basis of a kind of ongoing negotiation between public conventional norms and private normative attunements.8 Heidegger insists that why we experience ourselves as being in the grip of these kinds of substantive first-personal claims is an enigma (1962, 173). We know not the “whence” or the “whither” of these claims, nor can they be ultimately grounded, despite our efforts to strip their enigmatic character from them by way of various explanatory frameworks—be they souls, neurotransmitters, or DNA. But this enigmatic quality does not disqualify them from playing an essential role in our efforts to discern what it is best to do and be. Indeed, Angst has revealed to us that we have no other choice but to make use of such ultimately groundless normative resources if we are to act in the world. But this is not the whole story when it comes to the sources of normativity by which we respond to the normative neediness revealed in Angst. We must also recognize the possibility of second-person claims.

Second-Person Claims The essential plurality of the normative terrain in which we enact our orientation toward the good is made clear when we recognize a distinction between our relationship to the publicity of das Man categories and to the other individuals who share that world with us. There has been a tendency to collapse this distinction—both in Heidegger scholarship and in analytic metaethics, and I have argued against both manifestations of this tendency at length elsewhere.9 The essential point is that we must recognize an important difference between, on the one hand, our sense that we are one among many in a shared community, responding as one does to public structures of meaning that govern our being-with-one-another, and, on the other hand, our sense that we can be face to face with another self who has the authority to call into question both convention and my entitled sense that I am free to pursue the good however I see fit. Convention can only function as it does on the basis of the fact that we stand in such relationships to other Dasein, whom we recognize as participants in the task of being-in-the-world; participants to whom we accommodate ourselves and with whom we establish and maintain worldly structures of significance. Resolute Dasein does not see other Dasein simply as interchangeable bearers of averageness but as capable of conditioning what it takes to be best: as independent sources of normative claim that help it to answer to its normative neediness. In contrast, the normative imperialism of inauthentic Dasein prompts it to try to collapse others into the public roles they play, seeing them solely through the lens of conventions that it takes to be fully determinative of

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 143 what is good. Though the second-person presence of other Dasein can indeed be encountered by way of anonymous worldly roles and norms, the condition for this possibility is nevertheless the primal encounter with the other as a foreign originary temporality—an encounter that initiates and underwrites the shared roles and norms that constitute the world as a public domain of significance. Authentic Dasein recognizes the way of being specific to Dasein—but this recognition is not restricted only to its own being; it takes heed of the others in their own unique striving to be in the world. Thus just as we can recognize a gap between self and convention, so too can we recognize a gap between convention and other Dasein—who make a more direct claim to normative authority on us than merely as instantiations of public norms. There are different ways in which this kind of second-person recognition might manifest itself when we gear back into the world. Crowell references two, for example, when he argues that we necessarily experience others as normative partners to whom we are answerable in the critical practice of rational justification (2015, 209). He also speaks of viewing the particular relationship I establish between private affect and public role as an exemplification for others of what I take to be best (2015, 232, 2017). In other words, by tailoring conventions in light of my personal grasp of what is best, I signal to others my sense of how to “mind the gap” between conventional norms and the existential mattering they are aiming to instantiate. One might imagine other kinds of second-person responsiveness, however—for example, when I directly experience someone else’s suffering as immediate evidence of something being “worse” rather than “better.” We might also highlight love of other people in all their particularity as a central way in which we occupy a complex moral terrain in which we experience ourselves as claimed by others. Further, we might recognize the important role that art can play in giving us a kind of indirect access to the idiosyncrasies of mattering that constitute the unique personhood of other Dasein. Thus, second-person normative acknowledgement need not only take the form of justificatory discourse but can take many forms. We can see the importance of the distinction between second- and thirdperson sources of normativity when we consider McManus’s account of resoluteness in “Anxiety, Choice, and Responsibility in Heidegger’s Account of Authenticity” (2015). There he argues—in a way not dissimilar to the point I make above about first-person reasons—that resoluteness “is not choosing—per impossible—what to care about, but choosing to live in line with what one fundamentally cares about” (2015, 179). McManus explains the relationship to such ground projects in terms of experiencing oneself as not needing public justification; if society were to reject or abandon the projects that one takes to be truly valuable, he suggests, “my reaction would be ‘So much the worse for that society!’ ” (2015, 176).

144  Irene McMullin As McManus himself recognizes, however, this approach—which rightly brings first-person measures of the good to bear in assessing conventional norms—risks falling into the decisionism for which Heidegger has regularly been criticized.10 It seems to condemn us to holding that, barring the support of public convention, there is nothing to constrain our sense of what is best except for our idiosyncratic dispositions and preferences. But it seems clear that we do not and should not accept that everything in which we feel “at home” is ours by right. What if certain horrendous possibilities “speak to me”? Would we still say, “so much the worse for society?” McManus acknowledges this worry by specifying that we should limit talk of resoluteness simply to the condition in which one responds to one’s ownmost possibilities. Thus we might still criticize such a person “on the grounds that those possibilities are immoral, misguided, or the like; but that does not mean that we cannot recognize that she has indeed devoted herself to them” (McManus 2015, 180). But my account offers us an alternative. We need not equate resoluteness with simply resolving on whatever possibilities our first-person care prompts us to, public opinion be damned. We can characterize resoluteness not simply as private resistance to public convention rooted in the choice to “live in line with what one fundamentally cares about” (McManus 2015, 179), but as a condition in which we respond to claims from a plurality of normative sources—including the immediate normative authority of other individual Dasein.11 In other words, we can only avoid the solipsism and amoralism that some commentators take to characterize authenticity if we acknowledge that there is more than one way in which we can “fundamentally care” about things. Sometimes these modes of care can conflict—as, for instance, when care for self-realization comes into conflict with one’s loving care for the other person. Thus to live in line with what one fundamentally cares about often requires complicated negotiation work as one attempts to live up to competing normative domains governing what can count as better and worse. Because one such domain is the second-person authority of other Dasein, a narcissistic decisionism is ruled out as a viable account of authenticity. And we need not import an alien normative architecture in order to reach this conclusion. On the contrary, Dasein is fundamentally Mitsein—meaning that we cannot help but take others as normative resources who help us navigate the world. Thus, once we escape the normative monomania of inauthenticity and the mechanistic model of normresponsiveness it promotes, we are capable of recognizing not only the sense of better and worse provided by our own unique dispositions, but also of recognizing the manner in which other persons make immediate claims on us as legitimate sources of measure. Any notion of authenticity as being “true” to who I am must account for this essentially social dimension of Dasein’s being.

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 145 Why we take others to be sources of normative authority is enigmatic and ultimately impossible to justify. But as we have seen, this is the case when it comes to all three sources of measure: the communal standards provided by das Man, the first-person sense of how best to be oneself, and the second-person authority of others to make claims about how one ought to be. Inauthentic Dasein attempts to cope with the enigmatic and unjustifiable nature of this plural normative terrain by denying it— treating a single standard as the exclusive and self-legitimating source of the required normative orientation. Blindness to the other normative sources helps facilitate the illusion that conventional norms are ultimately justifiable; that this single normative source is sufficient for orienting us in our struggle to be in the world well. But as we have seen, this belief in a normative monopoly collapses in Angst, leaving us open to recognize the necessity of negotiating competing classes of normative claim as we gear back into the world and tap into the normative resources with which we find ourselves confronted when we do so. Authentic Dasein understands itself as responsible for taking up these different normative givens—assessing and tailoring them to its life. But—and here’s the rub—it only has these three normative resources to guide it as it does so. The mere formal condition of firstperson orientation toward measure itself provides none of the needed measures. But by using all three—allowing them to temper and condition each other—we can keep an eye to their indeterminacy and incompleteness without becoming paralyzed with the threat of nihilism revealed in Angst or resorting to a decisionism that only escapes the threat of nihilism via a heroic act of untrammeled self-assertion.

Readiness for Anxiety The move from breakdown to a post-breakdown authentic re-engagement with the world is characterized by the requirement that we take over being a ground—whereby we transform factic givens into justificatory grounds or reasons to do or be this way rather than another. As resolute, we stand surety for how we take up those factic grounds into our lives; we make ourselves answerable for them. As we have seen, however, we can only do so by negotiating between the claims of the three different sources of normative measure by which we assess better and worse ways to be in the world. This negotiation work displays Dasein’s responsibility for normativity by refusing to take a single normative field as simply definitive of the good, acknowledging through its responsiveness to a plurality of normative resources the fundamental indeterminacy that overshadows our orientation toward what is best. Let us return, now, to the question that opened the chapter: namely, how should we understand the affective dimension of this kind of resolute gearing back into the world? As in all manifestations of care, authentic

146  Irene McMullin being in the world displays the same tripartite structure of thrown projecting being-with. While the breakdown situation displays this tripartite structure via Angst, Existential Death, and the call of Conscience, the authentic exit from this breakdown situation—resoluteness—is characterized by readiness for Angst, being-toward-death, and reticence or wanting to have a conscience.12 The mode of affect characteristic of resoluteness is therefore “readiness” for anxiety (Angstbereit) (Heidegger 1962, 334, 342). But what kind of state is that? Heidegger gives us little to go on, despite explicitly raising the question of what mood corresponds to resoluteness (Heidegger 1962, 342). This neglect of the affective dimension of resoluteness is striking, considering the central role that affect plays in his analysis of breakdown. Based on what we know about anxiety, to be “ready” for it would seem to require us to be prepared for the ever-present possibility that public meanings might collapse at any time, revealing the first-person condition of responsibility and orientation toward measure that underwrites them, along with the plural normative field in which we enact that orientation toward measure. But what exactly does “readiness” for such a possibility entail, and how can it be understood as a mode of affect? Being “ready” typically denotes a condition in which one is poised in a responsive awareness of a potentiality that may or may not be realized or called upon. It can denote a condition in which in one has actively marshaled the relevant resources that will enable one to withstand an ordeal or commence a project for which the preparations are being made; e.g., “I am ready for the hurricane” or “I am ready for the party.” The person being described as “ready” in such cases is understood as being prepared for a future event that may or may not come about. But this poses a problem insofar as Heidegger is keen to insist that anxiety is in some sense always haunting us, that we are always already anxious even if we never experience an episode of world collapse (1962,  234).13 Thus, it would seem that we must distinguish a constant latent or “dispositional”14 anxiety from full-blown Angst and the episodes of breakdown to which it can give rise.15 Further, we need to clarify whether “readiness for anxiety” is an orientation toward the former or the latter. The answer, I  contend, is that readiness for anxiety is primarily an orientation toward the former; it is a stance in which the constant latent anxiety of being Dasein is affectively acknowledged, but not to such a degree that it provokes a slide into an experience of breakdown. Thus the stance of “readiness” occupies a middle ground between the inauthentic mode—in which Dasein thinks of itself as a thing and worldly conventions as laws—and the breakdown event in which Dasein experiences itself as pure possibility and worldly conventions as radically contingent. In readiness for anxiety, Dasein is haunted by normative contingency but is not paralyzed by it.

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 147 This middle ground is possible, I suggest, because normative plurality— and thus experiences of tension and indeterminacy—is a feature of our everydayness that inauthentic Dasein covers over in favor of the belief that public measures and conventions are fully determinative of the normative landscape. In other words, inauthentic Dasein hides from its implicit knowledge of the fact that self and individual others are normative authorities that challenge and complicate conventional claims on what is best. This implicit acknowledgement of normative plurality—and the corresponding tensions that define it—haunts Dasein with a kind of latent anxiety and undermines its efforts to simply dissolve itself into convention. In readiness for anxiety, then, Dasein accepts this normative plurality and indeterminacy and stops engaging in inauthentic evasion strategies. It accepts the uncanniness of being Dasein. Several questions remain. First, there is a worry that understood this way, the concept is too active to adequately denote the affective dimension of resoluteness. After all, readiness for anxiety is meant to be the authentic mode of affect and affect, as we know, discloses how each of us is passively exposed to the world and the way it shows up as mattering (Heidegger 1962, 175–8, 227). Indeed, we seem to see the affective element of resoluteness more clearly in Heidegger’s talk of wanting to have a conscience than we do in readiness for anxiety: “wanting” invokes experiences of yearning and affectively registered need while “readiness” seems to denote a condition of action-ready poise. Though “wanting” regularly acts as a motivational impetus to action, the state of wanting is not itself within our control; it simply comes upon us and thereby helps to disclose the fact that we are thrown into existence as what we are. “Readiness,” on the other hand, is suggestive of agency and control. Of course, care is a complicated unity in which no component stands alone, and thus we only fully enact and interpret this mattering when we act into the possibilities that it makes salient, but it is nevertheless important to think specifically about the affective component of resoluteness and ensure that we do not do so in overly active terms. In what sense, then, can readiness for anxiety be understood as a way that the world shows up as mattering; a way that it claims me? Further, does it make sense to call such a stance of acceptance readiness for anxiety, when “readiness” typically involves an expectation of a future event or episode—in this case, of collapse?16 Let us take these worries in turn. Readiness for anxiety manifests as affect—not as project—insofar as it is a stance in which the existential conditions revealed in breakdown matter to me. Resolute Dasein cares about being at stake in its choices and it feels itself claimed by the fact that there are plural sources of the good: different modes in which things can show up as mattering. Angst allows Dasein to see that it is at the mercy of sources of the good over which it has no control but on which it must nevertheless depend in order to act in the world at all. In resoluteness

148  Irene McMullin this mattering matters—both the fact that there is mattering and the fact that this mattering is characterized by indeterminacy, plurality, and contingency. Unlike inauthentic Dasein—who conceals the latter from itself by treating worldly norms as absolute laws, authentic Dasein cares about the normative indeterminacy overshadowing its efforts to navigate the world in terms of better and worse and does not attempt to pretend that this indeterminacy is not the case. Though much has been made of the negative components of this affective orientation to the indeterminacy and contingency of the sources of meaning on which Dasein depends, in the final section of the chapter I will argue that a key affective component of resoluteness is a kind of joyous gratitude. Before considering that claim further, however, let us first turn to the second worry mentioned above: namely, whether care for the good in all its complexity and contingency should be understood as “readiness” in the sense of preparedness for a future event. To answer this requires us to distinguish between “expectation” and “anticipation” and to remember that Heidegger’s notion of resoluteness must be understood in terms of the latter. Despite the common tendency to equate the two words, the latter does not refer to a stance wherein one looks forward to a future unrealized event; rather, an anticipation is a current instantiation or realization of a condition that might only be fully accomplished in the future. In other words, anticipation means a kind of foretaste, whereas expectation involves no sense of having already realized the expected event. Can “readiness for anxiety” be understood as an anticipating in this way—and not simply as an expecting? Examples like being “ready for the hurricane” seem to rule this out since being ready for a hurricane is not itself a foretaste of the hurricane. But think to other ways we use the word “ready”: “I’m ready to move on after the fight if you are” and “you’re too ready to think ill of others.” Though there is a clear sense in which these examples of “readiness” are pointing forward to future events—the moving on, the thinking ill—we can also see that the condition of readiness in these cases indicates that in fact the moving on and the thinking ill are already occurring, though more developed or explicit forms of those same states are implicit within the anticipatory form. But because the readiness is an anticipation, not an expectation, those more developed or explicit forms are not distinct episodes that might occur later on—like a hurricane—but are states already manifest now in incipient form: forgiveness, nastiness. In this sense, then, readiness for anxiety—understood as care for the normative complexity and unsettledness of existence—anticipates the kind of breakdown event in which this lack of normative determinacy causes a crisis, but without being a simple expectation of it as a discrete future event. In other words, resolute Dasein is ready for anxiety in that it is already living in the world according to saliences that can only show up as such for someone who has rejected the normative imperialism of inauthenticity

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 149 and cares about the complexity of the normative arena. Understood in this way, resolute Dasein is braced for any future breakdown event that might occur because its valuing of all three normative sources has already implicitly exposed it to the indeterminacy and complexity of norms. Resolute Dasein anticipates breakdown—full blown Angst—by living now in light of this normative indeterminacy—this latent Angst made good in its way of valuing the world. And indeed, this kind of anticipatory Angst might help Dasein cope with breakdowns if and when they arise, since the fundamental responsibility for and indeterminacy of norms revealed in existential death will not come as such a debilitating surprise.

Gratitude In this final section of the chapter, I  want to consider in greater detail the nature of this affective component of resoluteness. In particular, I want to suggest that perhaps too much has been made of the negative elements of authenticity—both by Heidegger and by commentators. In general, the tendency has been to focus on the neurotic implications of living in light of the indeterminacy and contingency of the normative resources to which we must commit ourselves whenever we act in the world. The result is a conception of resoluteness as requiring a state of constant wariness: an orientation in which what really matters to me is recognized as groundless and capable of being stripped from me at any time. Thus we are told that we are most “authentic” when we remember that what we love offers no real guidance about what is good; that we are to live our commitments as if they’re only quasi-commitments— demonstrating a willingness to take them back at any time. But even if this is possible—something about which I am skeptical—this seems to be radically inconsistent with the “unshakeable joy” that Heidegger mentions in conjunction with resoluteness (1962, 358). So I want to conclude by thinking about how such joy might be consistent with the fear and resignation about the groundlessness of the good that is also essential to accounts of resoluteness. The answer, I suggest, is that resolute Dasein feels gratitude for the fact that there are sources of mattering at all, however groundless. Recall what happens when we experience a surge of anxiety in the ordinary sense—not a complete breakdown, perhaps, but one of life’s regular reminders that Angst is always breathing down our necks. Perhaps you contemplate the death of your child. Or you consider the possibility of the utter failure of a central project to which you have committed your life. This is not simple fear, since in these moments we feel a powerfully suffocating sense of vertigo, a dizzying, disorienting sense of panicked terror—a sucking vacuum opens up at the foundations of the world. But this kind of experience is almost always followed by an incredible sense of relief and gratitude that it is not—or not yet—so. All has not been lost. Such experiences force one to recognize not only the

150  Irene McMullin contingency and groundlessness of meaning—that is undeniable—but also how utterly, incomprehensibly fortunate we are that there is meaning at all: that the world gives us things to love, that it shows us ways to strive for the good. Such experiences open up the possibility of responding to the plural sources of value that orient us in the world not as unreliable failures but as contingent graces for which we are deeply grateful. Indeed, I  want to suggest that focusing only on the negative dimensions of Dasein’s capacity for breakdown—and the uncanniness on which it depends—is itself a function of a certain kind of fixation on Dasein’s active, projective capacities. It is a failure to fully acknowledge and accept our thrownness. In other words, by focusing primarily on our inability to secure absolute normative foundations—as opposed to focusing on the astonishing fact that the world is overflowing with meanings that we do not create or control—we tend to read resoluteness solely through the lens of limitations that must be overcome through greater acts of control and self-assertion. But absolute normative foundations are an artificial standard. Once we relinquish the allure of this ideal, we can avoid both the single-minded rigidity of treating conventions as absolute laws and the equally worrying alternative: that of the heroic self, establishing itself as the ultimate ground of normativity. What the affective dimension of resoluteness ultimately shows us is the capacity for a joyous acceptance of the normative resources of the world—however mysterious and contingent they are—without seeing them solely as failed candidates for normative certainty. The meaning of the word “gratitude” comes from the Latin word grātia, meaning thankfulness, but also displaying a shared root with the word grace. Gratitude is the orientation that responds to grace—meaning a manifestation of goodness over which we have no power, but to which we find ourselves gratefully indebted. Such an orientation must be the affective truth at the heart of “readiness for anxiety”: a sense of being entrusted with objects of love whose fragility, contingency, and mysteriousness don’t reveal them as being “really” meaningless but, on the contrary, make them all the more precious to us. This gratitude, I would suggest, is typically accompanied by a determination to love better, to strive more fully, to treat the goods in our lives more tenderly. In other words, resoluteness is perhaps best understood as involving a kind of grateful devotion, a loving acceptance of being at the mercy of the world and its capacity to furnish our lives with meaning. Such an orientation is not best understood as a heroic resolve to establish value through resolute acts of will, but rather as a loving commitment to cherish the goods by which we find ourselves claimed.

Conclusion In anxiety we recognize the need for measure—the fact that we can only be Dasein by acting into possibilities that we assess in terms of better and

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 151 worse. But Angst also reveals that there is no single standard by which to make those assessments—there are rather three different sources of measure whose claims must be negotiated against each other in a condition of irrevocable normative tension. By undermining the colonizing tendency of das Man public normativity, other normative resources can appear— normative resources that have been implicitly characterizing our being in the world all along. What shows up as mattering to Dasein in resoluteness is this normative pluralism that Angst allows to appear. Thus in resoluteness the normative paralysis of breakdown is overcome without falling back into the simplistic normative monomania of inauthenticity. And in readiness for anxiety, Dasein displays a responsive attunement to this normative plurality that Angst has revealed, gratefully taking up the forms of mattering—the ways the world shows up as good—despite the fact that they cannot be explained or justified. Though resoluteness involves the active work of taking over being a ground, then—taking responsibility for the goods to which we are committed by owning up to them and deliberating with others about how to fully instantiate them in our lives—it surely also involves this more passive affective state, wherein the fact of mattering matters to us; wherein the mysterious loves that grip us aren’t simply fodder for responsibility-taking but rather show up as the presence of a gratuitous goodness in the world for which we are deeply grateful.17

Notes 1 Blattner challenges this in 2015, 123. 2 See also Heidegger 1962, 318, 321; Blattner 2013, 327. 3 The arguments regarding normative plurality are spelled out in greater detail in McMullin 2018. 4 In Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations (McMullin 2013), I make a sustained argument for the existence of this kind of secondperson recognition in Being and Time and the rest of Heidegger’s corpus. I demonstrate that implicitly acknowledging others as beings constituted by individuating primordial temporality is a condition for the possibility of the shared time and structures of significance that define what Heidegger means by world. I argue, in other words, that on Heidegger’s account being-with is a condition for the possibility of being-in-the-world and fully acknowledging this fact requires us to recognize that second-person recognition—while often obscured by tendencies toward inauthenticity—is nevertheless always operative for Dasein. While this is a controversial view regarding the normative resources available in Heidegger’s work, I cannot provide all of the evidence for its legitimacy here but must encourage the reader to consult the book where I have done so. 5 There is a tendency in Heidegger scholarship—facilitated no doubt by Heidegger’s own lack of consistency on this point—to equate publicity with inauthenticity. In Time and the Shared World, I show why this cannot be right, both in terms of the structure of Heidegger’s own view and the truth. Meaning is public, and while this publicity can promote a tendency toward the groundlessness and anonymity characteristic of inauthenticity, succumbing to this

152  Irene McMullin tendency is not unavoidable. Authenticity does not mean that Dasein ceases to participate in the shared meanings of the public world—since Dasein is structurally defined by being-with. Rather, Dasein participates in these shared meanings in such a way that it resists the tendency toward falling promoted by that sharing. See McMullin 2013, especially 29–38 and 109–15. 6 As McManus puts this point, “certain projects strike us as worthwhile in themselves” and these are what one “fundamentally cares about” (2015, 175, 179). 7 I am indebted here to Crowell 2015, 2017, which discuss the experience of a gap between public practices and the private sense of what is at stake in taking up such practices. Crowell claims, for example, that the person who is trying to be a teacher must “feel [her] way toward what lives up to the stakes of being a teacher” (2015, 238); and, “I act this way here and now because I feel that it is right, that it ‘trues up’ who I am—even though I cannot name what is affectively at issue in the enigma of my being” (2015, 239). Blattner offers a slightly different take on this, suggesting that resoluteness returns Dasein to who it already is, but with “a clear-sighted understanding of the normative demands inherent in who it already is” (2013, 331). Thus for Blattner resoluteness is a kind of flexible responsivity to the immediate, concrete, and factical situation, rather than to a generic understanding of the situation (332–4). See also Wrathall 2015, 205. 8 See Wrathall 2015, 211–13. 9 I challenge this tendency in Heidegger scholarship in McMullin 2013 and I argue against this tendency in virtue ethics in McMullin 2018. 10 See Burch 2010 for a helpful overview of this critique and a possible solution to it. 11 McManus might object that “what we care about” here is meant to encompass first-, second-, and third-person norms—thereby bringing our accounts much closer together—but his later comments about the absence of moral constraint operative in authenticity appear to rule this out (2015, 179–80). 12 Thus Heidegger notes that “The authentic understanding of the call has been characterized as ‘wanting to have a conscience’ ” (1962, 342) before querying “What kind of mood corresponds to such understanding? Understanding the call discloses one’s own Dasein in the uncanniness of its individualization. The uncanniness which is revealed in understanding . . . becomes genuinely disclosed by the state-of-mind of anxiety which belongs to that understanding. The fact of the anxiety of conscience, gives us phenomenal confirmation that in understanding the call Dasein is brought face to face with its own uncanniness. Wanting-to-have-a-conscience becomes a readiness for Angst” (1962, 342). See also Heidegger 1962, 348 for further discussion of “readiness for Angst.” However, at 1962, 342–3, Heidegger seems to oscillate between simply describing resoluteness as characterized by Angst and describing it in terms of readiness for Angst. Blattner also notes this ambiguity in Heidegger’s view, pointing out that “How one resolves this complexity necessarily interacts with what one thinks anxiety is in Being and Time. Is anxiety the sort of attunement or mood in which one can, to put it crudely, function, or is it rather disabling?” (2013, 323). 13 See Käufer for a deflationist account of authenticity—namely, that there need not actually be authentic people for Heidegger’s account to work: “as far as Heidegger’s argument regarding existential death is concerned, there might not be any actual, authentic people. The phenomenology of existential death is designed to show a structural point, that at a level more fundamental than any particular skill or solicitation there must be the ability to take a stand so that everyday caring comportment becomes possible in the first place.

Resoluteness and Gratitude for the Good 153 Selbstseinkönnen is constitutive of caring. It is what Dasein eigentlich is, even though it is not expressed in the self-construal of everyday Dasein” (2015, 109). 14 See Golob 2017. 15 See Carman 2015, which discusses how to accommodate the conflicting sense that anxiety is a kind of constant background attunement but existential dying seems to be a specific psychological episode. See also Dreyfus 2005, xx, on this point. 16 See Carman 2015, which discusses how to accommodate the conflicting sense that anxiety is a kind of constant background attunement, but existential dying seems to be a specific psychological episode. See also Blattner 2006; Dreyfus 2005, xx on this point. 17 My gratitude to Steven Crowell in particular informs this chapter. Thank you for being such a wonderful teacher, Steve. We are all indebted to the way you have shown us the possibilities and the promise of phenomenology.

References Blattner, W. 2006. Heidegger’s Being and Time. London: Continuum. ———. 2013. “Authenticity and Resoluteness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, edited by M. Wrathall, 320–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Essential Guilt and Transcendental Conscience.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by D. McManus, 116–34. New York: Routledge. Burch, M. 2010. “Death and Deliberation: Overcoming the Decisionism Critique of Heidegger’s Practical Philosophy.” Inquiry 53: 211–34. Carmen, T. 2015. “Things Fall Apart: Heidegger on the Constancy and Finality of Death.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by D. McManus, 135–45. New York: Routledge. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———.  2015. “Responsibility, Autonomy, Affectivity: A  Heideggerian Approach.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by D. McManus, 215–42. New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Exemplary Necessity: Heidegger, Pragmatism, and Reason.” In Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology, edited by O. Svec and J. Capek, 242–56. London: Routledge. Dreyfus, H. 2005. “Foreword.” In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, edited by C. J. White, ix–xxxvi. London: Ashgate. Golob, S. 2017. “Methodological Anxiety: Heidegger on Moods and Emotions.” In Thinking About the Emotions: A Philosophical History, edited by A. Cohen and R. Stern, 253–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translated by M. Heim. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Käufer, S. 2015. “Jaspers, Limit-Situations, and the Methodological Function of Authenticity.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from

154  Irene McMullin Division Two of Being and Time, edited by D. McManus, 95–115. New York: Routledge. McManus, Denis. 2015. “Anxiety, Choice, and Responsibility in Heidegger’s Account of Authenticity.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by D. McManus, 163–185. New York: Routledge. McMullin, I. 2013. Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2018. Existential Flourishing: A  Phenomenology of the Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wrathall, M. 2015. “Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Self.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by D. McManus, 193–214. New York: Routledge.

Section III

Normativity and Nature

9 On Being a Human Self Mark Okrent

The kind of subject who can be an agent while being absorbed in the world is a self whose identity is normatively achieved not by overcoming the passivity in its nature in order to constitute itself as a unified person, but rather by overcoming its anonymity to take responsibility for its own self as a task. —(Crowell 2013, 260)

Preamble This quote from Steven Crowell contrasts two ways that one might think that we humans achieve being a “self.” Either one might think that in order to normatively achieve the identity of our self we need to overcome the “passivity” in our natures so as to constitute our self as a unified person, the position that Crowell attributes to Christine Korsgaard, or in order to normatively achieve the identity of our self “while being absorbed in the world” we must “take responsibility for our own self as a task” “by overcoming its [the self’s] anonymity,” the position that Crowell attributes to Martin Heidegger. This contrast, however, presupposes a significant point of commonality. The presupposition of the disagreement that is highlighted here is a fundamental agreement that the identity of the self of the human agent is a normative achievement. And it is crucial for understanding and evaluating the highlighted disagreement that one understands the significance of the underlying agreement. Heidegger and Korsgaard both derive the crucial point of agreement from Kant. In this chapter, I argue that if one fully appreciates the radical implications of the anti-Kantian Heideggerian view that human agents are “absorbed in the world,” as neither Korsgaard nor even Crowell’s Heidegger1 do, then one sees that neither of the alternatives that are marked out in this quote offer an adequate picture of what it is to be a human self; one achieves a human self neither by overcoming the passivity in the agent’s nature nor by overcoming anonymity by taking responsibility for oneself as a task. This of course leaves open the issue of

158  Mark Okrent whether and how a human self is normatively achieved, an issue that is left unconsidered in this chapter.

How the Identity of the Human Self Came to Be Seen as a Normative Achievement It is anything but obvious that the identity of the human self is a normative achievement. Many properties of humans are facts, not achievements at all, and many of these facts contribute to the specification of the identity conditions on human individuals. I did not achieve being a human animal rather than a dog, nor did I  achieve being a biologically male human instead of a female. But arguably it is essential to what I am that I am a human biological male. Even if we restrict ourselves to historical and social characteristics, it is no achievement of mine that I am Jewish; as was clearly demonstrated in the 20th century, it is simply a contingent fact of my birth. So, what is one saying when one says that the identity of my self is an achievement, and why should we believe it? Even if one accepts that the identity of the human self is an achievement, what does it mean to say that this is a normative achievement? There is a straightforward teleological sense in which all achievements are normative. An achievement is something that has been successfully brought about by a process that involves effort. And some process can be successful just in case that process has a goal that is achieved. Achievements are thus the results of processes that can be successful or unsuccessful insofar as they achieve their goals or don’t, and the norm that is used in evaluating whether it is an achievement is just the goal of the process. But is there any more involved in claiming that the identity of the human self is a normative achievement than this flat-footed teleological sense in which the identity of the self is the result of a process that has a goal? It is instructive to approach these questions by starting with the preoccupation of Descartes with human distinctiveness from the rest of nature. The core of the scientific revolution that dominated Descartes’s intellectual milieu was the understanding of the natural world as a causal structure in which everything that happens has a mechanical explanation. We human beings, including Descartes, however, experience ourselves as agents who act as we do because there are reasons to act that way. And this difference between the way we often explain human acts and the way natural events came to be explained presented Descartes with an obvious problem. If everything in nature happens because of mechanical necessity, then how is it possible for humans, if we are part of the natural world, to act as we do because there are reasons to do so? As we all remember from our undergraduate Early Modern course, Descartes’s solution to this problem was to bifurcate human beings into two distinct substances, an organic body that is a piece of natural

On Being a Human Self 159 mechanism and a mind that is capable of thinking and of acting in response to reasons. In the present context, what is important about this move is Descartes’s way of articulating the defining property of minds, that they think. This is the case because for Descartes thinking involves a distinctive kind of self-relation, and it is only entities that are capable of such a self-relation who are capable of being responsive to reasons. We can begin to see the connections here by looking at the way in which Descartes defines “thought” in The Objections and Replies: “everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it” (Descartes 1988, 152). On this definition, thoughts have two distinguishing characteristics. First, they are in us, and for Descartes this means that thoughts are properties of the one who thinks them. But second these properties are distinct from all other properties in that the entity that has the properties is immediately aware of them as her properties; the thinker intends her thoughts as her own thoughts. So, thinkers are distinct from all other entities insofar as they intend themselves as thinkers, as having thoughts. But what does this intentional distinctiveness have to do with the ability to be responsive to reasons? In Descartes, the relationship is direct. Since “thought” is defined in terms of self-awareness, any entity that lacks self-awareness also lacks thoughts. But it is thoughts that carry the burden of representational content, so no entity that lacks the ability to intend themselves can intend anything at all. For the Cartesian, my dogs are good at getting around in the world and maintaining themselves in changing environments, as we are, but they perform this trick in a radically different way than we do. We have intentional states, “thoughts,” beliefs about entities in our environment that (1) are related to one another in accordance with a rational pattern, and (2) together with another class of intentional states, desires that certain states of affairs come to obtain, motivate actions that are instrumental to our achieving our goals. And these beliefs and desires are the reasons that motivate our behavior. But since my dogs can’t intend themselves, they can’t intend entities as this or that, and thus can’t have beliefs and desires at all. So, there must be some other, non-rational, because non-self-conscious, way that my dogs perform the trick of staying alive. Let’s for the moment call this alternative method “instinct.” It is crucial to the Cartesian position that the self-directed intention that intends every thought as in the thinker as a property is built in to every first-order intention of the thinker. But Locke noted that there is a problem for Descartes inherent in this formulation of the role of selfintentionality. For Descartes, we never directly perceive the substance that has properties; we only perceive the properties, and, given our innate idea of substance, infer the existence of a substance which has those properties. The cogito, however, was supposed to give the thinker immediate access to her own thoughts as her own thoughts, so whatever it is

160  Mark Okrent to intend oneself as the thinker of one’s own thoughts it can’t be to intend oneself as the substance which has the property of having mental states. Having recognized this problem, Locke offers a solution. The “I” of the “I think,” what Locke calls the “person” or “self,” is not to be identified with any substance at all. Rather, the person is constituted by the act of a thinker at one time intending a thought that occurs at a different time as its own thought. When I intend my own thoughts as mine by intending myself as the same thinker in two different thoughts, it is made to be the case that these two thoughts are mine. Since the “person,” or “self,” is just this subject of self-identification, the identity conditions on this self are just that this self-identification occurs among the various thoughts that comprise the self. And since this self is the product of the process of self-identification, the identity of this self is a kind of achievement of the process of self-identification itself. Leibniz criticized the Cartesian assimilation of intention and self-­ intention from a different angle, by pointing out that there are good reasons to think that we have intentional states that we don’t intend as our states while they are occurring. Adopting a Leibnizian example, I live close to a waterfall that makes a fair amount of noise. Nevertheless, because of familiarity I am rarely conscious that I am hearing that noise. But when I do notice it, it seems to me that I have been hearing the sound all along, even though I lacked self-consciousness of hearing it. So, Leibniz concluded, Descartes was in error in thinking that all intentional states necessarily include an intentional directedness toward oneself as the intender of those states. Kant inherited both the Lockean and the Leibnizian criticisms of Descartes, and took them into account in developing his own views on the relations among intentionality, self-directed intentionality, and responsiveness to reasons. His first move was to modally reformulate the Cartesian requirement that every intention actually include an intention directed toward the thinker into a requirement that it must be possible for all of our intentional states to be such that I can attach the “I think” to them. The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me. (Kant 1998a, B 132, 246) By in this way severing the immediate connection between first and second order intentionality, Kant revealed a deep problem implicit in Locke’s critique and development of Descartes. If it is not essential to every first-order intention that it contain a self-reference to the intender, then an intention directed toward that intender as that intender must

On Being a Human Self 161 be a distinct, second-order intention. But if Locke was right that when we intend ourselves as thinkers of our thoughts we do not intend ourselves as the substance that has those thoughts as properties, then what do we intend ourselves as when we intend ourselves as the thinkers of our thoughts? What is the content of this self-directed intention? Kant’s suggestion is that to intend all of my intentions as my intentions is for me to have a single intention that represents all of these distinct intentions as combined or synthesized in a distinctive way. For Kant, any two intentions can in fact stand in some relation to one another without being synthesized. In the passage in the B Deduction that immediately precedes the assertion that the “I think” must be able to accompany all of my representations, Kant makes clear that genuine combination of representations requires more than mere de facto relatedness of the representations. In addition, there must be an intentional representation directed toward that relatedness. Combination is the representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise from the combination; rather, by being added to the representation of the manifold, it first makes the concept of combination possible. (Kant 1998a, B131, 246) For there to be the intention of my current intention as belonging together with another intention in a single self-consciousness, as both my intentions, the distinct intentions must be represented, or intended, as being related or synthesized, and the intention or representation of this relatedness is “the I  think that must be able to accompany all my representations.” For Kant, the identity of the self as the one who has each of its thoughts is the product of an intentional act, the act in which all of those thoughts are intended as related together as one and all my thoughts. In this sense, for Kant this identity of the self is an achievement, in the special sense that it is a product of an act of spontaneity. “But this representation [the representation of all of my thoughts as belonging together in my self-consciousness] is an act of spontaneity, i.e., it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (Kant 1998a, B132, 246). But for Kant there is also a distinctive sense in which this achievement is normative. What is intended in the intention that “produces” the “I think” is that there is a determinate relation among all of my intentions. And, for Kant, this second-order intention intends that the first-order intentions are related in such a way that those relations among my intentions satisfy certain highly abstract concepts, where a concept “is always something general, and something that serves as a rule” (Kant 1998a, A106, 232). For Locke, that my current intentional state intends some other state as thought by me is a simple fact about my current state. When, for

162  Mark Okrent example, I remember a previous experience, that I currently identify as the same thinker as the subject of that other experience is a product of a causal connection between those two intentions that produces the memory as a memory. But for Kant, since what is represented in the intention that produces the “I think” is that the various intentions that are included under the “I think” are related so as to instantiate some set of rules for being related, only those intentions that satisfy those rules of relationship, treated as norms, are included under the “I think.” The categories thus function as a set of norms for determining whether any random intention that occurs counts among those things that I think. Since it is the fact that some intention is related to the rest of my thoughts in the appropriate way for instantiating the categories that qualifies it as my thought, that some intention falls under the categories, and thus is related according to the principles of reason to the rest of my thoughts, is what it is for that intention to be one of my thoughts. So, when I intend myself in the “I  think,” I  am intending myself as the thinker whose thoughts are connected to one another as they ought to be according to rational principles. But it is central to understanding Kant’s conception of the self as a normative achievement to understand just how Kant thought that this rational self-identification is achieved in human selves. Kant drew a sharp distinction between reason and association. When my dog hears a certain high-pitched sound that has previously been followed by an electric shock when he hasn’t moved away, he associates that sound with “pain if I  don’t move,” and this associated thought motivates him to move. But even though he is so motivated, and there is in fact a reason for him to move (to avoid getting shocked), he is nevertheless not responsive to that reason as a reason. If I were to wear a collar similar to Sammy’s and to hear that sound I would also move, but I would do so for the reason that I would be shocked were I to stay in the same place. I can intend the properties “wearing this kind of collar,” “hearing this kind of sound,” etc., and can represent the relation among these properties in the complex judgment that “If one is wearing this kind of collar and hearing this kind of sound, then if one doesn’t move one will be shocked,” and infer from this judgment, together with certain perceptual judgments, that I will be shocked if I don’t move. It is the conclusion of this inference, as the conclusion of this inference, that provides me a reason to move and motivates me to move. Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws, that is, in accordance with principles, or has a will. Since reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason. (Kant 1998b, 24)

On Being a Human Self 163 For Kant, then, when a human intends her thoughts as her thoughts, she is not only intending those thoughts as rationally related, she also is intending those thoughts as rationally related because she, the thinker, is responsive to reasons as reasons by treating those reasons as premises in arguments. Only thinkers who represent their reasons as premises of arguments are responsive to reasons, and only agents that are responsive to reasons are capable of the “I think” and have a unified, identical self. But this self is constituted precisely by the rationality of the agent who thinks, and this identical self is thus a normative achievement of the agent herself; it is a self constituted by the responsiveness to norms of the agent herself. While this Kantian articulation of the identity of the self has proven to be influential, post-Kantian philosophy has also revealed two serious problems with Kant’s formulation. First, by itself formal rationality, supplemented by perceptual beliefs and the principles of synthetic reason, provides no concrete reasons for acting, so if what I intend when I intend myself is that my actions and my mental states form merely a self-­ constituted rationally coherent pattern, then I don’t yet find myself with any reason to act at all. The second problem strikes directly at Kant’s understanding of what is involved in an agent’s being rational. Kant asserts that it is only possible to be responsive to reasons when one represents those reasons and draws explicit inferences from those reasons, treated as premises. But there are a variety of empirical and in principle reasons for thinking that this Kantian picture can’t be a correct articulation of the necessary conditions required for rationality, or for an agent to act because of reasons. The two options offered by Crowell amount to responses to one or both of these problems with the Kantian view of the way in which the identity of a human self is a normative achievement. Korsgaard offers a response to the first problem, while Heidegger not only gives us a (similar) response to the problem of the definiteness of the self, but also provides a solution to the second problem.

Overcoming Passivity The dominant solution developed by the post-Kantian tradition to the problem of the lack of determinacy of the rational self was to suggest that when one self-identifies by representing her various states as related in a rational pattern, one always identifies oneself as some particular kind of rational agent. And, according to this tradition, the dominant type of kinds that we use in self-identifying is both social and normative, in the specific sense that (1) the kind itself, together with the conditions for membership in the kind, are products of social interaction among humans, (2) the kind is partially defined normatively, in terms of a set of behaviors, motivations, and beliefs that occupants of the kind ought to display, and (3) the human selves whose identities are normatively

164  Mark Okrent achieved by intending themselves as belonging to a kind do so by being responsive to the norms that partially define that kind. This response to the problem of the lack of content in rationality, a solution that is the inheritance of Heidegger and Korsgaard, leaves a residual problem, however. While having a “practical identity” (as Korsgaard calls it) provides one with reasons for acting and believing in certain ways in various situations, it doesn’t provide one with reasons for having that identity in the first place. The fact that such identities are socially instituted guarantees that particular agents will be socially acknowledged as having some set of practical identities. But this fact by itself needn’t constitute a reason that an agent ought to accept some identity and ought to be motivated by the reasons inherent in that identity. By birth, I satisfy the entry conditions for counting as a Jew. And being a Jew carries with it a set of motivations that one ought to have as a Jew. Further, my upbringing might cause me to experience and react to the things in the world as Jews ought to experience and act. But it doesn’t follow from this that I either understand myself, or even ought to understand myself, as standing under a reason to act as Jews ought to act. The problem here is that while the norms definitive of a practical identity give one reasons for having certain first-order intentions, if one occupies that identity, they aren’t capable of providing reasons for identifying with that identity. But on the view we’ve been discussing, the unity of the self is to be achieved as a normative unity, by the agent being reason-responsive, and if the agent has no reason for accepting any practical identity, then the agent’s self is not achieved by being responsive to a norm. While a practical identity provides reasons, that an agent has some particular identity is just a fact; the agent is “passive” in relation to her own self. Korsgaard identifies a second kind of passivity in our human natures. For Korsgaard, to be an agent an entity must act, and for an entity to act the changes that occur in the entity in response to environmental variation must be both efficacious in achieving some goal, paradigmatically the goal of self-maintenance, and “autonomous,” in some way be the entity’s “own.” This second condition amounts to the requirement that the goal that the agent acts in order to achieve must be reflective of what the agent is. Given these Korsgaardian criteria, nonhuman animals are genuine agents. Their form and behavior is organized teleologically to achieve the goal of self-maintenance, and what an animal is is an entity that achieves self-maintenance through being such that, over a range of possible but counterfactual situations, what the animal would do varies as it should vary in order to achieve that goal. So, in displaying selfmaintaining behavior, the animal satisfies both of Korsgaard’s criteria for being an agent who acts for the sake of being itself; its being or self is an achievement of the animal. But, for Korsgaard, the identity of nonhuman animals is not a normative achievement. For Korsgaard, as for Kant, genuine normativity enters

On Being a Human Self 165 the world with action in response to reasons or because of reasons, or in light of reasons, and action because of reasons requires the representation of that reason, by treating that reason as a premise in an inference that has the required behavior as a conclusion. Nonhuman animals are formed by evolutionary processes that supply each of them with instincts that cause them to be such that they would act in a range of possible situations as they ought to act in order to maintain themselves. But that they do so is not a product of their recognition that this is what they ought to do. This way of characterizing nonhuman animals funds a second form of passivity in human selves, however. We humans are rational animals, but for all of that we are rational animals. We are born with animal natures, instinctual ways that we are caused to react to situations in the world, and relative to our rational selves these human animal instincts, as well as the practical identities that we are socialized in to, count as a passive aspect of our selves that is not a normative achievement. Korsgaard’s attempted solution to both forms of this problem of the passivity in our nature is thoroughly Kantian. The human ability to represent our mental states as our own by attaching the “I think” to those states has the effect of alienating or distancing ourselves from our animal inheritance. While for a nonhuman animal its “perceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will” (Korsgaard 1996, 93), the human ability to objectify our own instinctual states short-circuits their direct motivational force and thereby problematizes them as possible sources of motivation. And, since self-consciousness thus undercuts the motivational force of our instincts, we are left with a problem and an opportunity. The problem is that our natural inheritance is no longer sufficient to determine how we would act in various circumstances, or even the goals of those actions, so we must supplement our instincts with another source of motivation. But for Korsgaard this same self-alienation also supplies the opportunity for the solution to this problem. Since we are alienated from our instincts, it is just a fact that if we are to act at all we must have reasons for those actions. Since mere rationality is not sufficiently concrete to generate determinate motivations, and such determinateness is only provided by having some practical identity, we have reason to adopt some practical identity. But if we accept a practical identity for that reason, we are implicitly accepting that what gives a positive value to that identity is that it is necessary to have some practical identity in order to be a unified rational agent. So, in accepting a determinate practical identity for that reason we are also implicitly accepting that any agent that accepts a practical identity because it is necessary to living as a rational agent is valuable. And this implicit acceptance places a constraint on which practical identities are allowable. Only practical identities that are consistent with the practical identities of others that are rationally chosen for the reason that they are necessary for the agent to live a rational life are acceptable. And, Korsgaard concludes, treating this principle in this

166  Mark Okrent way as a constraint on the acceptability of the choice of a practical identity amounts to overcoming the passivity in our nature arising from the manner in which practical identities are given to us by our animal natures and our socialization, so that we can normatively achieve ourselves as unified, rational persons. There are problems with this strategy, however. The premises of Korsgaard’s argument are (1) it is a fact that given our animal nature we can only act at all if we have reasons for our actions and (2) we only have reasons to act if we have some practical identity. The conclusion is that we have reason to adopt some practical identity. Notice, however, that the fact appealed to in premise (1) is simply a fact about the kind of animal we are, and, really, no reason is supplied or can be supplied to justify why it is that that fact provides us with a reason to act. The fact is a conditional: if we have no reasons, we cannot act. But we only need reasons if we are to act, and no reason is provided for why it is that we should act. Of course, we would die if we fail to act at all. But the goal of living is supplied to us by our animal instincts, and we are passive in relation to those instincts. So Korsgaard’s strategy fails to show us how it could be possible to overcome the passivity in our nature so that our selves could be normative achievements. The failure of this strategy is a function of Korsgaard’s blindness to the second major problem for the Kantian understanding of the normative achievement of the self. As the late Wittgenstein argued, if one thinks of concepts as rules, treats every judgment as an application of a concept to a case, and holds that every such application is rational only if it is grounded in an explicit understanding of the rule involved in the concept applied, treated as a premise in an argument, then one generates a regress. Rules, no matter how explicitly articulated, always admit of alternative interpretations and applications, so on the Kantian view there must be some reason for preferring one alternative to the others. And if all reason-responsiveness requires inference from a principle, this implies that that reason must take the form of a rule for application of the rule involved in the initial concept. And so, the regress begins. From this Wittgenstein infers that there must be some other way of responding to a reason than through the Kantian device of representation of the reason. But this implies that every response to a reason that conforms to the Kantian pattern is made possible by an instance of some other way of being sensitive to reasons. Korsgaard tries to solve the first problem, concerning the concreteness of reason, by introducing practical identities. But since she doesn’t sufficiently appreciate the force of the Wittgensteinian regress, she attempts to rationalize the choice of practical identities by appealing to an explicit principle. And this re-inscribes the vicious regress. From this it follows that a self whose identity is normatively achieved is not achieved by completely overcoming the passivity in its nature in order to constitute itself as a unified person.

On Being a Human Self 167

Being Absorbed in the World Although Martin Heidegger developed his articulation of human being decades before Wittgenstein developed his regress, it is almost as if he developed that articulation in order to stop it. Consider a standard issue practical identity, for example being a carpenter. Since this practical identity is partially defined in terms of norms for appropriate behavior, where what counts as appropriate is defined relative to the situation and this practical identity, carpenters frequently do things for the reason that to act in that way in this situation is normative for carpenters. For example, the carpenter I have hired to build a door frame ought to try to actually build the frame. But what is it to pursue the end of building a door frame as a carpenter? That is, what is it for a carpenter to respond to the reason for building the frame that is embedded in her identity? Heidegger suggests that when one pursues the end of building a door frame as a carpenter, one intends the entities in one’s environment as instrumental or inimical to that end. But things are instrumental to achieving a goal only relative to the context provided by the other resources that are available to the agent. A hammer, by itself, isn’t much use in building a frame. But when combined with the other tools in the carpenters’ tool chests, and carpenters’ understanding of how all of these tools are to be used together by carpenters, hammers can play a crucial role in building the frame. When a carpenter is pursuing the end of building a frame, she thus intends the ruler as to be used to fix the size that the frame ought to be, the saw as to be used to cut boards to that measure, the nails as to be used to fasten the boards together according to the measure, the hammer as to be used to pound the nails into the boards, etc. Insofar as the carpenter, as carpenter, is pursuing the end of building the frame, she is thus continually adjusting her behavior in light of the way these things are intended by her as equipment that ought to be used in particular ways to achieve the end she is pursuing. So, Heidegger concludes, insofar as a human agent is responding to a reason to act that is demanded by a practical identity, she does so insofar as she intends the things in her environment as equipment to be used in such and such ways in attaining the end of the act prescribed by that reason. She doesn’t need to represent that reason; when a carpenter intends a situation as a carpenter, by intending and using her tools as carpenters ought, she is also responding to the reasons embedded in the identity “carpenter.” Heidegger thus provides a model for how to understand the kind of non-Kantian responsiveness to reasons that Wittgenstein’s argument requires. This articulation also has a second aspect, which is the cash value of Crowell’s observation that human agents are “absorbed in the world.” Since to be a carpenter is to be capable of building useful things out of wood efficiently and effectively by using the tools in the carpenter’s tool chest as they should be used to achieve that goal, because

168  Mark Okrent they should be used in that way, the act of actually using those tools to attempt to build things has a double telos. What the carpenter does is simultaneously (attempt to) build, e.g., a door frame and (attempt to) be a carpenter. That this is the case follows from the fact that, if successful, what the carpenter does is simultaneously responsive to the norms that specify how her equipment ought to be used to achieve the goal of having a door frame and responsive to the norms that specify what it is to be a carpenter. For a carpenter is just someone who is able to effectively and efficiently build useful things out of wood by using the tools in the carpenters’ tool kit as they ought to be used, and uses them in that way because they ought to be used in that way. If Heidegger is right, human agents don’t primarily intend themselves as having practical identities by representing the reasons to act that are embedded in those identities and inferring from those reasons what they ought to do according to those identities. Because the norms that define what it is to be, say, a carpenter, are norms that specify how one ought to be motivated by and interact with environmental things if one is a carpenter, one can both act as one does because that is the right way for a carpenter to act, and intend oneself as a carpenter, without representing those reasons or even that identity as one’s own. Rather, it is primarily by intending and being responsive to the things in our worldly environment as one ought to intend and be responsive to them, given our practical identity, that we thereby intend ourselves as having that identity, and normatively achieve that identity. “It is primarily things, not as such, taken in isolation, but as intraworldly, in and from which we encounter ourselves” (Heidegger 1982, 171). Notice, in this quote Heidegger is not claiming that we encounter ourselves immediately, but non-reflectively, in some sort of pre-reflective self-awareness, a constant pre-reflective sense of my practical identity in the background of my action. If this were the point he would, in crucial respects, have been returning the dialectical situation to Descartes. Heidegger’s point is precisely that self-awareness, pre-reflective or otherwise, is not a necessary condition on encountering ourselves as having some practical identity. The intention in which we encounter ourselves is directed at the equipment we deal with in the context of the activities we engage in in attempting to be, e.g., a carpenter, not directly at ourselves. Rather, for a carpenter to intend herself as a carpenter is to intend things in her world as a carpenter ought to intend them, as “in-order-to” perform certain functions within the carpenters’ tool kit. But the various tools in the kit can have these determinations only as an integrated holistic package that itself is for the sake of a carpenter doing what needs to be done for a carpenter to be a carpenter. The norms involved in being a carpenter and the norms for how carpenters ought to intend carpenters’ equipment are so integrated that the intention that satisfies the norms for how carpenters’ ought to intend their tools also satisfies the norms for the

On Being a Human Self 169 agent to inhabit the practical identity of being a carpenter. The carpenter can encounter herself “in and from” her tools because encountering her tools as carpenters’ tools is thus essentially related to encountering herself as a carpenter. As Crowell puts the point in the passage quoted at the top, we humans are subjects who are “absorbed in the world” of our concerns.

Overcoming Anonymity Heidegger’s way of articulating what it is to have a practical identity and what is involved in intending oneself as having such an identity reconfigures the issues that confront the post-Kantian attempt to understand what it is to normatively achieve a self. Heideggerian Dasein always has some practical identity, and always is responding to the reasons inherent in that identity. So, there is no requirement, as there is for Korsgaard, that in order to be a human self, one must have rational grounds for accepting any determinate reasons as reasons, a requirement that can never be entirely fulfilled. On the other hand, the Heideggerian reformulation brings with it two new problems, or new versions of old problems. First, given Heidegger’s way of understanding our human way of having a practical identity, in what sense are those identities our own, in what sense are they our normative achievement? Second, since Heidegger’s articulation of human absorbed being in the world undercuts the early modern manner of distinguishing human responsiveness to reasons and the manner in which nonhuman animals make a living, how should we understand that difference? The first problem arises from Heidegger’s articulation of the way that we primarily normatively achieve our selves by acting for the sake of being an agent of a definite sort, in the course of carrying out the goaloriented tasks of that sort of agent. These ways of being an agent are social, in the sense that each individual inherits the norms of the identity by occupying the identity. So, in what sense are these norms our own; in what sense is one’s having such an identity one’s own achievement? Kant, and Korsgaard, advanced an answer to this question. Since for them one is only responsive to norms in a human way when one is capable of representing norms, one is also always capable of reflecting on these practical norms, and in doing so call those norms into question. So, when one actually affirms the norms of some practical identity, one always at least ought to have some reason in light of which one gives this norm to oneself. This strategy generates a vicious regress, however, a regress that is stopped by Heidegger’s offering an alternative account of what is involved in human responsiveness to norms. But if reflective rational endorsement isn’t the way in which a human self is an agent’s own normative achievement, in what sense is the self the self’s own normative achievement?

170  Mark Okrent According to Crowell, Heidegger in a sense does follow the Kantian strategy. As for Korsgaard, Crowell’s Heidegger holds that in order for the human self to be its own normative achievement, a certain distancing of oneself from one’s practical identity is necessary. “Heidegger, too, identifies a kind of distancing as a condition for being the sort of creature who can be bound by norms” (Crowell 2013, 249). But for Heidegger, instead of this occurring through a reflective cognitive operation, it is occasioned by a certain kind of mood, paradigmatically, anxiety. This occurs, according to Heidegger, in moods such as Angst, where I find that I can no longer act at all, no longer press forward smoothly into practical possibilities for being, and I confront myself as ‘pure Dasein’, that is, as ‘being-free for the freedom of choosing [myself] and taking hold of [myself].’ (Crowell 2013, 249) On Crowell’s reading, in the mood of anxiety we come to feel that we are agents that are distinct from all of the practical identities that typically organize our everyday motivational life. What is revealed in this mood is that I am an agent who is always essentially in question, at issue, and so as one who must ‘take over being a ground’. [To take over being a ground] is to uncover, phenomenologically, the condition that enables me to act not only in conformity to norms (as in everyday coping) but also in light of them—that is, to be responsible, beholden to normative constraints and so offer reasons (grounds) for what I do. (Crowell 2013, 249) That is, in this view, being in the mood of anxiety distances us from all of our practical identities in such a way that we no longer find ourselves with implicit reasons to act at all. And, according to Crowell’s Heidegger, this frees me to see that at bottom who and what I am is in question in such a way that I must respond to that question by choosing my own being by offering “reasons for what I do.” At bottom, this strategy is identical to Korsgaard’s. Let us assume that Angst does have the structure suggested, and that being in anxiety simultaneously undercuts the motivational force of all of my practical identities. In that case, if I am to act at all I am radically responsible for what I do, in the sense that if I am to act for reasons I must myself supply reasons for my own action. But to have reasons is to have a practical identity that supplies those reasons, or to infer an act from reasons treated as premises. Ex hypothesi, Angst casts me out of all practical identities, so I have no reasons derived from those identities. And were I to appeal to explicit principles, I would initiate the Wittgensteinian regress. Even

On Being a Human Self 171 if I  find myself with an obligation to provide reasons, “in light of the good,” as Crowell often puts it, given these considerations the light provided by the good is so dim and indefinite that I have no reason to accept any practical identity in particular, so I cannot fulfill this obligation. At this point Korsgaard can at least attempt the invocation of a transcendental argument, even if that strategy fails. But Crowell can’t even do this; instead of reasons for choosing some practical identity, his Angst-ridden agent can only arbitrarily adopt some practical identity or other, with no reasons. And a self so chosen is no normative achievement at all, even if the agent accepts responsibility without reason for the choice. Perhaps recognizing this problem with the formulation of his position in terms of Angst, Crowell provides a second, rather different formulation. On this version, the distancing from one’s practical identity that is required for being a human self who is its own normative achievement is already present in the way in which humans live those identities, without Angst: such facticity is not put in question for the first time in the distancing that takes place in Angst; it is always already in question since it is bound up, in the unity of the care structure, with the for-the-sake-of, with the issue of who I am to be, my trying to be a father, a professor, and so on. (Crowell 2013, 249) For Crowell, even when a human isn’t in the mood of anxiety, she still doesn’t live her identity as simply given to her. Although the norms that are inherent in practical identities are objective, they are also indefinite in the sense that there is no algorithm for determining what an agent with some practical identity ought to concretely do in every situation. And as such we are all in the position of having to work at being what we are by determining what it is that is required of who we are; we must try to achieve our practical identities, and if we do, that normative achievement is our own in that what we are trying to do is act as we do because of the norms of our identity in our own way. This way of putting Heidegger’s point is more promising because it undercuts the problem that is generated by Crowell’s initial statement of the position. Since the very act of living according to my practical identity is always an attempt to respond to the norms of that identity, I don’t need to be unmotivated by those norms to be distanced from them. The human way of having a practical identity treats that identity as indefinite and to be accomplished rather than as instinctual, as already attained, and thus always as an achievement that is to be attained by interpretively attempting to adhere to norms because they are norms. We always find ourselves with practical identities, but we inhabit an identity only by always being in the position of trying to achieve what is (indefinitely) demanded by the identity.

172  Mark Okrent This resolution of the problem of the regress provokes a new question. Since Descartes, human distinctiveness from other animals has been understood in terms of responsiveness to reasons, and this responsiveness has been understood as requiring that humans are able to disengage from the motivations that are merely given to them by their animal and social natures. But on this new account, it is in attempting to live in light of the norms that are provided by those natures that our human identities are achieved. But, then, how are we humans normatively distinctive from the other animals? In responding to this question, Crowell points to the way that we humans must try to be ourselves rather than simply instinctively being what we are. But what is this “trying” supposed to consist in, and how is it that it is supposed to distinguish us from other mammals and birds? “To try” is the paradigmatic teleological verb and marks the fact that anything that acts in order to achieve some goal might fail to achieve it. In that sense, any agent that acts in order to achieve some goal tries to achieve it; and as Korsgaard, following Aristotle, points out, organisms as such are defined by acting in order to survive, and thus try to maintain themselves. Crowell, however, relies on a more robust sense of “trying”: we humans are distinctive in virtue of the indefiniteness of the goals we act in order to achieve when we inhabit a practical identity, and the resulting indefiniteness of what we are trying to be. And for Crowell this way of being provides a contrast with all nonhuman animals who act instinctively according to evolutionarily derived programs so as to realize fixed ways of being the animals that they are. But empirical evidence now indicates that this view of the life of nonhuman animals is naïve. More intelligent animals, and certainly most mammals and birds, don’t stay alive in the face of varying environmental conditions by relying on an inborn set of fixed responses that determine their behavior. Many animals not only learn to modify their motivations and behavior in light of experience, and thereby learn to suppress their “instincts,” some of them also develop instrumentalities for making a living by designing and constructing novel kinds of tools, which they pass on as one of a variety of distinctive local cultural traditions of tool making. In effect, since for such animals it is always at issue exactly how they are to achieve their identities as a self-maintaining animal of a certain sort, they find themselves in a position similar to humans who need to be responsive to the objective but essentially indefinite norms of their practical identities. So, this second sense of “trying” also fails to make the requisite distinction. I suspect that Crowell is implicitly relying on a third sense of “try,” however. There is a sense in which one is “trying” to do something only if one is prepared to respond to challenges (verbal or otherwise) to what one is doing by revising one’s behavior or rationalizing what one is doing by responding to the verbal challenge. The root of this sense of “trying” is that to act for a goal requires flexibility in what one does in the face of difficulty by changing so as to better achieve one’s goal. Such behavioral

On Being a Human Self 173 flexibility is the only way for nonverbal agents to demonstrate their commitment to achieving the goal. And many nonhuman animals display this kind of behavioral flexibility, of course. But no nonhuman animals can respond to verbal requests for reasons, in the sense of justification for what one does, and this difference is in fact a difference that marks a real difference; we humans are the animal that has the logos, that can give an account of our actions, “in light of the good.” So, we humans are the animal who is capable of rationalizing our acts not only by altering them in the direction of greater success, but also by justifying them. If this is the sense of “trying” that Crowell is in fact relying on, then in demarcating in this way the difference between human and animal ways of achieving their identities he has unfortunately only succeeded in reinscribing the Wittgensteinian regress. If what it is that makes our human self a normative achievement is that we justify what we do by supplying reasons from which we can infer the correctness of our action, then we can never fully normatively achieve our selves. In that case, Crowell is confronted with a new aporia. If he denies that he is reinstating this Kantian strategy, he has failed to supply us with a way in which human selves are normative achievements in a way that is different from our animal cousins. But, if he does reinstate the Kantian view, then he has failed to give us a coherent account of how we humans normatively achieve our selves by overcoming our anonymity to take responsibility for our own self as a task.

Note 1 Although I don’t agree with Crowell on all points of Heidegger interpretation, I will not argue those differences here. Instead, I will assume that Heidegger is just Crowell’s Heidegger, and consider and criticize the position that Crowell attributes to Heidegger. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in all quotations are from the original.

References Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, Rene. 1988. “Objections and Replies.” In Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998a. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998b. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 Normativity With a Human Face Placing Intentional Norms and Intentional Agents Back in Nature Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder

One cannot simply posit a correlation between experience and nature, between seeing-as and seeing what-is; one must show what this sense of nature amounts to through an account of the evidence in which it is given as nature. —(Crowell 2001, 17)

Intentionality, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons There is much agreement in the philosophical literature that intentional states, including beliefs, desires, intentional actions, and the like, are candidates for normative assessment. That is, they can be evaluated with respect to standards of propriety, such as success, fitness, accuracy, and, above all, truth. Intentional states are marked by the property of being directed toward objects and properties in the environment which they can be about and can also fail to adequately represent, thus becoming candidates for truth-assessment. Underscoring this point, John Haugeland claims that “to have intentionality is to have (semantic) content” (Haugeland 1990, 384). Sellars has articulated this distinction further. According to Sellars, intentional states are distinctively characterized by belonging to what he labeled “the space of reasons.” He described this space by contrasting it with the space of nature, claiming that they are governed by two different kinds of normativity. While the normativity of nomological generalizations, proper to scientific natural laws, characterizes the realm of nature, the normativity of reasons and rational principles is characteristic of human actions and performances and of intentional states, such as beliefs and desires in particular. Accordingly, the logical space of reasons is not the space in which we describe the psychology of the acts of thinking, but the space in which our justificatory credentials are at issue. McDowell, following Sellars, claims that “[w]e must sharply distinguish natural-scientific intelligibility from the kind of intelligibility something acquires when we situate it in the logical space of reasons” (McDowell 1996, xix). Nevertheless, McDowell warns us, we must be

Normativity With a Human Face 175 especially careful as to the implications of such a distinction. In particular, one must avoid the confusion that underlies its identification with “a dichotomy between the natural and the normative” (Ibid.). Such a confusion would amount to losing any possibility of accounting for the way in which the world has normative significance for us, e.g., the possibility that the world itself play a justificatory role for our beliefs. According to McDowell, both Davidson and Sellars, by sharply distinguishing the normative and the natural, end up endorsing a view “about experience [that] disqualifies it from intelligibly constituting a tribunal” (McDowell 1996, xvi). Against Sellars’s and Davidson’s conception of the rational, McDowell surmises that in order to avoid, on the one hand, endorsing a form of dualism—i.e., separating causes from reasons—and, on the other, emptying our empirical beliefs from empirical content, we need “to place norms in nature.” His strategy in this regard is both simple and bold: we must enrich our concept of nature so that it encompasses the normativity of rational demands.1 McDowell rightly calls his proposal a “rehabilitation of empiricism,” the very empiricism that Sellars—who identified the empirical with an unacceptable notion of the Given—and Davidson—who rejected the view that we can make sense of experience as something other than a blind cause—had deemed untenable. According to McDowell, Sellars’s and Davidson’s conclusions depend on surrendering the notion of nature to the realm of pure causal law, a “disenchanted nature” that “does not embrace the space of reasons” (McDowell 1996, 84). If the notion of nature is so understood, only two options are left open: (1) to embrace what McDowell calls “bald naturalism” replacing reasons with pure causes or (2) to endorse a sort of dualism that conceives of reasons as belonging to a self-contained space that is only affected by causes from the outside. Sellars and Davidson embrace option (2). Resisting this dilemma, McDowell puts forward the idea that experiences are not mere sensations but “themselves cases of our sensory capacities at work, as opposed to being merely caused by our sensory capacities” (McDowell 2009, 158). According to McDowell, we can understand the world’s impact on belief-formation as belonging already to the conceptual sphere. Experiences are “like beliefs in being actualizations of our conceptual capacities and so able, consistently with the basic principles that underlie Davidson’s thinking here, to be rationally and not merely causally relevant to our thinking” (Ibid). The outcome of this thought is the idea that causal relations need not be exhaustively described as the “domain of physical fact.” According to McDowell, only if beliefs and experiences can be about the world and thus be either correct or incorrect with respect to it, will we be in the position to account for how experience is actually capable of playing its role as a warrant for beliefs. Conversely, if experience could not be granted a rational role

176  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder in the formation of beliefs, then as Kant warned us, we would be left with empty concepts: without intuitions concepts would be “spinning in a void” (McDowell 1996, 11). Steven Crowell’s work is to be praised for highlighting how the phenomenological tradition can contribute to the aforementioned debate concerning intentionality and normativity. And while Crowell shares many of McDowell’s main tenets and his general aim of integrating experience into the space of reasons, he questions the lack of an adequate phenomenological account of how perceptual experience can be normatively informed. In his view, McDowell lacks “the necessary theory of perception or intuitive givenness to remove the appearance of dogmatism in its appeal to the space of meaning” (Crowell 2001, 19). Crowell argues that phenomenology offers a remedy for this problem, namely, the best strategy for placing norms in nature. In this sense, phenomenology would be the best way to pursue the project of rehabilitating empiricism while simultaneously acknowledging the distinctive character of normatively contentful intentionality. That is what would be required for an empiricism “that recognizes not only quarks and trees, but numbers, battles, and passions” and is in a position to resist not only skepticism, but reductionism as well” (Crowell 2001, 19). In this chapter, we will follow Crowell’s path and explore to what extent such a project can be carried out. We will contend that Crowell’s attempt to provide a phenomenological account of intentionality makes important progress but is nevertheless incomplete. Phenomenology does indeed offer the best strategy for approaching this project. Unlike McDowell’s proposal, phenomenology does not commit to the idea that intentionality is always conceptual and hence, as we will show, it offers the right tools for avoiding some important shortcomings of McDowell’s position. But if Crowell succeeds in placing norms in nature through his phenomenological account of perceptual experience, he still shares with McDowell and Haugeland the idea that intentionality proper is to be identified with full-fledged normatively contentful capacities. This leads him to reject the possibility—a possibility actually explored by Husserl and other phenomenologists—of accounting for (i) the role that biological constraints play in the exercise of rational capacities, and (ii) the way in which the world we are directed to is shared by other creatures that themselves disclose the world in different ways. Lacking resources for accommodating (i) and (ii), Crowell’s view turns out to be incapable of making sense of how intentional agents are themselves placed in nature. We will claim that placing intentional agents in nature is not only possible, but also necessary if we are to bring Crowell’s and McDowell’s project of rehabilitating empiricism to completion. We will proceed as follows. In the next section, we will analyze McDowell’s attempt to place norms in nature, highlight its shortcomings, and follow Crowell in providing a phenomenological alternative

Normativity With a Human Face 177 to his view. In the third section, we will analyze both McDowell’s and Crowell’s approaches to the problem of placing intentional agents in nature. We will diagnose how and why they fall short. In the final section, we will sketch an alternative strategy for successfully “rehabilitating empiricism,” namely, by placing both norms and intentional agents in nature.

Placing Intentional Norms in Nature Crowell concurs with McDowell on the idea that “the challenge is to say how the world can be independent of our thinking while still having a rational—and not merely causal—bearing on what we think” (Crowell 2010, 153). This challenge can be put in terms of two generally accepted conditions for establishing what counts as contentful normativity: (1) the objectivity condition: that contentful states must be about an independent world they can fail to adequately represent, and (2) the first-person condition: that intentional states must not be merely cases of acting “according to a norm”—the kind of normativity that applies to phenomena under scientific nomological generalizations—but rather cases of acting “in virtue of a norm,” i.e., states of subjects who are conscious of, responsive to, and responsible for the norms specified by said states. It is this first-personal kind of normative relation that holds for states in the space of reasons. Crowell (2008, 2012a) himself acknowledges the need for accommodating these conditions in accounting for perceptual states. According to Crowell, unlike Sellars and Brandom for whom “perception plays no justificatory role but is just an entry move into the realm of inferentially governed conceptual relations” (Crowell 2010, 150–1), McDowell correctly saw that experience, along with other rational states, belongs in the space of reasons. But, in his view, accommodating (1) and (2) is paramount for reclaiming a role for the notion of “experience” as conceived in the phenomenological tradition and not merely in the way McDowell seeks to incorporate it. Notably, both McDowell and Crowell agree that a correct account of intentionality involves a commitment to some form of empiricism (McDowell 1996, xviii; Crowell 2001, 19). However, it is at this point that Crowell introduces his criticism of McDowell’s position, namely, that the latter fails to provide an adequate notion of experience: McDowell seems to hold that perceptual content must have a conceptual structure since only predication, an operation with concepts, establishes the object as a norm, places it in the space of reasons. But just this point makes McDowell’s position elusive, for in perception no such predication takes place. (Crowell 2013, 126)

178  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder Thus, McDowell’s commitment to a conceptual understanding of the space of reasons leads to a propositional conception of perceptual states that Crowell deems inadequate. The problem is that McDowell, following Sellars, thinks of this space of reasons in purely conceptual terms. He thereby wrongly identifies seeing a cat on the mat and seeing that the cat is on the mat.2 According to Crowell, McDowell is unable to draw the relevant distinction between seeing something and seeing that something is the case, for he lacks a non-conceptual notion of experience. While after Mind and World McDowell seems to have discarded that propositional notion of the content of experience, he still holds that experience should be conceived as informed by “conceptual capacities at work.” Crowell acknowledges such a shift in McDowell’s thinking but argues that the problem remains, since “both kinds of content remain conceptual” (see Crowell 2013, 127n3).3 Crowell argues that an adequate notion of experience must be able to explain how a perceptual state can be meaningful and thus normative without being conceptual. At this juncture, Crowell introduces his more general claim, namely that phenomenology is uniquely suited to provide an encompassing picture of the normativity of experience that accommodates the aforementioned conditions (1) and (2), i.e., that it is capable of accounting for the way in which we are first-personally responsive to objective norms in experiencing the world, while not understanding such norms as involving conceptual capacities. Phenomenology fares better than McDowell’s view in accounting for the way in which experience is norm-governed because it characterizes perception in normative terms without recourse to conceptuality. Indeed, “phenomenologists concerned with the question of the normative in perception have tried to go further” in characterizing experience (Crowell 2013, 127). A paradigmatic example of the kind of perceptual-yet-notconceptual normative constraint that belongs to experience thematized by phenomenologists is the relation that holds in perceptually experiencing an object, for example in vision, between an actually observed aspect of the object and other aspects of the same object, which are not in view. When I see a matchbox in front of me, my experience is not the mere experience of the seen side of the matchbox but a case of seeing the matchbox as such, including the sides that are hidden from view. The unseen aspects of the matchbox are part of my actual perception of the matchbox even though they are not directly perceived. This is shown by the fact that there are several further actions that I can perform with respect to the object that can confirm the presence of such hidden aspects, e.g., I can turn the object around and see the other sides, and I can then see if they look more or less like the one I had previously seen, and so on. Alternatively, if, for instance, I turned the matchbox around and its backside mysteriously disappeared, I  would think that something is wrong, that it was not a matchbox after all: maybe it was a hallucination or a

Normativity With a Human Face 179 trompe l’oeil. These relations between the seen and unseen aspects of objects of perceptual experience are not merely causal but normative: the unseen aspects of the same object are normatively relevant for my actual perception of it and for its epistemic credentials. This network of normative relations that govern perceptual experience is at the center of Crowell’s “quasi-inferentialist” account of perceptual normativity. In his words, “the way the world and things in the world are taken in experience is, for each, a function of (as Husserl puts it) their ‘intentional implications’ or (as Heidegger puts it) the ‘referential totality of significance’ ” (Crowell 2008, 341).4 In sum, the phenomenological strategy put forward by Crowell fleshes out the normativity governing our experiential relation to the world in terms of “quasi-inferential” relations that are disclosed by intentional agents as they experience such a world. He claims that having such experiences—in contrast to McDowell—does not require deploying any concepts. So far so good. McDowell provides a framework for placing norms in nature and reconciling experience and normativity. Crowell’s phenomenology lets us move further in specifying how to understand the normative character of experience without being committed to a problematic form of conceptualism. But contrary to all appearances, the task of rehabilitating empiricism remains essentially incomplete. For to reclaim a form of empiricism which is compatible with a normative account of reasons—which both McDowell and Crowell aim to do—requires not only showing how norms can be part of experience but also how intentional agents are sensitive to such norms, i.e., how they are governed by such norms and how those norms inform their behavior in action and perception. While Crowell insists that intentional agents must be capable of such norm-guided behavior, the question remains as to whether we can account for the capacities of the agents at issue in a naturalistic vein. Reconciling norms and nature requires not only placing experience in the space of reasons but normative agents in nature. When intentionality is understood in normative terms, the motivation for such a subjective dimension of a “rehabilitated empiricism” becomes clearer: a normative account of intentionality could not get off the ground if it failed to account for the way norms have a grip on us as natural beings, i.e., how they inform the behavior of natural intentional agents. In order to demystify these relations—not only norms but normative agential ­capacities—we need to be in a position to intelligibly place intentional agents within a conception of the natural and relate them to the capacities of other animals belonging to nature. These are two interrelated demands of an adequate empiricism in McDowell’s and Crowell’s terms, two sides of the same coin: placing experience in the space of reasons is one side, placing the capacities of experiencing subjects in nature, the other.

180  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder As it turns out, Husserl already underscored this point in his criticism of Kant. Husserl’s contention is that Kant’s notion of subjectivity is no more than a “mythical construction”; it is “his own sort of mythical talk, whose literal meaning points to something subjective, but a mode of the subjective which we are in principle unable to make intuitive to ourselves, whether through factual examples or through genuine analogy” (Husserl, 1976, Hua VI, 116). According to Husserl, phenomenology, on the other hand, focuses also on concrete subjectivity (Husserl 1974, Hua XVII, 33/30): i.e., factical features such as “the use of objects, the role of cultures and specific make-up of bodily motility” (Nenon 2008, 437) as well as the particular sense through which the hyle is apprehended and the peculiar temporal form of experience. Such elements of concrete subjectivity, according to Husserl, do have an explanatory role in the transcendental constitution of the world. The biophysical makeup of the body, affectivity, and instincts come into a description of intentionality once such an idea of concrete subjectivity is endorsed.5 This idea can be traced back to the very early Prolegomena to Pure Logic, where Husserl claims that “the necessary use of the understanding is, all the same, a use of the understanding and belongs, with the understanding itself, to psychology” (Husserl 1975, Hua XVIII, 66). In sum, an account of intentionality that seeks to do justice to experience needs to be complemented by an account of the capacities of the intentional agents that are able to experience the world in the ways they do, a psychological account that makes sense of these normative capacities as natural and placed in a natural world in a continuum along with the intentional, normative capacities of other animals. Such an account should be able to answer questions such as, What capacities should a creature capable of normative contentful behavior exhibit? How do such capacities emerge and develop in ontogeny and phylogeny? Are these capacities inherited or acquired through enculturation and training? How do they relate to those of other animals? In view of this, it becomes clear that phenomenology is ideally suited not only to address one side of the coin but also to complete the task of rehabilitating empiricism, that is, of placing intentional agents in nature. This is so, not only because of its focus on experience, but crucially, as Crowell notes, because it does not identify human cognitive capacities with conceptual capacities. Nevertheless, Crowell rejects in principle, as we will see, the possibility of providing a phenomenological account of rational capacities as human natural capacities. In the next section, we explore the corresponding strategies that McDowell and Crowell utilize to place agents in nature and find both ill-suited for the task; while McDowell introduces a gap in nature, Crowell denies that any possible account can be given of a subject’s rational capacities in natural terms. After explaining how and why this is so in the next section, in the final section we present an alternative view that

Normativity With a Human Face 181 allows us to overcome this problem and show how both norms and intentional agents can be placed in nature, as they should if the task of rehabilitant empiricism is to be completed, without losing the normative dimension that McDowell and Crowell underscore as the distinctive feature of human minds.

Placing Intentional Agents in Nature McDowell directly acknowledges the need to place intentional agents in nature. This is precisely the role that the notion of “second nature,” appropriated from Aristotle, is meant to play. Second nature is a specific form of life in which we come to live insofar as we are introduced by others in a language and a tradition: “A rational animal could not have acquired the conceptual capacities in the possession of which its rationality consists except by being initiated in a social practice” (McDowell 2009, 287). The central idea is that human rational capacities depend for their exercise on individuals being initiated in an understanding of the articulation of reasons which comes with their upbringing and which molds their thinking (McDowell 1998, 185). The space of reasons is a space we come to inhabit as linguistic creatures. While language enables us to make ourselves intelligible to others and others intelligible for us, it also underlies the possibility of self-understanding and of having a genuine conceptual engagement with the world. Furthermore, in focusing on the phenomena of meaning and understanding, McDowell takes these to be wholly natural phenomena despite the fact that they have an irreducibly normative character—a character which, for McDowell, cannot be explicated in non-normative terms. By McDowell’s lights, it is simply a fact that certain c­ reatures— those that have benefited from being initiated into special kinds of social ­practices—become capable of having meaningful or contentful states of mind. According to McDowell, it is through a social process of enculturation that creatures come to have a second nature, and it is by that token that they enter into the space of reasons (see McDowell 2009, 287). But having sharply separated second nature from first nature—i.e., the kind of stance someone has by being placed in the space of nature as described by natural science—McDowell argues that we are not capable of explicating or explaining how it is that capacities for contentful thought come to exist in nature so understood. Foregoing explanation, we can only simply affirm “our right to the notion of second nature” (McDowell 1996, 94–5). Thus, despite his claim that the space of nature and that of reasons should be integrated to avoid mythical conceptions of how the world impacts our senses and is related to our beliefs and other cognitive states, McDowell dichotomizes our understanding of nature when it comes to understand the capacities of the agents that have

182  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder such experiences, leaving us with two senses of nature which are forever divided. Following a similar line of thought, Michael Thompson (2017,  32) argues that McDowell’s proposal amounts to surrendering the notion of first nature to bald naturalists while reclaiming a notion of second nature for proper accounts of human rationality. As Rouse nicely put it, this leaves us with “a second nature disconnected from any explicable relation to first nature” (Rouse 2015, 185). As a consequence of such a disconnection, McDowell’s account of second nature is unable to place intentional agents in nature. On his view, no account can be given of the capacities that allow an agent to grasp the normative structure of the space of reasons as themselves belonging to nature. In particular, no natural history of such capacities can be given since that attempt would place them outside the space of reasons. Both capacities for second nature and the world of second nature itself remain primitive posits, not intelligibly connected with humans’ first nature and the natural world they seem to inhabit. This follows from the impossibility of making sense of how second nature connects to first nature. But if the capacities at stake were not possibly seen as emerging from and enacted in a natural world, the project of reconciling the rational with the natural would fail. Phenomenology seems better equipped to deal with the problem of placing intentional agents in nature. Since it does not assume that cognitive capacities and normative abilities require language and conceptual capacities, it seems that it could provide a picture of how sophisticated conceptual normative capacities emerge and develop from more basic capacities we share with other animals and young children, capacities that do not require the ability to apply concepts. This is precisely what Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of instinctive-intentionality, affection, and passivity attempts to accomplish. But Crowell rejects such a strategy. According to him, phenomenological accounts of such prepersonal, non-rational processes—carried out in so-called genetic phenomenology—rest on an “an illicit ‘naturalistic’ assumption” that underlies the “identification of the person with the human being”6 (Crowell 2012b, 26). Crowell’s argument runs as follows: “when we ‘situate’ the subject in ‘natural processes’ we always do so already privatively, by conceiving those processes on the model of our first-person understanding of what it is for me to be” (Crowell 2014, 40). As John Haugeland puts it, “we can understand animals as having intentional states, but only relative to standards that we establish for them. This makes animal intentionality exactly analogous to biological teleology” (Haugeland 1998b, 303). That means that “biological systems have only ersatz teleology and normativity,” and this itself can only be understood “privatively,” in terms of their lacking something. This is so because “animals do not commit to constitutive standards, hence do not submit themselves to norms, and do not understand anything” (Haugeland 1998b, 304).

Normativity With a Human Face 183 Crowell endorses Haugeland’s “existential holism” (see Haugeland 1998a, 55ff), the idea that full-fledged contentful intentionality, unlike animal behavior, “is a norm-governed trying to be” (Crowell 2016, 232), i.e., a capacity that is essentially linked to first-personal responsibility, and thus, it is only possible for rational beings. In Crowell’s hands, this is the idea that a proper account of intentionality must ground normativity on agents’ capacities to entertain practical identities in terms which they understand and respond to particular norms. In this way, a fundamental distinction is drawn between rational agents, those that live up to and through practical identities and (nonhuman) animals who don’t.7 Crowell’s claim here can be seen as fitting with the widespread agreement among contemporary philosophers that there is an important distinction between biological beings, subject to biological norms, and rational persons, subject to properly contentful norms. Many authors hold that biological normativity falls short as a candidate for accounting for the kind of responsiveness that an agent capable of grasping truth-evaluable mental contents would be capable of: “Evolution won’t give you more intentionality than you pack into it” (Putnam 1992, 33). This is because there is a crucial distinction between “functioning properly (under the proper conditions) as an information carrier and getting things right (objective correctness or truth)” (Haugeland 1998b, 309). There is “a root mismatch between representational error and failure of biological function” (Burge 2010, 301), since “natural selection does not care about truth; it cares about reproductive success” (Stich 1990, 62); that is, “evolution doesn’t care about veridicality” (Burge 2010, 303). Truth is not always adaptation, and adaptation does not necessarily track truth. Thus, even if we can speak of biological norms in terms of naturally selected functions specifying what a given organism is meant to do, and hence rule out certain performances of those organisms as incorrect in relation to the fulfillment of their selected functions, those norms are fundamentally different from the kind of norms that apply to intentional items. Intentional states can be assessed as correct or incorrect with respect to what they represent, and this is not to evaluate them in terms of norms of evolutionary success, survival, and organismic fitness. While certain kinds of organismic responses can be normative in a biological sense, this does not mean that they are sensitive to the kind of correction that truth-assessable states and responses are sensitive to, and no account can be given of the latter in terms of the former. Drawing from Heidegger’s take on organisms in a 1929/1930 lecture course, Crowell expands on this idea by arguing that “a phenomenology of meaning requires a distinction that cannot be drawn within the conceptual horizon of a metaphysics of life” (Crowell 2016, 230). While “the metaphysics of life” characteristic of biological accounts of nature calls upon a third-person methodology to distinguish regions of being and their relations, meaning makes essential appeal to the first-person point

184  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder of view. If contentful norms are to be sharply distinguished from biological norms, Crowell claims, the biological nature of human existence becomes irrelevant for an account of intentionality: “The fact that higher animals are much more similar to us than are robots physiologically, ethologically, and even phylogenetically, is not necessarily significant when considering intentionality” (Haugeland 1998b, 304). Moreover, biological and behavioral similarities that could be found between us and other higher animals—such as bonobos and chimps, our closer relatives in the great ape lineage—cannot ground any claim about cognitive similarities between us and them, for any perceived similarity in this domain would be dependent on our own understanding of our conceptual capacities, that is, on our bringing them inside the space of reasons, a move that cannot be legitimately justified when the capacities to bring one’s own response under a first-personally construed practical identity is missing. Because of this, conversely, there is no straightforwardly legitimate way of seeing our own capacities as having emerged from those of other animals in a natural evolutionary process, for that would amount to dragging our own capacities outside the space of reasons, into the space of nature, thus stripping those states of their defining characteristics. This opens up a gap between proper rational intentionality and animal ersatz intentionality, and between ourselves conceived in the light of our “second nature”—as already responsible rational agents—and us understood in the light of our natural history and our early upbringing, in the context of which practical identities are not yet at play. We find a similar point in Davidson’s work: The difficulty in describing the emergence of mental phenomena is a conceptual problem: it is the difficulty of describing the early stages in the maturing of reason, the stages that precede the situation in which concepts like intention, belief, and desire have clear application. In both the evolution of thought in the history of mankind and the evolution of thought in an individual, there is a stage at which there is no thought followed by a subsequent stage at which there is thought. To describe the emergence of thought would be to describe the process which leads from the first to the second of these stages. What we lack is a satisfactory vocabulary for describing the intermediate steps. (1997/2001, 127) Davidson thinks that we lack the requisite vocabulary because he is committed to the idea—in line with his views on the holism of the ­mental—that minds can only be discerned and characterized by ascribing propositional contents to them. Let us call this the “characterization problem.” In his view, “words, like thoughts, have a familiar meaning, a propositional content, only if they occur in a rich context, for such a

Normativity With a Human Face 185 context is required to give words or thought a location and a meaningful function” (Davidson 1997/2001, 127). A fortiori, for him, nonverbal thought cannot be characterized as a form of thought because it lacks the necessary links with contentful attitudes—it stands outside of the network of propositional attitudes. For this reason, Davidson doubted that there could be “a sequence of emerging features of the mental . . . described in the usual mentalistic vocabulary” (Ibid.), since thought/the mental can only be present when a sufficiently rich set of rational connections and propositional attitudes can be thought to be present, and this only happens when someone speaks a language (Davidson 2001; for criticism see Hutto and Satne 2017). As a consequence of this lack of adequate vocabulary—the characterization problem—Davidson thinks we are left without the resources for making sense of the connections between contentful attitudes and the rest of nature. In his way of setting things out, the characterization problem leads to a “connection problem”: the mental as intentionally contentful and the natural are forever divided. This precludes the possibility of describing human rationality as located in nature, thus leading to an emergence problem as a particular instance of the connection problem, as Davidson rightly acknowledges. McDowell follows Davidson in his holism of the mental and in the idea that conceptual capacities cannot be given a genetic understanding in the natural world of the sort that evolutionary theory privileges for exactly the aforementioned reasons. And while Crowell disagrees with Davidson’s and McDowell’s claim that concepts are the mark of the mental, he shares their skepticism about the prospects of telling an evolutionary story about human intentional capacities. He agrees that we can’t step out from the point of view of our human form of life and recognize other capacities as capacities that, qua different from our own, are intentional for their own sake. In his view, this is because (other) animals lack the first-personal responsiveness that is characteristic of our engagement with reasons, which is given to us in the form of the construal of practical identities. In the best case, we can adopt a privative approach toward (other) animals and attribute as-if intentional capacities to them. Thus, he claims, I can employ teleological modes of explanation in understanding nonhuman animals not because I recognize that they and I share an ontological region, “life,” but because I constitute them as possessing abilities that I possess, but privatively or in modified form. (Crowell 2014, 35) This does not rule out the possibility of providing a third-personal description of our biological constitution and of finding similarities with the biological capacities of other animals or such construal of the evolutionary

186  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder history of our own rational capacities, but such a description would be irrelevant for an account of intentionality and intentional agents proper. As he argues against the project of genetic phenomenology, [Husserl] believes that he is entitled to the idea that the sense, ‘human being’, carries with it reference to natural kinds—not merely in some culturally relative sense in which the pre-given world contains various familiar ‘types’ of organism, but in the strict sense of scientific naturalism. . . . But the importation of this sort of third-person assumption into transcendental phenomenology is pernicious, because it makes it seem as though the pre-personal processes characteristic of consciousness conceived as a natural function could somehow be ‘reconstructed’, in the absence of first-person evidence, as constitutive abilities of transcendental subjectivity. (Crowell 2012b, 41, our emphasis) However, this seems to conflict with the project of philosophical empiricism to which Crowell claims to be committed. Even if Crowell is right that those pre-personal processes cannot per se be identified with rational intentional abilities—i.e., that first-personal endorsement cannot be eschewed—that does not mean that the description of those contingent, psychological and biological features becomes irrelevant, nor does it mean that our self-understanding as humans is philosophically irrelevant for our concept of ourselves. As we have argued elsewhere, given the contingency of the starting point, the question concerning rational grounding becomes all the more pressing. Such a question would take the following form: how can the norms that govern rationality, the very norms that can be first-personally endorsed, actually inform the behavior of contingent, factual and concrete subjects? How can they inform their bodily movements, their passive associations, their attentional shifts? (Ainbinder forthcoming) Crowell argues that describing such contingent features of our makeup and natural history would amount to abandoning the point of view of contentful—objective and first-personal—intentionality. Thus, in his view those features do not belong to an account of intentionality proper. To include them would just mean changing the topic of discussion entirely. But to follow this path is to end up with a new version of the gap between first and second nature which we found in McDowell’s and Davidson’s work, making it impossible to place agents in natural history and in relations of natural continuity with (other) animals. Specifically, it leaves us unable to describe the intermediate steps between agents that are capable of first-personal responsibility and those who are not. As a consequence

Normativity With a Human Face 187 of this lack of adequate vocabulary—a particular form of the characterization problem—we are left without the resources for making sense of the connections between normatively contentful first-personal attitudes and the rest of nature. In his way of setting things out, again, this characterization problem leads to a “connection problem”: the mental as firstpersonal assessable and the natural are forever divided. This precludes the possibility of describing human rationality as located in nature, thus leading to an emergence problem as a particular instance of the connection problem. If this is the case, then the Husserlian project of a phenomenological description of the natural origin of our cognitive capacities and of the relevance of our biological makeup—i.e., instincts, affects, and certain features of embodiment—for rational contentful intentionality cannot get off the ground, and, as we have seen, the project of placing rationality in nature, and nature in the space of reasons, remains unfinished and fundamentally incomplete. Crowell’s motivation for opening up the gap derives directly from his understanding of the phenomenological method: any form of intentionality is thought to be available to first-person reflection and evidential fulfillment. Any attempts to characterize alternative forms of intentionality would be inferential or speculative, beyond the reach of phenomenological clarification grounded on first-person evidence.8 As a consequence, he leaves no room for features of intentionality that are not first-personally accessible.9 In sum, McDowell and Crowell both rule out placing rational agents in nature. In McDowell’s case this was because conceptual capacities cannot be given a genetic understanding along the lines that evolutionary theory privileges. In Crowell’s case, this is because of the unique character of rational beings’ “form of life” and the way this is given to us in the form of practical identities, and its incommensurability with (other) animals’ forms of life. We believe that the distinctive character of normative intentional capacities emphasized by Crowell and McDowell can be maintained while simultaneously elucidating how these capacities can be placed in nature, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. There is indeed a strategy available that could reintroduce intentional agents into the natural world without reducing the space of reasons to that of nature and thereby changing the topic altogether. It consists not in reducing normative contentful intentionality, the kind proper to the space of reasons, to simpler forms of intentionality—for example those governed by biological norms—but rather in providing the genetic and ontogenetic origins of such capacities by having recourse to different capacities, tools, and platforms, such as social practices that contribute to their emergence and maintenance (see Hutto and Satne 2015; Satne and Salice forthcoming; Rouse 2015; Okrent 2017). But, to do so, we would need first to overcome a crippling assumption that underlies the characterization

188  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder problem in its different forms, the very same assumption that is behind Haugeland’s claim quoted at the beginning of this chapter, i.e., “to have intentionality is to have (semantic) content” (Haugeland 1990, 384). This is the idea that intentionality comes only in one form. This is a uniformity assumption: that all intentionality is unified by a defining feature—propositional form in the case of Davidson, conceptual structure in McDowell’s view, and first-personal responsibility by Crowell’s lights. The problem with this assumption is that “restricting intentionality to a small domain [characterized by a defining feature], one proper to intentional agents . . . is the royal road to conceiving of intentional patients in mere ‘as if’ terms [Crowell’s privative approach, Haugeland’s ersatz intentionality]” (Hutto and Satne 2015, 532). If intentionality is uniquely identified with a privileged kind of intentionality under whatever of the descriptions that is preferred, the characterization problem immediately arises and with it the connection and emergence problems that are linked to it, leading to the impossibility of properly placing intentional agents in nature. For even if McDowell, Crowell, and Davidson acknowledge the intelligence of certain nonhuman animals, they claim that any such ascription of intelligence would require speculation on our part about the kind of thinking that is available to them, something that could not be grounded either in radical interpretation and ascription—as Davidsonian methodology suggests—or by means of the first-personal methods of phenomenology—as Crowell’s account recommends. This being the case, our own biological nature becomes a matter of speculation. In the next section, we claim that in order to place intentional agents in nature—i.e., to illuminate the role played by our biological constitution in our intentional capacities and to bring to light their developmental and phylogenetic roots—we need to make room for many different forms of intentionality, overcoming the characterization problem, i.e., the conclusion that forms of intentionality that do not belong to the privileged kind cannot be properly characterized. This involves dropping the uniformity assumption. Assuming, on the contrary that (1) there are different kinds of intentionality, this is something that Davidson, Crowell, and McDowell seem to acknowledge while at the same time claiming that we somehow fail to adequately account for them; and (2) all such forms cannot be unified by identifying some core common features they all exhibit. As we argued, the uniformity thesis that makes intentionality the “exclusive province of semantic content” is problematic. In fact, its endorsement is the main reason why one is led to assume the impossibility of placing agents in nature. Once we remove such an assumption, we claim that there is no remaining obstacle in reconciling the rational with the natural. This requires showing how understanding “life” in a non-metaphysical phenomenological way makes room for “forms of life” in the plural and showing why acknowledging that normative contentful capacities cannot

Normativity With a Human Face 189 be reduced to anything else does not imply that our proposal falls prey to the characterization problem that haunted other theories.

Pluralizing Intentionality, Pluralizing Life The first step toward a rehabilitation of empiricism capable of accounting for the biological nature of intentional agents is revising the notion of nature as it was thematized by Sellars. On Sellars’s account, first nature is characterized on the model of one particular natural science, physics, in which phenomena fall under nomological generalizations proper to scientific natural laws. It comes as no surprise then that nature so characterized cannot encompass facts of meaning and first-personal responsibility. In recent years, a number of philosophical naturalist projects10 have challenged that picture of nature, claiming that nature should be thought of as including values, interests, and consciousness; that is, that facts in nature are facts of experience, not of physics. In the same vein, relaxed naturalism (see Hutto and Satne 2015, 2017) claims that the philosophical agenda for a naturalist should not be concerned with reducing facts of meaning to the restricted domain of the natural sciences—that is, to facts to be found in biology, chemistry, and ultimately physics—but that its aim should rather be to clarify the nature of some explanandum—for example, intentionality—by investigating it in a way that draws on and seeks to harmoniously integrate the findings of a wide range of relevant empirical sciences, including anthropology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, cognitive and phenomenological psychology, cognitive archaeology, and so on. The relevant point to note is that Relaxed Naturalists do not unnecessarily restrict the tools by which those illuminating explanatory connections might be forged, and by this token they allow social and normative facts along with those explored by the relevant empirical sciences in their account of nature. Importantly, relaxed naturalists do not divide up nature into two realms, but rather seek to integrate facts of nature studied in different sciences, including physics, into one single unified reality, in which these are harmoniously integrated (Hutto and Satne 2017, 2018). Once the conception of nature is broadened in this way, it becomes possible to show how intentional agents can be thought to be part of nature. It becomes possible, for example, to tell a developmental story about how children are initiated into social practices in which they learn how to follow norms from others: they became enculturated and initiated into narratives in terms of which they make sense of themselves, others, and the world around them. At the same time, the phylogeny of the rational capacities required to engage in the training of mind-shaping practices can be addressed in this framework by reflecting on the evolution of culture and cooperation in the evolutionary trajectory of hominids (see Tomasello 2014; Sterelny 2012; Rouse 2015; Haugeland 1998b).

190  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder The central idea behind that explanatory strategy is that the space of reasons can be thought to be “extensionally equivalent to our discursive biological niche” (Rouse 2015, 158; see also Satne and Salice forthcoming). This approach holds that we can only make sense of contentful normative intentionality in the context of shared forms of life in which social norm compliance is developed, maintained, and stabilized through shared practices. Such practices are not only based on our shared biology but on social engagements and cultural devices that evolved over time, especially linguistic tokens, the primary bearers of semantic content. Accordingly, the capacity to have contentful normative intentionality depends essentially on engaging in sociocultural practices in which biologically inherited capacities are scaffolded in open-ended ways. As is apparent, this view shares much with McDowell’s and Crowell’s views of rational subjects, but it differs crucially from them on two counts. First, as opposed to McDowell’s view, in this account the emergence of second nature is not a mystery and no commitment to an explanatory or evolutionary gap follows, for nature is not divided up into two realms. In a story like this, it is possible to describe the empirical makeup of the subjects as biologically and psychologically constrained by interactions with the world and other beings, a world where sophisticated intentional agents coexist along with other creatures intending the same shared natural world. These forms of life can be intelligibly described as succeeding each other in phylogeny, leading to human forms of life. These last are characterized by mutual engagements in which different agents respond to each other and the world rationally in the context of naturally evolved sociocultural practices and this is where practical identities have their proper milieu. It is in this sense that our form of life is properly called human, and not merely that of a rational agent, in that it appears to itself as situated and contextual, itself conditioned by instincts, by the body, and by the biological constitution that comes with it. This takes us to the second way in which this view differs from McDowell’s, and to the key distinction that separates Crowell’s account of intentionality from our own. Namely, to allow for a variety of forms of intentionality that are not unified by a set or a single common feature. Some of these are contentfully normative—involving the ability to grasp truth-evaluable contents—while some, more basic, are characterized by mere intentional directedness and the ability to respond to the environment in intelligent ways without apprehending it in terms of truth and falsity or being subject to first-personal assessment and responsibility. Furthermore, primitive kinds of intentionality—such as simple forms of social cognition and perceptual experiences of a basic non-linguistically permeated kind, lacking the normative contentfulness of conceptual intentionality, give a platform for the sort of engagement with others that leads and has led humans to construe and inherit sociocultural discursive niches in the context of which practical identities and full-fledged

Normativity With a Human Face 191 norm-following develops and unfolds (Satne forthcoming). Having said this, there is still one final obstacle to overcome to allow for such pluralism about intentionality. That is showing that our proposal does not fall prey to the characterization problem, thus answering the question of how are we in the position to describe these different forms of intentionality, some of which are not contentful or even accessible in the first person. Following Wittgenstein, we propose to embrace the idea that “forms of life,” or “life-forms” in Thompson’s terms (2007, 2017), come in many varieties and that intentional capacities can be understood contextually in connection with such life forms. More importantly, and in contrast to McDowell’s and Crowell’s views, each of these domains is not defined by a common feature but rather there are a number of different activities and capacities that are part and parcel of a “form of life.” Thus, as Wittgenstein says in PI 23 and PI 25, requesting, thanking, cursing, and greeting are practices of our forms of life as are eating, walking, and playing. These very different activities “hang together” as part of our form of life. Furthermore, what makes it possible to understand other animals as intentionally directed to the world, albeit sometimes in a different way than ours, is that their capacities are also contextually situated in complex pattern of activities, some of which they share with us. This, we claim, is a fact that is exhibited in our own experience in our life-world. This claim does not however involve a commitment to the idea of “an ontological region ‘life’ ” that we share with other animals, a “metaphysics of life” and the associated third-personal methodology that grounds it, that Crowell (2016, 230) rightly rejects. The idea of “form of life” does not refer to a metaphysical substratum, defined in terms of a fixed set of properties, properties that other animals and we share. Rather, we propose that “form of life” should be understood in terms of what Heidegger called a “mode of being,” which is not defined in terms of a set of properties but as a way in which a domain of beings and their properties are understood, specifying conditions for their individuation and recognition.11 Thus, “life” in our view, as in Crowell’s, is a phenomenological concept, not a metaphysical one. But even if such a pluralism of forms of life is granted, it is still true that in describing other forms of life, there is no alternative than to start from our own experience. We see the world from our own perspective and according to our own capacities for social interaction and cognition. But, crucially, this does not entail the impossibility of cognizing other forms of life or our own as belonging to natural history along with such other forms. This is because one’s own form of life appears as one among many others of which one might have more or less understanding, and more or less in common. These facts of experience can be further studied by a number of different sciences and at different levels of complexity, uncovering similarities and lineages that are not first-personally accessible. This is the methodological recommendation of relaxed naturalists

192  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder who seek a unified conception of reality that is jointly construed by the different sciences, as well as from the point of view of philosophy. In sum, on this view, there is no impossibility of placing intentional agents in natural history and accounting for our own biological and psychological nature, for the latter are part of our own nature as we experience it, something that we can further explore with the tools of different natural sciences. Pursuing this path that we have developed within the framework of relaxed naturalism allows one to place humans in nature together with other animals while nonetheless maintaining the uniqueness of the kind of engagement that we, as animals who have normative self-understanding, enjoy.

Notes 1 McDowell characterizes this move as two-fold, involving both placing reasons in nature and allowing experience into the space of reasons (McDowell 1996, xv ff). Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in quotations reproduce the original. 2 See Crowell 2010, 160, who follows Travis 2007, 227. 3 Unfortunately, McDowell does not further elaborate on how such nonpropositional yet still conceptual capacities function. This should come as no surprise, since as Crowell rightly notices, “McDowell is relatively uninterested in explaining how conceptual capacities can be drawn on in receptivity. His aim is therapeutic rather than constructive” (Crowell 2013, 127). 4 Crowell draws on Brandom’s inferentialism to coin his own concept of quasiinferentialism. Nevertheless, unlike Brandom’s inferentialism, Crowell’s quasi-inferentialism makes room for first-personal access to such normative relations. For the lack of a distinctive first-personal dimension in Brandom’s inferentialism, see Rödl 2010. 5 This is, indeed, what grounds Husserl’s genetic interest in instincts and preegological strata in the constitution of the self. See Ainbinder forthcoming for an argument along these lines and against Crowell’s negative reading of genetic phenomenology. 6 Crowell attributes such an assumption both to those, such as Searle, who hold “that the mind (consciousness) is intrinsically intentional and that it is in some sense nothing but the brain” and to those who look “for the emergence of intentionality in the evolutionary explanation of the organism and its behavior more generally” (Crowell 2012 b, 37n17). 7 In Crowell’s words, “one might imagine that the for-the-sake-of [i.e., the kind of responsiveness to norms proper to practical identities] belongs to the teleological structure of animal action. But this would be wrong. Instead, the for-the-sake-of corresponds to practical identity” (Crowell 2007, 5). 8 We are grateful to Matthew Burch and Irene McMullin for pushing on this point. 9 It is worth noticing that Crowell’s insistence on the first-personal character of phenomenological inquiry is not directly related to the problem of Evidenz (if we understand this in verificationist terms) but rather to the problem of responsibility; facts of experience are facts to which we are responsive and for which we are responsible. It is in these terms that Crowell defines the firstpersonal character of phenomenological inquiry (see Crowell 2007).

Normativity With a Human Face 193 10 In particular, enactivist projects of a phenomenological kind: see e.g., Varela, Rorsch, and Thompson 1992; Nöe 2004. 11 For a way of understanding Heidegger’s “mode of being” in this sense, see Ainbinder, under review.

References Ainbinder, B. Forthcoming. “Questions of Genesis and Questions of Validity: Husserl’s Answer to an Old Kantian Problem.” In Husserl, Kant and Transcendental Philosophy, edited by Iulian Apostolescu and Claudia Serban. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. Under review. “Modes of Being and Substance Templates: Heidegger Meets Millikan.” Burge, T. 2010. The Origins of Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2007. “Phenomenology and the First-Person Character of Philosophical Knowledge.” Modern Schoolman 84 (January and March): 131–48. ———. 2008. “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism.” Synthese 160 (3): 335–54. ———. 2010. “Transcendental Logic and Minimal Empiricism: Lask and McDowell on the Unboundedness of the Conceptual.” In Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel, and Sebastian Luft. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012a. “The Normative in Perception.” In Contemporary Kantian Metaphysics, edited by R. Baiasu, G. Bird, and A. W. Moore. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012b. “Transcendental Phenomenology and the Seductions of Naturalism: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Meaning.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. “Husserl’s Subjectivism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, 147–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. “Transcendental Life.” In Phenomenology and the Transcendental, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Tiemo Miettinen. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016. “We Have Never Been Animals: Heidegger’s Posthumanism.” Ëtudes Phénomenologiques 1. Davidson, D. 1997–2001. “The Emergence of Thought.” In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haugeland, J. 1990. “The Intentionality All-Stars.” Philosophical Perspectives 4: 383–427. ———. 1998a. “Understanding Natural Language.” In Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, 47–61. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998b. “Truth and Rule-Following.” In Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, 305–61. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Husserl, E. 1974. Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Edited by Paul Janssen. The Hague: M. Nijhoff/ Kluwer = Hua XVII.

194  Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder ———. 1975. Logische Untersuchungen: Erster Teil. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage. Edited by Elmar Holenstein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. = Hua XVIII. ———. 1976. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. = Hua VI. Hutto, D., and G. Satne. 2015. “The Natural Origins of Content.” Philosophia 43 (3). ———. 2017. “Demystifying Davidson: Radical Interpretation Meets Radical Enactivism.” Argumenta (5) (November). ———. 2018. “Wittgenstein in the Goldilocks Zone.” In Wittgenstein and Naturalism, edited by Kevin Cahill and Thomas Raleigh, 56–76. London: Routledge. McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. “Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective.” In The Engaged Intellect. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nenon, T. 2008. “Some Differences Between Kant’s and Husserl’s Conceptions of Transcendental Philosophy.” Continental Philosophy Review 41 (4): 427–39. Noë, A. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Putnam, H. 1992. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Okrent, M. 2017. Nature and Normativity. Biology, Teleology and Meaning. London: Routledge. Rödl, S. 2010. “Brandom’s Theory of the Mind.” In Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit, edited by Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer. London: Routledge. Rouse, J. 2015. Articulating the World. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Satne, G. Forthcoming. “Between Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality: The Role of Shared Activities in the Emergence of Human-Specific Cognitive Capacities.” In Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality, edited by L. Koreň, H. B. Schmid, P. Stovall, and L. Townsend. Springer, Philosophy of Sociality Series. Satne, G., and A. Salice. Forthcoming. “Shared Intentionality and the Cooperative Evolutionary Hypothesis.” In Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency, edited by A. Fiebich. Springer. Sterelny, K. 2012. The Evolved Apprentice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stich, S. 1990. The Fragmentation of Reason. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Thompson, M. 2007. Life and Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2017. “Formen der Natur: erste, zweite, lebendige, vernünftige und phronetische.” In Selbstbewusstes Leben, edited by Andrea Kern and Christian Kietzmann. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Tomasello, M. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Travis, C. 2007. “Reason’s Reach.” The European Journal of Philosophy 15 (2): 225–48. Varela, F., E. Thompson, and E. Rorsch. 1992. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

11 World-Articulating Animals Joseph Rouse

Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927/1962) took a distinctive place amidst philosophical debates over intentionality through the work of Hubert Dreyfus (1991) and many of his former students.1 Drawing primarily upon Division I of Sein und Zeit, Wittgensteinian accounts of rule-­ following within forms of life, and Merleau-Pontyan conceptions of bodily intentionality, these interpretations presented the skillful use of equipment to fulfill roles specified within social practices as paradigmatic of intentional comportment. Conformity to what “one” does establishes norms for equipmental kinds, their proper use, and their place within a social world and institutes possible ways for human beings to understand themselves by projecting into those possibilities. This anti-mentalistic conception of intentionality gave priority to practical abilities to cope with meaningful situations rather than cognitive or linguistic representations of objects. Practical coping was not referentially opaque, but was aspectual and normative, since skillful practice engages things themselves, which still can resist these practical comportments. Language, conceptual articulation, and rationality became derivative phenomena, founded upon skillful coping with changing circumstances, and arose in response to the partial breakdown of practical engagements. Explicit articulation in language contributes to initial skill acquisition, but genuine expertise transcends mere conformity to what one does. Experts can break established or articulated rules or norms through skillful responsiveness to a situation and resolute openness to possible breakdown of a whole practice or way of life. Such resolute responsiveness also enables creative disclosure of new worlds—whole structures of significantly interrelated equipment, skills, roles, and existential possibilities. Recent scholarship significantly revises those readings of Sein und Zeit, while building upon and acknowledging indebtedness to them. John Haugeland and his fellow travelers both accepted and contributed to Dreyfus-inspired readings of Division I, while treating that account as necessary but seriously insufficient for intentional directedness.2 Division II decisively contributes to Heidegger’s understanding of intentionality, without which the Division I account presents only an inadequate

196  Joseph Rouse simulacrum of intentional directedness. Conformist skills let individual performances and skills be accountable to socially instituted practices or norms, but foreclose holding them accountable to entities themselves or any other normative measure. In Crowell’s (2013) Kantian terms, Division I shows human beings acting mostly in accord with socially generated norms, but cannot understand acting in light of norms. In Haugeland’s (2013) terms, social practices and social worlds would not be beholden to entities themselves, and hence not intentionally directed toward those entities unless they could be held accountable to them. These readings present the liminal possibility of a breakdown of skillful, socially meaningful involvement in the world, manifest in Angst, existential death, and the call of conscience, as indispensable to genuinely normative engagement with the world. Steven Crowell (2013, 2014, 2017a, 2017b) is an important contributor to renewed emphasis on Heidegger’s second division, with concomitant rejection of social conformity and expertise as sufficient for intentionality. Crowell eloquently defends an essential role for first-personal normative uptake in allowing action in light of norms. He also radically reinterprets Heidegger’s treating of how rationality and reason-giving figure in normative accountability. Crowell shows that Heidegger does not diminish reason’s role in normativity, but instead explicates how reasoning acquires its role. Contra Kant, reason is not self-authorizing, and hence itself needs grounding. Crowell succinctly summarizes Heidegger’s conception of reason’s lack of self-sufficiency: Heidegger’s great achievement in Being and Time is to have demonstrated that care is prior to reason—that homo cura is more fundamental than the animale rationale.  .  .  . A  further condition on intentionality is provided by Division II’s account of subjectivity as inwardness, conscience as first-person self-awareness. . . . [M]eaning, intelligibility, requires something like the capacity for reason, and conscience is the origin of this capacity. (2013, 184) Heidegger accounts for the existential sources of normativity, thereby securing the place of reasoning, language, and conceptual capacities in human life. Crowell couples the normative force of reason with another Heideggerian theme by radically disconnecting intentionality from the biological continuity between humans and other animals. Neither Heidegger nor Crowell deny that human beings are animals, biologically. They instead deny any role for biological continuity in understanding intentional directedness and normative accountability. The “Dasein in us,” the existential possibility of acting in light of norms within the normative grip of

World-Articulating Animals 197 reason, is conceptually independent of its biological realization in Homo sapiens as a lineage evolved from primate ancestors. As organisms, we are animals and primates, but the Dasein in us, the capacity to act in light of norms, including reasons, is not and has never been a characteristic of our animality. I aim to disconnect these two aspects of Crowell’s reading of Heidegger. Crowell does not render our discursive normativity and our animality incommensurable, but instead enables their reconciliation. Crowell’s reasoning for disconnecting discursive normativity and animality is dialectical, criticizing linkages of animality to normativity from Carey Wolfe’s deconstructive post-humanism (Crowell 2017b) to Christine Korsgaard’s Aristotelian Kantianism (Crowell 2013, Ch. 11), against the background of Heidegger’s (1995) own differentiation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world from animals’ relations to their environments. His arguments only support his general conclusion if those views are adequate conceptions of how animality bears on intentionality and normativity, and Wolfe, Korsgaard, and Heidegger each partially miss the mark in this respect. I will not directly criticize his interlocutors, but instead proceed constructively. Recent developments in evolutionary biology show how capacities for reason-giving and intentional directedness on Crowell’s Heideggerian conception can be understood biologically as an evolutionary novelty within our primate lineage. The chapter proceeds in four parts. I first review the structure of human life as being-in-the-world developed in Division I of Sein und Zeit. I then summarize Crowell’s account of conscience as origin of a capacity for reason and its normative grip. The third section presents considerations he draws from his discussions of Wolfe, Korsgaard, and Heidegger’s reflections on the being of humans and nonhuman animals. The final section reconciles our animality and “the Dasein in us” as a conception of discursively articulated normativity.

The Social-Pragmatic Conditioning of Intentionality and Normativity Heidegger’s Division I presents human beings amidst a plurality of interconnected, existentiell worlds.3 Entities show up as already meaningfully situated within various possible projects and their constitutive tasks, as equipment, materials, obstacles, threats, “junk,” or absences, or as “others” for whom tasks and roles are intelligibly assigned and taken up. Their spatial array also acquires significance, as things are close at hand or out of reach, within walking distance, on the grid, conveniently situated, or out of the way. Other entities, including environmental features such as rivers, wildlife, or seasonal diurnal patterns, mathematical entities such as numbers, shapes, or functions, or scientifically intelligible

198  Joseph Rouse entities such as electromagnetic fields, genetic sequences, or tectonic plates, proximately show up as significant within these interconnected worlds. Heidegger characterizes their interrelatedness as an “in-order-tofor-the-sake-of” structure, oriented toward ways of living a human life as their “for-the-sake-of-which.” Possible ways to be are always already laid out for us as occupations, social relationships, religious practices, recreational pursuits, artistic engagements, cultural patterns, and more.4 We encounter these possibilities in how others live intelligibly around us and as projects we ourselves worked through previously, now inhabit, or aim toward. Roles show up as open to anyone, and in taking them up, we do so as anyone else does, even in how we partially differentiate ourselves. In taking up everyday engagements, we are not “I-myself,” but an “anyone-self,” a concatenation of publicly available roles in which we are what we do, and what we do is regulated and guided by “what one does.” The world, wherein these various existentiell worlds interpenetrate, has a normative structure, displaying what things are for, how to use them, how to take up roles, and what differences it makes to get these matters right or wrong and succeed or fail in carrying them out. This normative structure is sustained by people’s concern for whether and how they differ from others (Abständigkeit) and constant monitoring of self and others to keep differentiation acceptably bounded. People always find themselves “thrown” into the world, not just as already situated by current circumstances and prior involvements, but in having to live their lives as so situated, outrunning their control or understanding.5 Heidegger thus emphasizes the unity of thrownness and projection: people must always “press into” the possible ways to be into which they are thrown. Projection presses into possibilities, both because people can never securely be in their terms—I am a philosopher or a friend only to the extent that I respond to what those roles’ constitutive commitments make salient—and because what those possibilities demand and how to project into them is never settled but always at issue. Human life not only sustains its intelligibility as thrown projection in each case, but also lets other entities be accountable to and intelligible through the significances and saliences showing up within the world. Entities are thereby disclosed amidst possibilities for making sense and mattering, and for Heidegger, human life is this disclosedness. Disclosedness is a dynamic tension between opening worlds as fields of intelligibility, and closing off and falling away from those openings by understanding itself in terms of its roles, discoveries, and normative structure taken as given. Division I concludes with the unification of human being-in-theworld as an affective, discursively articulated ability-to-be, whose disclosedness is ahead-of-itself-amidst-entities-as-already-in-a-world. It is not surprising that Dreyfus and others regard this conception of intentionality, normativity, and meaningfulness as compelling.

World-Articulating Animals 199

Conscience, Responsibility, and Reason-Giving Crowell, Haugeland, Blattner, Withy, and others nevertheless argue that the disclosedness of human life in its everydayness as articulated in Division I is insufficient as a broadly social-pragmatic conception of intentionality.6 These structures of everyday human life are themselves inflected and constituted in their normative solicitation and uptake by the possibility of breakdown of our worldly involvements. Division II articulates this liminal phenomenon of “existential death” as the possible impossibility of any possible ways to be, affectively manifest in Angst and discursively articulated by an individuating call of conscience. The normative force of worldly involvements, their affective manifestation, their reasoned articulation, and the selfhood of the “anyone-self” responsive to them depend upon the possibility of resolute openness to breakdown in being-towarddeath, readiness-for-Angst, and wanting-to-have-a-conscience. The nullity (Nichtigkeit, “not-ness”) of human life is proximally disclosed in Angst, which also methodologically enables Heidegger’s philosophical reflection on the sense of being (Withy 2012). We are not identical with any worldly possibilities, since none is inexorable or obligatory, and in Angst, all lose any normative grip. A whole world of significant possibilities and affordances remains accessible and recognizable, but not as possibilities that matter, real possibilities for me. This slipping away of significance in Angst is existential death, the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all” (Heidegger 1927/1962, 262/307). Existential death individualizes: we find ourselves amidst the usual possibilities available to anyone, but not to me. Existential death is a way of living, distinct from the perishing of an organism or the demise of a socially recognized or biographical person. In existential death, I cannot be anything in particular, but still have to be. Crowell emphasizes the resulting self-disclosure as “pure possibility” apart from any specific practical identity, thereby throwing me back upon the naked “I-myself.” This affectively manifest understanding of nullity is discursively articulated by the call of conscience, which Crowell presents as the transcendental/ontological condition for encountering normative force, and hence also for ordinary senses of “conscience.” This call addresses the “I-myself” from its immersion in various public practical projects.7 Heidegger characterizes what one is “given to understand” in this call as “schuldig!” (1927, 262, 1962, 307), in its dual sense of “guilty” and “responsible.” We are always already guilty, because we encounter the normative salience and force of our multiple practical entanglements: answering to any normative demand always forsakes others, which nevertheless still claim us. We are also disclosed as responsively responsible for the force of these claims: none claim us intrinsically, but do so instead by our hearing and acknowledging those claims as binding.8 We are thrown into a welter of normative significances for anyone, and hear

200  Joseph Rouse and acknowledge those that “authentically” claim me as my own (in each case) by projecting into their normatively significant possibilities. Heidegger describes the discursive character of a resolutely owned response to this call as “reticence,” because it silences the chatter of competing public demands to hear those that call me from out of my life. Heidegger characterizes the appropriate response to this call as resolutely taking over being the ground of a nullity.9 The ground of human being is our thrownness, having to project ourselves from our situation amidst possibilities and normative claims of a public world. That ground is a nullity both in that we are not and cannot be determinately identified with any of those possibilities, and that the “whence and whither” of so being is always obscure (Withy 2014). We take over being that ground in being responsively responsible for how some possibilities and their normative significance claim us (in each case). Both aspects are indispensable: if we were only responsible for commitments we choose or acknowledge, owned resoluteness would be indistinguishable from voluntaristic self-assertion; if we were only responsive to normative demands from elsewhere, these demands would be determinative rather than normative. The temporality of human existence allows for this middle ground, thrown projection, between empty freedom and externally imposed determinacy. The end, that for the sake of which my life is a standard that I can own up to or fail to do so, is its wholeness. My life is a whole only in death, not the event of dying, but the no-longer-being of my life as completed (Magid 2017). I am only in life, as being-toward-the-end. Originary temporality is the sense of being a self, as gathering my “beenness” (Gewesenheit), present involvements, and coming-toward-myself (Zu-kunft) as the end, as a non-sequential whole. I  “own” my life by acting for the sake of this non-transparent wholeness, as the end I have always been coming-toward. Crowell’s most distinctive contribution to understanding Division II as central to Heidegger’s conception of intentionality is his account of reason and reason-giving within this conception.10 Heidegger is often understood as irrationalist or arationalist. Crowell instead argues that Heidegger shows how reason and reason-giving take their characteristic place within the normativity and intentionality of human life. Reason is indispensable in human life, but it is not self-grounding. In this respect, Heidegger is heir to Kant and German idealism in putting at the center of inquiry how reason can itself be grounded (Beiser 1987). Heidegger’s answer, for Crowell, is that our capacity for reason and our practices of reasoning are grounded in our thrownness and the call of conscience to take over being that ground responsively and responsibly. Crowell’s account of the grounding of reason-giving in transcendental conscience (Kukla 2002) has two key elements. The first comes from Heidegger’s (1998, 1984) reading of Plato. When our for-the-sake-ofwhich is stripped down in Angst to pure possibility, all specific normative

World-Articulating Animals 201 contents from public life lose their grip, but we still remain oriented toward the idea tau agathou, the “idea of the Good [lying] beyond beings and ousia” as “for-the-sake-of-which” (Heidegger 1984, 184). Crowell argues that, in that context, To take over being-a-ground is to take factic grounds in light of the Good, that is, in light of measure as such (what is best). This does not mean that I  must “know” what the Good is, but only that to be Dasein is to be at stake or at issue in this distinctively normative sense. (Crowell 2013, 223) To take over responsibility for being-a-ground is thus “to stand toward my factic grounds as toward possibly justifying reasons” (2013, 222). The second element of Crowell’s argument concerns the implications of this normative orientation within the overall structure of Dasein’s being: [I]t is impossible to be accountable to myself without owing an account to others—and this for two reasons. First, since Dasein is essentially Mitsein, my relations to others are at stake even in breakdown, and all the more so when I re-engage the world resolutely. . . . And second, since to be accountable is to stand toward factic grounds as toward reasons, and since by their very structure reasons are (potentially) public, I cannot be accountable for myself without at the same time being accountable to others, indeed, to every other. (2013, 225) The discursive articulation of my owned ability to act toward what is better and worse, as at stake in the possibilities I take up resolutely, grounds practices of reason-giving in the care structure of Dasein’s what-being as existence and that-being as mineness.

Animality and “the Dasein in Us” Heidegger’s criticisms of Husserl and the neo-Kantians moved him closer to philosophical naturalism in rejecting appeals to transcendental consciousness, logical necessity, or other extra-worldly entities or structures apart from “factic grounds” arising within Dasein’s being-in-the-world.11 Heidegger nevertheless vehemently resisted naturalistic conceptions of philosophy or of human life, and explicitly argued against understanding being-in-the-world continuously with human biology. Crowell ardently defends this aspect of Heidegger’s anti-naturalism. He does so dialectically, engaging critically with prominent attempts to integrate the normativity of meaning and action with human animality. A  strength of Crowell’s presentation is his well-chosen interlocutors, even though he

202  Joseph Rouse never directly engages biological accounts of human animality, or intentionality as a capacity of human animals. Crowell’s (2017b) most extensive attempt to disengage “the Dasein in us” from animality critically compares Heidegger’s (1995) own treatment with Carey Wolfe’s (2008) “posthumanist” appropriation of autopoietic conceptions of life. The issue concerns whether to understand the world opened by human ways of life as our animal environment. On ecological-­ developmental (“autopoietic”) conceptions of life,12 an organism’s environment is not its physical surroundings, but only those aspects that matter to its physiology, development, behavior, and evolution. Richard Lewontin emphasizes this point: Every element in [an ornithologist’s] specification of the environment [of a bird species] is a description of activities of the bird. As a consequence of the properties of an animal’s sense organs, nervous system, metabolism, and shape, there is a spatial and temporal juxtaposition of bits and pieces of the world that produces a surrounding for the organism that is relevant to it. . . . It is, in general, not possible to understand the geographical and temporal distribution of species if the environment is characterized as a property of the physical region, rather than of the space defined by the activities of the organism itself. (Lewontin 2000, 52–3) Lewontin’s point also holds in reverse: every biologically significant organismic trait is a responsive interaction with some aspect or aspects of the organism’s environment, and neither organismic trait nor environmental feature is independently identifiable. Heidegger’s discussion of animality is best understood in these terms. He speaks of the things animals encounter and interact with as “disinhibiting” their “instinctual drives,” and concludes, The intrinsic self-encirclement [Sich-Einringen] of the animal . . . is precisely drawn about the animal in such a way that it opens up a sphere within which whatever disinhibits can do so in this or that manner. . . . [T]he animal surrounds itself with a disinhibiting ring which prescribes what can affect or occasion its behavior. Since this self-encirclement belongs to the animal, it always intrinsically bears its disinhibiting ring along with it and does so as long as it is alive. Or more precisely—the life of the animal is precisely the struggle [Ringen] to maintain this encircling ring or sphere within which a quite specifically articulated manifold of disinhibitions can arise. (Heidegger 1995, 255) Heidegger speaks only of behavior, and would need to treat physiology, neural processes, development, and evolution in similar ways. We

World-Articulating Animals 203 need not endorse such conceptualizations of animal life as “instinctual drives,” “disinhibition,” or “captivation,” however, to recognize continuities between Heidegger’s and ecological-developmental conceptions of organism/environment complexes. The crucial distinction for Heidegger and Crowell is the difference between animal environments and the existential-ontological conception of world, which divides other animals’ “access” to entities from human beings’ “openness.” Other animals do not encounter entities affecting them as entities, but only as solicitations of and affordances for their ways of life. Entities do not show up within nonhuman animal lives with an articulated “as” structure of meaningful disclosure, but as indications or initiations of organismic responses. We might think predators encounter potential prey as food, and prey in turn discover predators as threatening, but that imports our conceptual articulation of discrete functional components of their way of life. The issue concerns the locus and character of organismic normativity. Encountering an entity with a meaningfully articulated “as” structure lets its manifestation answer to norms of success and failure in those respects. We are inclined to see predators as trying to capture prey, and succeeding or failing, but that misleadingly isolates one aspect of the organism’s way of life. A lion that “fails” to catch a gazelle engages in a way of life arisen from selection pressures that sustained and reproduced this activity amidst organismic and environmental variation. Those selection pressures operate holistically on organismic phenotypes. Predatory behavior is under selection not only for successful metabolic provision, but also simultaneously for metabolic costs of chases and consumption, risks of debilitating injury, threats from other predators and parasites, cognitive demands of discrimination among potential targets, tradeoffs between metabolic provision and reproduction, developmental processes that produce these capacities and limitations, benefits and costs to kin, and much more. The only goal by which natural selection “measures” success and failure is the maintenance and reproduction of organisms and their lineages. This measure is entirely deictic: organisms develop and lineages evolve, but selection is indifferent to such change or its absence. The goal is the maintenance and reproduction of this organism/lineage/environment pattern in its changing but undifferentiated complexity. Distinctions can be appropriately drawn among organismic traits, environmental features, and their differential developmental and evolutionary significance, but that requires capacities for conceptual articulation and counterfactual assessment not belonging to organisms’ own cognitive repertoires.13 Such analyses answer to conceptual norms in the biological sciences, including conceptions of their scientific and heteronomic significance, and entanglement of normative and alethic modalities (Rouse 2015, Chs. 8–10). Crowell does not develop arguments along these lines, but he endorses the conclusion that organismic ways of life do

204  Joseph Rouse not direct themselves intentionally toward entities as entities, or normatively toward articulated measures of success or failure. Crowell then returns to his analysis of how the second division account is central to intentional directedness toward entities as entities. Although he does not put it this way, one could conceivably understand the kind of sophisticated social patterns laid out in Division I as a biologically emergent phenomenon. If they were not inflected by the liminal possibility of Angst/death/conscience, they might be biologically explicable, but not genuinely normative, because they would only accord with norms, but not act in light of norms. Crowell concludes that the normative significance conferred by this existential possibility makes “the Dasein in us” incommensurable with our animality: [Heidegger] calls this ability to be I-myself “being free in an originary sense” (1995, 343). Originary freedom is comportment guided not by the measures of some specific identity but by responsibility for measure as measure. Being responsible for being is what it is for there to be Dasein; it provides the “measure for all measurement” (346). For this reason, it is the basis upon which what is can appear as beings (beings as such). And to occupy this dimension of the as, of responsibility, explicitly—the fundamental comportment of originary freedom—is to “take upon ourselves the effort to transform human being . . . into a more originary existence: the Dasein in us” (350). (Crowell 2017b, 236) The Dasein in us has never been animal. Human beings are animals, and can and should be understood as such biologically, but the disclosedness of world that lets entities be has nothing to do with our animality. Even if disclosedness cannot be understood as a feature or aspect of our animality, our animal lives might still be an inseparable component of disclosedness, however. Crowell attributes that position to Christine Korsgaard’s (1996, 2009) Aristotelian Kantianism. For Korsgaard, human beings are essentially rational animals, and the integration of a capacity for rational reflection into our lives lets us be accountable to norms. Korsgaard treats the goal-directedness with respect to which success or failure is intelligible as arising from the self-maintaining form and functioning of animal life. She nevertheless agrees with Heidegger in regarding such functioning as “instinctual,” and hence only providing norms that animal life accords with. Acting in light of norms must be self-conscious and reflective. This capacity for reflection, which also imposes moral norms as conditions on consistently reflective agency, supposedly brings human life into a genuinely normative space of reasons. Crowell argues that Korsgaard’s effort to unify our animality with the capacity to act reflectively in light of norms fails, as symptomatic of a

World-Articulating Animals 205 more general problem. Korsgaard’s conception of our humanity, like Kant’s, is ambiguous. She treats our humanity both as a form of animality and as in opposition to animality. Reasoning is supposedly grounded in animal teleology, which contributes the goal-directedness that reason then redirects. Reasoning then also provides a distinctive practical identity, as human, which can oppose and override both animal desires or inclinations, and the contingent practical identities through which we express and fulfill them. Crowell regards this ambiguity as fatal: [Korsgaard’s] concept of person is itself internally bifurcated. As animal-plus-reflection, humanity is an unstable notion in which the “plus” oscillates between being a mark of identity and of irrecoverable breach. . . . By construing sensibility as teleological, instinctual animality, Korsgaard falls into a dilemma: “humanity” cannot be the name for its integration under the regime of reflection because reflection is what keeps it from functioning in its proper way, namely, as teleological and instinctual. There is no possibility of unifying the self in this model. Animality cannot be part of my humanity, yet is must be if the agent is to be unified as a person. (Crowell 2013, 254–5) Crowell concludes that Korsgaard’s account of normativity is thereby severed from animality and identified with reflection itself. He endorses the severance, but rejects her identifications of normativity with reflection and its outcome with substantive norms that compete with our everyday involvements. That yields an over-intellectualistic conception of agency, leaving no place for the unreflective involvements of everyday life. Crowell (2014) proposes that a more general problem underlies the failure of “additive” conceptions of rational animality, arising from efforts to integrate transcendental conditions on the possibility of meaning and truthfulness with metaphysical determinations of entities. In Korsgaard’s case, this problem arose in conceiving reflection as both a transcendental condition on normative responsibility and as grounds for substantive determinations of how one ought to act and live. More generally, Crowell argues, it shows up in the conflation of “transcendental life,” necessary conditions constituting meaningfulness and action in light of norms, with metaphysical conceptions of embodied life drawn from the sciences or philosophical anthropology. Crowell concludes that, Whatever ‘life’ means in the phrase ‘transcendental life’ must be determined from within the transcendental point of view itself. It cannot be borrowed from any of the polysemic uses one finds in the natural attitude or the “life of the plane”—whether from biology or cybernetics, or from ordinary, poetical, or metaphysical (e.g., Aristotelian)

206  Joseph Rouse conceptions of life and nature. Transcendental life will then be the ultimate basis upon which other notions of life can be determined. (Crowell 2014, 32) Crowell then concludes that efforts to ground normativity in contingent features of life reverse the appropriate order of explanation. We cannot begin with organismic teleology and understand the transcendental constitution of meaning on that basis. Although human life has indeed contingently evolved from other forms of animal life, both forms of biological life are only intelligible within a transcendentally constituted space of meaning and reasons. The more limited conceptions of normative accord that emerge from reflection on organismic functioning and evolutionary selection are inadequate simulacra of transcendental normativity: I can only think of phenomena of nontranscendental life as privations (or perhaps better: modifications) of my own transcendentally determined life. I  can employ teleological modes of explanation in understanding nonhuman animals not because I recognize that they and I  share an ontological region, “life,” but because I  constitute them as possessing abilities that I possess, but privatively or in modified form. (Crowell 2014, 35) Crowell reads Heidegger as committed to the autonomy of transcendental constitution from any empirical determination that was initiated by Kant and embraced by Husserl and the neo-Kantians. Heidegger’s achievement in articulating the priority of care to reason was only to carry out this project more consistently and adequately.

The Evolution of Normativity Without Normative Determinacy Several strategic routes could show where Crowell goes astray in defending a free-floating autonomy of transcendental constitution from empirical realization. Crowell’s account shares a dualistic pre-conception of nature and normativity with much of the 20th-century tradition we still inhabit, treating each domain in ways that render them irreconcilable (Rouse 2002, Chs. 1–7). Crowell’s reasoning also follows much of the tradition in seeking to ground normativity in some form of logical, nomological, or transcendental necessity. Such efforts founder on the “problem of manifest necessity” (Rouse 2002, Ch. 1), that is, how these alleged necessities become manifest in nature and history as authoritative over actual, contingent forms of life. The problem is not the epistemic issue of how we could recognize their authority as necessary for us, but the ontological character of this manifestation or “evidence,” as either itself a

World-Articulating Animals 207 necessary structure, or as instead a material-historical contingency. This problem shows up specifically in Crowell’s reading of Heidegger in the dual character of Angst both as a methodologically necessary precondition for philosophical reflection and as a mood that might contingently overtake us (Withy 2012). Crowell’s interpretation requires conflating these two distinct conceptions of Angst. These critical responses to Crowell do not suffice, however, for they invite renewed efforts to sustain the dualisms rather than abandon them. Hence, I shall pursue the different strategy of presenting in summary form a non-dualistic alternative, first developed in Rouse 2015, as constructively drawing upon many features of Crowell’s analysis. Crowell is an instructive interlocutor, precisely because he gets so much right. The strategy underlying this alternative conception of normativity is foreshadowed in three ways in light of Crowell’s reasoning. First, it is not an additive conception of human animality that would add rational reflection or “methodological Angst” onto an essentially unchanged animality, but is instead a contingent, transformative evolutionary novelty in our lineage. Second, it reverses Crowell’s transcendentalist strategy of grounding normativity in necessity, according priority instead to the temporal constitution of normativity as constitutive for how distinct forms of necessity are intelligibly manifest. Third, it reverses his conception of biological normativity as a “privative” diminution of supposedly transcendentally constitutive ways of acting “in light of” norms. The contingent evolution of human forms of life is instead integral to their normativity (Rouse 2015: epilogue). I begin with an ecological-developmental conception of biological normativity. Living organisms articulate and maintain boundaries between their ways of life and the environmental configurations that intra-actively matter to their continuation. The overlapping forms of individuation and interdependence of these intra-active patterns, as cells, multi-cellular complexes, endosymbioses, holobionts (Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 2012), lineages thereof, and ecosystems, are contingent complexities that emerge in life’s evolution. These intra-active processes are goal-directed and normative in working to sustain themselves in changing conditions, and can succeed or fail. Their goals are internal to the processes, and need not be reflectively articulated (Okrent 2007, Chs. 2–4). What is at issue in and for those processes is only whether they continue through their development, evolution, and niche constructive co-evolution. They thereby manifest themselves in retrospect as one-dimensionally normative: whether an organism lives or dies and its lineage continues or dies out is at issue in its developing, evolving way of life, but not how it changes or what it thereby becomes. As a pattern of intra-active differentiation, organisms and their lineages are “indifferent” to their own development and evolution. Amidst rapidly changing ecological conditions in Africa some millions of years ago a suite of evolutionary novelties emerged within a single

208  Joseph Rouse lineage of social primates. Biologists and philosophers offer alternative accounts of which capacities emerged first and/or were decisive, but many of these core components are more widely accepted: cooperative rather than merely coordinated social behaviors extending beyond kinship groups to larger fission-fusion bands; higher-fidelity social learning guided by active teaching and imitation; differentiated but interdependent toolkits; and protolinguistic and other forms of symbolically displaced expression, including images, rhythmic/tonal soundings, and dramatic performances.14 Crucial to understanding these phenomena is recognizing that they are not straightforwardly adaptive and would likely have been strongly selected against had they emerged in other lineages. An evolutionary account must show how those initial counter-selective pressures were overcome.15 Here I  set aside the evolutionary explication to consider how these emergent phenomena contribute to understanding conceptual normativity.16 To begin, these evolutionary novelties all involve partially autonomous practices. Their autonomy consists in the proximate accountability of their performances to other performances of the practice. Linguistic utterances are assessed for their iterative deployment of previously used expressions in conversational contexts. Equipment use is assessed within equipmental contexts that incorporate developed skills and assignments to tasks. Performances in other expressive repertoires build upon and respond to both their immediate “expressive” context and their familiarity with previous performances. These performances are only partially autonomous, however, because both the acquisition and exercise of the relevant skills, and the consequent continuation of the partially autonomous practice, are also assessed for their place in the overall way of life of individual organisms, kin-selective groups, and larger cooperative bands.17 The emergence of partially autonomous practices distinctively combines material and behavioral niche construction (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Rouse 2015). Niche construction encompasses how organisms change the selection pressures on their own and other lineages by changing their developmental and selective environments. Behavioral niche construction occurs when a behavioral pattern becomes integral to the developmental environment of subsequent generations, in ways that change the selection pressures affecting the reproduction of those behaviors. Integral to many of the practices that emerged as core novelties in the hominid lineage are vocative, ostensive, and recognitive performances that enable cooperative activities, joint attentiveness, corrective holding-accountable, and high-fidelity teaching and learning (Kukla and Lance 2009; Laland 2017). Human beings normally develop, and only develop normally, amidst vocatively, ostensively, and recognitively articulated social practices and equipmental complexes as integral and salient features of their developmental environments.

World-Articulating Animals 209 A crucial result of these developments is a constitutive interdependence among people’s performances. Socially coordinated animal behavior is only effective when appropriately coordinated. Social practices instead involve behaviors that are not only ineffective, but “unintelligible” unless appropriately aligned with what others do and their partly shared circumstances.18 Misalignments nevertheless arise, as people respond to past patterns of practice in different ways, according to different conceptions of what they are doing together, in sometimes recalcitrant circumstances. Facing misalignments, participants adjust their behaviors, rearrange the circumstances, remonstrate with others, or opt out. Issues arise wherever adjustments seem required, and what is at issue is both whether and how the practice continues. The emergence of discursive capacities allows participants to say what is at issue, but these articulative performances are integral to the practices themselves. People can participate in the same patterns of practice with different conceptions and expressions of what is at issue in one another’s ongoing responses to prior performances and current circumstances. Despite these differences, the practices still incorporate the current and projected performances of all participants along with their contested conceptions. The normativity of such practices is not a governance by shared, determinate norms. It is instead the temporally constituted mutual accountability of their performances and the practices themselves to the issues and stakes in whether and how that performative pattern continues or goes extinct. This conception of normativity without norms is the most important continuity between my ecological-developmental conception of human animality and Crowell’s reading of Heidegger on Dasein as being-in-theworld. For Heidegger, normativity is an ontological rather than an ontic matter. To talk about “norms” or “meanings” is thus to misunderstand Dasein’s disclosedness in terms of a relation to a special kind of entity. For Heidegger, Dasein is instead a thrown project whose being is always at issue. We find ourselves already thrown into some “abilities-to-be” (Seinkönnen) and not others, in a meaningful situation whose salient significance is responsive to how we press ahead into those possibilities. Both whether to continue in those roles, and what those roles would demand of us are not already determined, however, but are at issue in whether and how we take them up. If I am a parent or a teacher, what it is to be a (good) parent or teacher is not already determined but is continually worked out in how I take up those roles and respond to what they make salient in my situation. What I and others have been doing all along is at issue in those ongoing responses, along with what the practice and its roles and disclosures would thereby become. Dasein’s disclosedness is the space of intelligible possibility opened by our mutual involvement with one another in ongoing patterns of practice whose continuation and significance are not already determined, but are instead determinative of who and how we are.

210  Joseph Rouse The evolutionary emergence of discursively articulated practices constitutes this novel, two-dimensional mutual normative accountability without already-determinate norms. Whereas other organisms develop and evolve in ways whose only measure is whether life and lineage continue, our discursively articulated practices and their encompassing way of life introduce tradeoffs between whether they continue and what they “are” (encompassing both what they have been and how they continue). The same is true of the discursive practices in which we articulate those tradeoffs and their significance. These practices are partially interdependent, and people are also involved in different combinations of practices. Many misalignments arise because of those interdependences among practices and among people’s multiple involvements, and adjustments that sustain one practice may introduce new issues for other practices or in the lives of their participants. A  central issue that thereby arises within the lives of such organisms is how they respond to their multiple overlapping involvements. We can only live a human life by participating in practices and responding to the issues they raise, but what that way of life will be is part of what is at issue. Do we simply do “what one does” in each case, or are we attentive to what is at issue in their possibilities and conflicts, and how they matter? How we respond is also thereby at issue as a whole as well as in detail: do we take up the various demands willynilly as imposed by the practices across which our lives are dispersed, or do we take responsibility for those practices and their place in our lives as a whole, and thereby also for the issues constitutive for the practices we take up? I hope it is becoming clearer how the conception of normativity that Crowell discerns in Sein und Zeit characterizes the evolved, twodimensional normativity of human ways of life. The openness to measure that outruns any determinate conception of the good, grounded in the issue of whether we are responsively responsible to and for our own lives as a finite thrown projection, is the issue always confronting an animal whose evolved way of life is two-dimensionally normative. This reconception of the temporally constituted normativity of human life as a novel biological phenomenon also reconceives what it means to understand ourselves “naturalistically.” Crowell rightly objects to traditional naturalisms, which take the metaphysics of nature for granted and thereby treat its scientific conceptualization as transparent. Such transparency impossibly, and unnaturalistically, purports to characterize the world in which we are thrown as meaningful from a gods-eye view from “sideways on” (McDowell 1994), that is, independent of how that understanding finitely belongs to a human way of life whose disclosedness is a thrown projection. Crowell nevertheless treats the supposedly “transcendentally” necessary conditions for meaning in a similarly impossible, unsituated way. Neither natural nor transcendental necessities can be articulated or binding except as a thrown project that articulates the world from within. Such articulations express and commit to

World-Articulating Animals 211 what is at issue and at stake in sustaining the disclosedness of the twodimensionally normative way of life in which we find ourselves and have to make our way. These themes are partly developed in Rouse (2002, 2015). A  fuller explication of how “world” is integrally both natural and transcendental, articulating necessities bound to the normative issues arising within its finite disclosedness, must be left to other occasions.

Notes 1 Prominent works influenced along these lines by Dreyfus’s (1991) account of division one of Sein und Zeit include Guignon 1983; Richardson 1986; Haugeland 1982; Okrent 1988, Carman 2003; Wrathall 2011; Cerbone 2008; Schatzki 1996. 2 Along with Haugeland (2013), important contributions to this interpretive strategy include Crowell (2013, 2017a), Blattner (1994, 1999, 2015, 2017), Withy (2012, 2014, 2015, 2017), and Kukla (2002). 3 Heidegger describes existentiell worlds as “that ‘wherein’ a factical dasein as such can be said to live” (1927, 65/1962, 93); examples include the academic world, the business world, the world of a close-knit immigrant community, and an urban gay community’s world. 4 Magid (2015) compellingly shows that the proximate “for-the-sakes-ofwhich” of everyday life are not just “practical identities” such as occupations or social roles, but must also incorporate culturally distinct patterns of living that are widely shared among those whose practical identities differ. 5 Withy (2012) emphasizes how thrownness exceeds mere situatedness. 6 They do stand as an intelligible and defensible conception, but arguably neither Heidegger’s conception, nor an adequate conception. 7 Crowell claims that conscience addresses neither the anyone-self nor the owned (eigentlich) self, but “the hidden condition of both” (2013, 183). I  follow Blattner (2015, 120–4) in claiming that conscience is instead a call to my owned self from out of its public entanglements. This change does not affect Crowell’s account of conscience, rationality, and reason-giving discussed below. 8 Crowell himself sometimes follows Haugeland in characterizing our responsibility as a kind of “commitment” that “insists” upon holding itself to norms and thereby confers normative authority upon them. I  elsewhere (Rouse 2002, 256–9) object to the voluntarism of this account. At his best, however, Crowell also recognizes the responsiveness to a call that Haugeland’s formulation misses: “I acknowledge [normative claims upon me], feel their affective significance” (Crowell 2017a, 89), and “being the author of something is not the only way of being responsible for it; . . . taking responsibility for something is a response to a demand addressed to me” (Crowell 2015, 223). I do not think we disagree about the jointly constitutive roles of hearing/acknowledging the call and taking over that response responsibly for how normative authority grips us. 9 Owned existence is “appropriate” because, as Haugeland (2013) showed, both “what-being” and “that-being” are intelligible and normative, in the sense that one can succeed or fail at them. The what-being of human being is “existence,” its own being as at issue for it. Our that-being is “mineness,” the possibility of successfully holding our lives together as our own, such that we responsibly own up to that issue, or failing, in letting our lives be irresponsibly dispersed in publicness. An irresolute, unowned life is still a human life, in a deficient mode.

212  Joseph Rouse 10 Crowell argues that Heidegger demonstrates a crucial, first-personal role for subjectivity in division two. I follow Blattner (2015) in treating that claim as conflating selfhood with first-personality. There are, indeed, important roles for second- and first-personal address and uptake, but these concern the self as owned/“authentic.” Where Crowell assigns first-personal import as Heidegger’s contribution, I would assign that status to existential selfhood, being a “who” rather than a “what,” of which unowned dispersal in the anyoneself is a mode. 11 For extended accounts of Heidegger as a “fellow-traveler” with the mid-20thcentury turn toward naturalism in philosophy, see Rouse 2002, Ch. 1, 2007. 12 Crowell follows Wolfe’s characterization of life as “autopoiesis,” but the phenomenon is better understood as ecological-developmental, since the former term attributes a kind of autonomous self-making to an organism, which obscures its environmental dependence (Gilbert 2002; Haraway 2008, Ch. 1). Ecological-developmental biology explores this interdependence as the intra-active (Barad 2007) entwining of phenotypic plasticity and niche construction. 13 Mills and Beatty (1979) classically argue that evolutionary fitness and the traits that contribute to it cannot be understood in terms of actual reproductive outcomes, but must instead determine counterfactually robust propensities to contribute to reproductive success. 14 Prominent among many important contributors to this common core are Tomasello 2008, 2014; Bickerton 2009, 2014; Rouse 2015, Chs. 3–5; Sterelny 2012; Dor and Jablonka 2001; Laland 2017; Deacon 1997. 15 The principal reason they would be selected against is that these capacities require responding to performances by conspecifics not as indications of what to do in current circumstances, but as having symbolically displaced significance. Flexible, “intelligent” behaviors typically depend upon close attunement to possibly conflicting indications of what to do in current circumstances (Rouse 2015, Ch. 3–4). 16 For a more detailed exposition and justification of these claims, see Rouse 2015, Chs. 2–5, especially Ch. 5. Rouse 2015, Chs. 6–10, shows how to understand scientific practices and their conceptual normativity in these terms, including the scientific practices of evolutionary biology and social practice theory invoked in the earlier chapters. 17 Initially, that assessment occurs via natural selection. As partially autonomous discursive practices become firmly established, however, explicit choices are thereby made possible. 18 “Unintelligible” is in scare quotes because intelligibility is a normative issue that only emerges explicitly with conceptually articulative practices in place. Initially, the relevant behaviors would not just be performed differently without appropriate alignment with others’ performances and shared circumstances; these behaviors would not continue at all without sustaining mutual alignments, and so the continuation of a practice is at issue in whether and how its performances align.

References Adams, Zed, and Jacob Browning, eds. 2017. Giving a Damn. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the University Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beiser, Frederick. 1987. The Fate of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

World-Articulating Animals 213 Bickerton, Derek. 2009. Adam’s Tongue. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 2014. More Than Nature Needs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blattner, William. 1994. “The Concept of Death in Being and Time.” Man and World 27: 49–70. ———. 1999. Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Essential Guilt and Transcendental Conscience.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self, edited by Denis McManus, 116–34. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Anonymity, Mineness, and Agent Specificity.” Adams and Browning: 51–72. Carman, Taylor. 2003. Heidegger’s Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cerbone, David. 2008. Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. “Transcendental Life.” In Phenomenology and the Transcendental, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Marja Hartimo, and Timo Meittinen, 21–48. New York: Routledge. 2015. “Responsibility, Autonomy, Affectivity: A  Heideggerian ———.  Approach.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self, edited by Denis McManus, 215–242. New York: Routledge. ———. 2017a. “Competence Over Being as Existing: The Indispensability of Haugeland’s Heidegger.” Adams and Browning: 73–102. ———. 2017b. “We Have Never Been Animals: Heidegger’s Posthumanism.” Études Phénoménologiques/Phenomenological Studies 1: 217–40. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton. Dor, Daniel, and Eva Jablonka. 2001. “From Cultural Selection to Genetic Selection: A Framework for the Evolution of Language.” Selection 1: 33–56. Dreyfus, Hubert. 1991. Being-in-the-World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gilbert, Scott. 2002. “The Genome in Its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis.” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 981: 202–18. Gilbert, Scott, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber. 2012. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” Quarterly Review of Biology 87: 325–41. Guignon, Charles. 1983. Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haugeland, John. 1982. “Heidegger on Being a Person.” Nous 16: 15–26. ———. 2013. Dasein Disclosed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. English Translation 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1984. Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translated by M. Heim. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1995. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Translated by W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. “On the Essence of Ground.” In Pathmarks. Translated by William McNeill, 97–135. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

214  Joseph Rouse Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Self-Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kukla, Rebecca. 2002. “The Ontology and Temporality of Conscience.” Continental Philosophy Review 35: 1–34. Kukla, Rebecca, and Mark Lance. 2009. Yo! And Lo! Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laland, Kevin. 2017. Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewontin, Richard. 2000. The Triple Helix. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Magid, Oren. 2015. “Beyond the Tools of the Trade: Heidegger and the Intelligibility of Everyday Things.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 53: 450–70. ———. 2017. “Heidegger on Human Finitude: Beginning at the End.” European Journal of Philosophy 25: 657–76. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mills, Susan, and John Beatty. 1979. “The Propensity Interpretation of Fitness.” Philosophy of Science 46: 263–86. Odling-Smee, John, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman. 2003. Niche Construction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Okrent, Mark. 1988. Heidegger’s Pragmatism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. Rational Animals. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Richardson, John. 1986. Existential Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rouse, Joseph. 2002. How Scientific Practices Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science.” In A Companion to Heidegger, edited by H. L. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall, 173–90. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2015. Articulating the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schatzki, Theodore. 1996. Social Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sterelny, Kim. 2012. The Evolved Apprentice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Withy, Katherine. 2012. “The Methodological Significance of Angst in Being and Time.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 43: 195–211. ———. 2014. “Situation and Limitation: Making Sense of Heidegger on Thrownness.” European Journal of Philosophy 22: 62–81. ———. 2015. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2017. “Haugeland’s Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Normativity.” European Journal of Philosophy 25: 463–84. Wolfe, Cary. 2008. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wrathall, Mark. 2011. Heidegger and Unconcealment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Section IV

Attuned Agency

12 Moods as Active Joseph K. Schear

1. Steven Crowell reads the existentialist phase of the phenomenological tradition as fertile ground for a theory of subjectivity centered on ideas of commitment and responsibility. In this chapter I want to consider moods, a classic existentialist topic, in this Crowellian spirit. Moods are generally considered passive states to be put up with rather than a part of one’s life as one leads it. In this chapter, I make a case for the idea that moods are an expression of agency for which we are answerable. Moods are meaningful engagements with the world, I contend, and we are responsible for meanings at stake in them.1 2. The recent discussion about moods in philosophy is occupied primarily with whether moods provide a counterexample to the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. For a mental state to be intentional is for it to be directed at an object. Moods such as free-floating anxiety or nameless dread, ennui or high-spiritedness—certain forms of joy, boredom, wonder, or despair—are not directed at an object. Yet surely they are mental phenomena. So it is false, the argument goes, that all mental phenomena are intentional. On pain of conceding that moods are qualia-like states (no recipe for an honest night’s sleep), philosophers on the whole have been eager to make sense of moods as genuinely intentional phenomena. Charles Taylor characterizes moods as directed at an object that is present as absent (Taylor 1985, 48).2 Unfocused dread, for example, is in search of an object on which to fasten, like an empty slot that needs filling. Moods have an object, then, for they are reaching for an object that has yet to be found. Among the classical phenomenologists, particularly Heidegger and Sartre, one finds the materials in some of their writings for an alternative position: moods have an “object,” namely the whole world. Moods are world-directed or world-involving. Moods exhibit a kind of global scope intentionality, on this view, for they are ways of finding oneself in a world.3 In broad sympathy with this phenomenological position, many philosophers and psychologists of emotion distinguish emotions from moods

218  Joseph K. Schear in terms of whether they are specifically or non-specifically directed.4 My anger at Ella for mocking me targets a determinate object, as does my fear of the oncoming tiger. Contrast anxiety or ennui, states that are often (if not always) directed everywhere and at nothing in particular. The line between being a mood and being an emotion is not always sharp. Some affective states, for example anger, can function as an emotion or as a mood (or indeed a way of life!). Others seem to problematize the very distinction. Take profound grief, which is intensely targeted at the loss of a loved one, yet it also has global scope, at least if it is over the loss of what one might call a “world-constituting other”: someone who is not merely one among others but whose presence constitutes one’s very sense of the world (e.g., one’s parent or partner). The classical phenomenologists, I think, are clearly onto something in identifying moods, at least some moods, as world-involving. There is a niche tradition in the anglophone philosophy of mood that invokes the weather to help capture this global experiential character. Gilbert Ryle opens his discussion of moods in The Concept of Mind by characterizing them as akin to “maladies and states of the weather”: Boredom is not some unique distinguishable ingredient, scene, or feature of all that its victim is doing or undergoing; rather it is the temporary complexion of that totality. It is not like a gust, a sunbeam, a shower, or the temperature; it is like the morning’s weather. (Ryle 1949, 100) Hubert Dreyfus says: Moods are like the weather. On a sunny day not only are all present objects bright, but it is difficult to imagine a drab world, and conversely, on dull days everything that can show up is dull, and so is everything one can envisage. . . . Moods settle in like the weather and tend to perpetuate themselves. (Dreyfus 1990, 172) John Haugeland offers a kind of taxonomy of affective life in the closing chapter “Real People” of his book Artificial Intelligence, and says this in a passage I will come back to several times in what follows: Moods are odd ducks in this pond. Moods pertain to nothing in particular but somehow “color” the whole world at once. When one is melancholy, no sky is cheery: fluffy clouds are at best invisible, at worst a taunting mockery. Though events (and chemicals) can influence them, moods are not automatic responses to stimuli, nor are they ever rational or justified. To describe the onset of moods, we resort to saying they “descend on” or “fill” or “come over” us.

Moods as Active 219 They’re like vapors that seep into and infect everything we are about: what we think and what we notice, what’s desirable and what seems likely, what’s worth pursuing and how best to proceed. Moods are of intermediate duration (hours to weeks) and vary neither in fervor nor conviction, but in some kind of depth. Existentialists love them. (Haugeland 1985, 235) In what follows I shall take for granted, following the above “meteorological” tradition, that moods have something like global scope intentionality. I’ll return to the weather shortly, and indeed why moods are worthy objects of existentialist love, but not in the context of the standard question about the peculiar intentionality of moods. In this chapter my question is, Are moods active or passive phenomena of human life? 3. Philosophers from Plato to Kant and Hegel, from Joseph Raz to Richard Moran, have held that the distinction between the active and the passive applies not only to the domain of ordinary intentional agency (raising one’s arm) but also to the life of the mind. While this history is long and rich, for our purposes we can provisionally identify the relevant distinction by attending to the phenomenon of making up one’s mind. In practical contexts, this is paradigmatically making a decision about what to do. In theoretical contexts, this is paradigmatically making a judgment about what is the case. “Shall I go for a walk this afternoon?” I ask myself. Well, yes, that seems like a good thing to do, thereby forming the intention to do so. “Did the butler do it?” Yes, I think he did, thereby forming the belief that the butler did it. In both cases of everyday deliberation, I make up my mind, for it is up to me to settle the question of whether to take a walk now or of whether I think the butler did it. Imagine that I later come to believe, in light of new evidence, that the butler didn’t do it. As I change my mind, my mind thereby changes. Thus we see here an ordinary sense in which the power of agency manifestly has a home in our mental life: by exercising our power of reason, in its theoretical and practical employments, we quite literally make up our minds.5 Now, contrast making up one’s mind with feeling a shooting pain in one’s ankle or a splitting headache. These are sensations that we suffer, happenings in the mind over which we have no say. A  splitting headache is in me, but is in no sense up to me. So here we have a distinction between forms of mindedness drawn in terms of the contrast between the active and the passive. My question is, Where do moods lie? Do they belong with judgments and decisions (the active) or with sensations (the passive)? The answer to this question has seemed obvious to many. While few would hold that moods are sensations (even if many involve sensations), it is widely held that moods belong in a box with sensations, at least with regard to the distinction between the active and the passive. Moods too,

220  Joseph K. Schear on this view, are figures of passivity. We make judgments and take decisions: the very existence of these stances is a matter of our bringing them into being by the exercise of our deliberative agency. But we hardly make or take moods. A mood is something one “finds oneself” in. Ordinary language is full of passive constructions vis-à-vis moods. Joy is something with which we are “overcome.” We sometimes characterize the onset of anxiety as an “attack.” This is part of the attraction of the weather analogy for those who have written on moods. For in addition to capturing global scope, the weather is that paradigmatically unpredictable condition to which we are all subject and over which we have no say.6 Note Ryle’s use of “victim” in the above passage; Dreyfus’s “tend to perpetuate themselves”; Haugeland’s “infect everything we are about.” Heidegger’s formulation follows suit: “A mood assails us” (Heidegger 1962, 136/176, my emphasis). Commentaries on Being and Time, when turning to the key notion of Befindlichkeit (a paradigmatic mode of which is a mood), tend to open the chapter by announcing their new topic as the “passive” or “receptive” aspect of our being-in-the-world.7 Accordingly, the consensus seems to be that moods are closer to sensations than judgments. If with a sensation we are the site of its occurrence, with a mood, we are the vehicle, or conduit, of its perpetuation, at least until it takes leave of us. If melancholy does in fact “pass,” it is an occasion for gratitude. If joy subsides, it is an occasion for mourning. A mood, then, is an aspect of my mindedness that is not for me to make up but is always already made up—something to be accommodated, or put up with, rather than a part of my life as I lead it. Moods are, on this view, an exemplary topic for a phenomenology of passivity. 4. Can we, against the consensus, find sense in the idea of moods as an expression of agency? They say if you are interested in challenging a consensus, it’s good to go out and do some experimental philosophy. Unfortunately, my recent experimental philosophical research has in fact confirmed the consensus. But one person replied immediately to me, when I asked my question whether moods are active or passive, that of course we are agents of our moods. “We can do something about them,” she said. Against the consensus, then, one might note that we can, in the midst of a mood, take steps to intervene. A mood is not a hurricane, or the fog. For it is wrong to say that we are mere hapless victims of it. We need not merely wait and see. I can go for a run, cozy up in bed with my favorite television show, or otherwise change my scene or situation, practicing the art of diversion. This would be to exploit a feature of moods often cited, the sense in which one mood “crowds out” another mood, as Ryle put it. Compare Heidegger: “when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood” (Heidegger 1962, 136/175). Call this sense of being active with respect to our moods self-management agency. It is undeniable that we can, with varying levels of success, be

Moods as Active 221 agents with respect to our moods in this sense. We can, that is, act on our moods. We can work to eliminate a mood or install one or otherwise modify or mitigate it. Compare having a magical meteorological joystick that manipulated the weather to suit one’s needs. Acting on our moods is one thing. The mood itself amounting to an active relation to things is another. Indeed, when setting out to manage our moods we precisely construe them as passive phenomena, a kind of intrusive humor to be removed or a welcome affect to be installed. Now it may well be that the self-management of moods is all that there is. I certainly don’t want to slight the serious achievement that effective selfmanagement of our moods can represent. But when I ask about the possibility of finding sense in the idea of moods themselves as expressions of agency, I do not mean agency over our moods. I am not asking whether moods are objects of our agency. Rather, I am asking whether being in a mood is an expression of agency. So the one person who responded affirmatively to my question “Are moods active or passive?” missed the point, helpfully, of my question.8 Return to the idea of making up one’s mind to sharpen the contrast to self-management agency. Take again the case, following Hieronymi, of judging that the butler did it. As we put it before, to make up one’s mind, at least in the ordinary case, just is for one’s mind to be made up. In doing this, I am not acting on my beliefs, as if they are something external to manipulate or manage. I am coming to believe that the butler did it. I am not trying to “get myself” to believe the butler did it (which would be a different thing). Rather, the activity here consists in the very forming of my belief.9 Now this sense of agency can seem almost divine, at least compared to the self-management I may try to exercise on my mood. After all, the sense of taking charge at work in making up one’s mind is immediate. Once I am prepared to answer “yes” to the question of whether the butler did it (let there be light), my stance is thereby settled (light!). Once I set out to intervene in or manage my mood, however, I do not thereby succeed, for my psyche may thwart me. But there is a different sense in which the agency of making up one’s mind is intrinsically constrained, and so not possessed of a sense of power that, for example, much intentional agency makes available. After all, my coming to believe that the butler did it is not voluntary. Believing “at will,” the way in which one might set about at will, on a whim, to skip down the street, makes no sense. Making up one’s mind, that is, is responsive: the relevant sense of agency here essentially involves an element of passivity. In our going example, this passivity is a matter of being moved by the balance of the evidence relevant to the question of whether the butler did it (or the balance of considerations relevant to whether to take a walk). But the passivity of reasons-responsiveness is not like the passivity of being hit on the head, or suffering a headache,

222  Joseph K. Schear for the agent’s involvement is necessary: the believer participates by holding herself open to the balance of evidence, letting herself be moved by the claim of the relevant reasons, and therewith submitting herself to something far beyond her voluntary control. Making up one’s mind is therefore caught up in a unified dynamic of activity and passivity. This is a conceptual point about the nature of the rational attitudes—and, no less, a phenomenological point about what it is like to reason.10 By “caught up in a unified dynamic of activity and passivity,” I don’t mean that making up one’s mind is a hybrid of activity and passivity—as if there is one discrete bit that is the active part and another discrete bit that is the passive part. That would be an apt description of the playground game see-saw. See-saw is a coordinated process that calls upon one participant to first push up, and then wait to be brought down by the other pushing up, one after the other. Making up one’s mind is not in this way a hybrid of activity and passivity. It is rather a unity of activity and passivity: the agency consists in holding oneself open to be bound by the relevant reasons. Earlier, I sketched the consensus position about moods as passive states by contrasting moods with what looked like the other extreme, a manifestly active stance, namely making up one’s mind about what to believe or to do. But if that picture of moods appeared attractive by way of a contrast to a false (“over-active”) caricature of making up one’s mind, then the idea of moods as not straightforwardly passive can perhaps find a hearing. If we are prepared to acknowledge that making up one’s mind—though it essentially includes an element of passivity—is nonetheless an expression of agency, then might moods too exhibit something more like a unified dynamic of activity and passivity?11 5. Is there anything like the sense of being active at work in moods that one characteristically finds in making up one’s mind?12 Of course we do not generally, if ever, “form” our moods by deliberating. This truism is part of what fuels the consensus that moods are passive. But appreciating the element of responsive receptivity at work in making up one’s mind—the sense of being bound by the authority of what is reason for what—ought to inform our sense of what it means to be “active” in this paradigmatically agential case of mindedness. The sense that we have of being active here is not due to the bare idea that we do something when we deliberate. The sense of being active is due to the idea that in so deliberating we are responsive to reasons. For, apart from such responsiveness, there would be little sense to the idea that in forming our attitudes by deliberation we are genuinely active as opposed to merely arbitrary. This suggests that the phenomenology of “taking charge” of one’s own mental life at work in making up one’s mind cannot be separated from one’s self-understanding as occupying a standpoint of rational agency. It is by being responsive to reasons that we are active. Arriving at

Moods as Active 223 a judgment or a decision via deliberation is one case of this responsiveness. But the responsiveness can show up in other modes of mindedness which do not involve making up one’s mind. Consider, for example, perceptual beliefs. We generally just find ourselves with them; perceptual beliefs “assail” us. But as Raz has pointed out, even when we form perceptual beliefs through subconscious processes, we are aware of the absence of sufficient reasons against the belief, and (at least normally) of adequate reasons for it. Raz’s example: “When it seems to me that I see a cat I—without deliberation—believe that there is a cat there. But if I believe that I am in a magic show, then I do not form that belief” (Raz 1997). That perceptual beliefs are not formed through deliberation does not preclude their being reason-responsive; insofar as they are, they too are an expression of agency in the relevant sense. This agency is demonstrated in our practices of holding one another responsible for our beliefs. Imagine I am not aware that I am in a magic show and so form the belief that there is a cat there. Were you to point out to me that I am in a magic show, you’d expect me to react by withdrawing, or at least qualifying, my belief, and you’d be puzzled if I didn’t. Or imagine my forming the belief that there is a cat there even though I am aware that I am in a magic show. Absent special circumstances, you could, and presumably would, object to me that I  shouldn’t hold the perceptual belief I am holding.13 This relevant sense of being active, then, does not hang on how one got into the state (deliberation, subconscious processes, or whatever) but rather on whether the state displays reasons-responsiveness. This responsiveness is evident in the state’s figuring in our practice of holding one another responsible for such states. So a promising test for whether moods are expressions of agency is accordingly the following: do we hold ourselves responsible for our moods? If we can and sometimes do, then we have a piece of evidence for the idea that moods are agential in the relevant sense. Now of course one way we hold ourselves responsible for our moods doesn’t get us one inch beyond the agency of self-management: one burden we bear, in particular with respect to particularly “bad” moods, is to do our best to get ourselves out of them, or at least contain them, if only to avoid dampening the atmosphere for everyone else. But we can hold ourselves responsible for our moods in another sense. For, the question “why?” finds an application with respect to moods, as in: why are you anxious? Why are you joyful? Why are you melancholic (or “down”)? These questions, asked in a certain manner, might sound harsh or aggressive, but imagine them being posed in a sympathetic tone. Even if such why questions are not always pragmatically apt, they do not involve committing a category mistake. One way of hearing these why questions is asking for a brute causal explanation. Compare: “Why are you in pain?” “Because a brick fell on my foot.” Of course sometimes

224  Joseph K. Schear our answers to why-mood questions can take this shape (e.g., “I’m hungover”), and such answers can be perfectly appropriate. But when we ask the why question about a mood, we not only, or even typically, solicit that kind of explanation, for a different sense of the why question has an application to moods, according to which we ask something more like the following: what is it about your life situation such that that mood is fitting? We don’t feel insulated from this demand to account for our moods—at least if asked by the right person (which may be oneself) in the right way in the right circumstances—even if the demand may not be easy to meet. Since it can, and often does, make sense to hold ourselves responsible in this sense, one is not in such cases a mere passive conduit of the mood but rather living it out as a responsive orientation to one’s situation. Being in a mood, then, does not merely present an opportunity for self-management, for it is a way of engaging with one’s world. Being in a mood, so understood, is something for which we are intelligibly answerable. Call this the argument from answerability.14 Consider an example to illustrate the argument. George Graham describes the case of Carl M., a forty-year-old Polish Jew, imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, where he has just recently lost his wife and children to a gas chamber: When he pictures his present circumstances, he pictures a terrible and terrifying world. He feels spiritually bankrupt, miserable, impotent, and helpless. ‘My family meant everything to me.’ ‘Without them I am nothing.’ ‘I am incapable of living.’ Carl spends his days, immediately prior to his own execution, lying on a cold board in a bunkhouse, refusing to eat the meagre tasteless rations he used to share with another inmate when his wife and children—though separated from him in the camp—had been alive. He had kept himself alive for them. Now he wants to die. (Graham 1990) Carl’s grieving despair, we can all agree, is an apt response to his circumstances, circumstances that are in themselves despairing. Of someone who is somehow immune to falling into despair in such circumstances, we would say he is either self-deceived, or emotionally confused or impaired, or even mentally unhealthy. One can imagine Carl M. refusing pills, were anti-depressants around then, on pain of failing to do justice to how he ought to feel in such circumstances. His despair, for Carl M., is a fitting engagement with reality, and to that extent worth sustaining. If Carl M. were suddenly to discover that in fact he is an extra on the set of the film Life Is Beautiful (these uncheerful clips were cut . . .), he’d obviously tune into his world differently, for it would be a different world. Recovering from this crushingly cruel hoax would of course not be as straightforward and immediate as withdrawing an ordinary

Moods as Active 225 perceptual belief upon discovering that one is in a magic show. But this fact may well just be a function of the depth and global scope of the state, which gives it a greater psychological inertia than most garden-variety perceptual beliefs. This, however, does not compromise the mood’s belonging within the category of agency. After all, if Carl M.’s realization that he is in an elaborate Hollywood set rather than a Nazi death camp made no difference to his mood, we would not be prepared to call what he is feeling despair rather some bizarre ersatz. 6. The argument from answerability, now furnished with Graham’s Carl M. case, naturally raises the question, What precisely do I mean by answerability? I hope it is clear that I don’t mean moral responsibility. Moods need not be objects of praise and blame for us to be answerable for them. Moods can be (indeed are) objects of moral appraisal. But the “why question,” the question of whether and how a mood is fitting or appropriate to the circumstances in which one finds oneself, is distinct from the question of whether I am a good or bad person for being in the mood.15 When I say that we are answerable for our moods, I mean that the demand to make our moods intelligible as somehow or other fitting has application. The core thought is that being in a mood makes you a possible target for a demand for intelligibility (even if only for yourself); what one is answerable for is the meaning at stake in the mood. We can further develop this sense of answerability by addressing the predictable charge that what I am proposing amounts to a kind of blinkered rationalism about moods, stripping them of all that makes them worthy of existentialist love. This is a serious objection, even if it is also worth heeding Heidegger’s sharp warning in the midst of his discussion of moods in Being and Time: “irrationalism, as the counterpart to rationalism, talks about the things to which rationalism is blind, but only with a squint” (Heidegger 1962, 136/175). There are in fact several versions of the blinkered rationalism charge that are worth distinguishing. One version notes that in ordinary conversational contexts, ascriptions of mood—to oneself and others—normally function as conversation-stoppers. Often it is the generic formulation “I am in a mood” or “he is in a mood” that, far from inviting a “why question,” effectively shuts down the possibility of any such question arising. While true, this does not, however, vitiate my claim that the question why has application with respect to moods. For as I mentioned before, I am not making a claim about what we do with our words. But I also don’t think this point of ordinary language philosophy goes very far. Imagine living with someone with whom you are very close who doesn’t just say this (“I am in a mood”) every once in a while but does so day after day after day. It wouldn’t take too long to start feeling let down by what he is trying to do with this form of words. Or imagine saying this yourself daily. It wouldn’t take long for you to feel let down,

226  Joseph K. Schear at some level, if the other with whom you live were simply to accept your unending effort to shut the conversation down. Such reactive attitudes are not at all hard to imagine, but they would make no sense if we weren’t answerable for our moods. A second version of the blinkered rationalism charge digs deeper, for it concedes that why questions about moods have application but proceeds to claim that this application—unlike the application to the rational ­attitudes—is ultimately empty. After all, whatever answer to the why question one comes up with will just be one more expression of the mood, rather than what is being asked for, namely an account of the mood. Recall Haugeland’s analogy to “vapors that seep into and infect everything we are about: what we think and what we notice, what’s desirable and what seems likely, what’s worth pursuing and how best to proceed.” This is a formulation that resonates with Heidegger’s idea of moods as always already outlining “in advance” what matters. Accordingly, if the demand for answerability imposes an ultimately empty requirement on mood, then the idea that responsiveness to this demand reveals something important about moods rings hollow.16 This version of the charge draws on a claim about the phenomenological structure of mood, its global or pervasive character. But I don’t think the worry gets the sense of pervasiveness right. When interrogating a mood, we are prepared to draw a distinction between responses that express a form of “acting out” and responses that genuinely grapple with the question “why?” This distinction is obviously of serious significance in the more specialized therapeutic context, but not only there. Perfectly ordinary relationships operate within the frame of this distinction, which is why receiving a series of responses that do no more than “act out,” eventually, lets one down. If the distinction between acting out and genuinely grappling has purchase, then the application of the why question to moods is not empty. The pervasive character of moods is indeed a crucial feature of them, but the pervasiveness need not be blinding: being in a mood need not preclude you from genuinely taking the question on. That is, speaking from out of a mood need not thwart self-interpretive inquiry about that very mood. Or put in Heideggerian terms: moods may outline in advance what matters, but it hardly follows from this that the question “Why does this matter to me?” gets no grip. What’s more, taking on the question of the intelligibility of your mood need not at all lift you out of it. Such self-interrogation could even intensify the mood: facing up to it and articulating it, one fixes on how the mood is fittingly tuning you into reality, thereby heightening its disclosive force. Far from empty, then, the question “why” can be heard as an invitation to a kind of seriousness about one’s affective life.17 A third version of the blinkered rationalism charge begins by noting a familiar feature of the application of the why question to the rational attitudes, namely a general presumption of self-knowledge in the very

Moods as Active 227 holding of these attitudes. Take what is arguably the strongest case, namely intentional action. Suppose Anscombe is right that the question “why?” essentially has application to intentional actions. Why are you attending the meeting? Because it is my duty; because I need to impress my boss; because I want to do my part to support an important proposal. The question “why” asks for my reasons for acting, for the considerations I take to count in favor of attending the meeting. The question presupposes that the description of the action (attending the meeting) is the one that captures what I take myself to be doing. Compare belief: at least in most ordinary cases, if someone asks me why I believe something to be the case, I am expected to have an answer to this question. I may not have an answer, but at least I understand myself as vulnerable to the question. This too presupposes that the belief attributed to me is something I take myself to hold. (One way of rejecting the why question is disavowing the belief.) Accordingly, a general presumption of self-knowledge is built into the application of these why questions to the rational attitudes. Does this presumption apply to the question “why are you anxious?”? Surely not, the worry runs. After all, it is perfectly coherent for you to ask me “why are you anxious?” noting that my manic comportment is palpably expressive of anxiety, without my even remotely realizing that I am anxious. This is coherent, and what’s more, hardly uncommon. Insofar as the why question presupposes self-knowledge, and moods need not (and often do not) involve self-knowledge, the question fails to apply to moods. These issues about self-knowledge are extremely complex, and I can’t do them justice here, but note that, in the admittedly cropped vignette above, you directed your question at me—“why are you anxious?”—­ presumably for a reason. After all, it is my manner of comportment, my way of carrying myself, that manifests anxiety. If I were to reply, “Am I?” with a tone of surprise, or perhaps even with resistance, you might not be surprised by my surprise, or my resistance. You may generally be better at identifying my moods than I am. But you would presumably hope that your question might serve to bring me to acknowledge my apparent mood and be disappointed if it didn’t. Contrast the question “why are your shoes so dirty?” You also direct this at me—I am the one wearing them—but if I replied “Are they?”, you might start worrying about my vision, or perhaps my standards of cleanliness, but you wouldn’t worry that I am out of touch with myself (or in denial). This suggests that though the presumption of self-knowledge with why-mood questions is less strong than the case of the rational attitudes, certainly less strong than intentional action, there is nonetheless a presumption at work. And this suggests a difference in degree rather than of kind between the rational attitudes and moods. So we can accept that the burden of answerability always comes wrapped up with some presumption of self-knowledge, but deny that this insulates mood from the application of the why question.

228  Joseph K. Schear 7. There are no doubt more versions of the blinkered rationalism charge worth considering, and some readers may well feel, if they have come with me this far, that the distinctive character of moods has been neglected. (And I have said nothing here about what is undoubtedly the most interesting thesis about Stimmungen in the existential phenomenological tradition, namely Heidegger’s claim that they play a transcendental role.) Let me conclude by registering one important difference between moods and the classically rational attitudes (belief and intention) regarding our answerability for them. This lies not in a presumption of self-knowledge but rather in what is being requested in asking “why?” With a whymood question, often what we are asking for is not a consideration that counts in favor of being in the mood, so to that extent we are often not asking for what is commonly understood as a “reason.” We are asking rather for an account that makes manifest, that expresses, the shape or tenor of one’s situation as it shows up from one’s perspective. In some cases, we could very well be satisfied with a demonstration, a kind of showing. You look utterly gray and empty, the hopelessness or despair is written on your face. Why? Take a walk with me through Aleppo, my hometown. Such a demonstration might be thought to count as justificatory in a suitably broad sense—when effective it does “account” for the mood—but it is not necessarily presented or received with the sense of rational necessitation, that is characteristic of (say) a reason for belief, and at least on some views, a reason for action. If I ask you why you are anxious, you use whatever expressive means are available to you to show me how things are with you; you invite me into your world. I can accept that invitation to appreciate your perspective on things without myself genuinely sharing in the mood (though I might well find myself caught up in it). Contrast the incoherence of my accepting your reason for belief— as in taking it to be a genuine reason, not just accepting it for the sake of argument—without at the same time endorsing it. This difference in the sense of answerability—a difference in normative force correlated with the distinction between the demand for rationality versus the demand for intelligibility—ought to be respected in any viable account of our moody engagement with the world. Perhaps acknowledging this difference is enough to see moods for what they are, not victims of an imperious rationalism, but rather objects of existentialist love.18

Notes 1 In his work and life, Steve exemplifies the promise and humility of phenomenology. I am grateful to him for lighting up the field, and for being such a Mensch about it. 2 The position of Angela Mendelovici 2014 that moods present uninstantiated properties is in the legacy of Taylor’s view. 3 For appropriations of this position, see Solomon 1993, 172–3; Crane 1998; Ratcliffe 2008.

Moods as Active 229 4 See, for example, Goldie 2002. 5 For the agency of making up one’s mind, see Moran 2003; Hieronymi 2009; Boyle 2009, 2011. 6 Compare Keats in his “Ode on Melancholy”: But when the melancholy fit shall fall, Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud. 7 Dreyfus 1990, 168; Mulhall 2005, 75. 8 For a Heideggerian account of self-management agency vis-à-vis emotions, understood as a meta-level commitment to resisting averageness, see Withy 2015. 9 See Hieronymi 2009. 10 A picture of a life with reason as a life of willful hubris, not uncommon in certain strands of the phenomenological tradition, is bad phenomenology. This point is explored in Harry Frankfurt’s work, discussed invaluably in Moran 2018. 11 It is not hard to suspect that lots of core aspects of human life in some sense fall under the description “unified dynamic of activity and passivity.” Perhaps this explains Heidegger’s affection for those reflexive verbal constructions that so often coil up the active and the passive in one go. I note that the kinds of (“mediopassive”) formulations I was just using to describe the activeness of making up one’s mind have echoes in a number of Heidegger’s formulations about mood, such as the following two passages from § 29 of Being and Time: Under the strongest pressure and resistance, nothing like an affect would come about . . . if being in the world, with its attunement, had not already submitted itself (sich schon angewiesen) to having intraworldly entities matter to it in a way which moods have outlined in advance. (Heidegger 1962, 137/177) An attunement not only discloses Dasein in its thrownness and its submission to that world which is already disclosed with its own being; it is itself the existential kind of being in which Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the world and lets the world matter to it. (Heidegger 1962, 139/178) 12 One rather quick way of finding sense in the idea that moods are intrinsically active would simply be to endorse a kind of cognitivism about moods. On this view, moods just are truth-evaluable assessments of reality. Compare cognitivism about emotions: Ellas’s anger at me consists in a verdict or appraisal that can be assessed for its truth. If we adopt a world-directed construal of the intentionality of moods, then we could say this: a dark gloomy mood consists in the judgment that the world I find myself in is a bleak and horrid place (or something like that). Anxiety is a matter of judging the world I find myself in to be utterly fragile and fraught with peril. If moods themselves just are a special kind of judgment (special in the scope of their subject), they’d inherit the sense of internal activeness inherent in all judgment. To be in a mood is to take the world to be thus-and-so. I myself don’t find cognitivism about moods terribly plausible. So I don’t propose to extend the sense of being active at work in judgment to moods by simply reducing moods to judgments. We should want to have more respect for the appearances here. 13 See Angela Smith 2005 for a case for the agency of our attitudes extending well beyond perception. 14 See Crowell 2013, chapter 10, on being answerable. In response to this argument, Jann Schlimme, psychotherapist, reported that he normally asks not “Why are you anxious?” but rather “What is making you anxious?” Either

230  Joseph K. Schear this question is asking a version of what I called the brute causal question, in which case something like “I’ve drunk too much caffeine” would suffice as an answer (and the question would presumably be better posed by a pharmacist than a psychotherapist). Or, by contrast, this question is a reformulation of the why question as I intend it to be understood. 15 D’Arms and Jacobsen 2000. 16 Thanks to Stephen Mulhall for this worry. 17 Thanks to Sophie Archer for her help with this paragraph. 18 I’d like to thank the audience at the Phenomenology of Powerlessness workshop at Essex, hosted by Béatrice Han-Pile, for whom I first wrote the lecture out of which this paper grew. Audiences at the 2017 American Society of Existential Phenomenology meeting in Berkeley, at a European Philosophy Workshop at the Senate House in London, and at colloquia at Stirling, Trinity College Dublin, and San Francisco State offered questions and comments that improved the paper. Richard Gipps gave me a set of incisive and thoughtful comments on an early draft. Thanks to Stephen Mulhall for a helpful conversation about moods over lunch. I thank the editors Irene McMullin and Matthew Burch for their helpful comments. Above all, I thank Sophie Archer for her guidance and advice.

References Boyle, Matthew. 2009. “Active Belief.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1): 119–47. ———. 2011. “ ‘Making Up Your Mind’ and the Activity of Reason.” Philosopher’s Imprint II (17) (December): 1–24. Crane, Tim. 1998. “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental.” In Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Anthony O’Hear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———.  2015. “Responsibility, Autonomy, Affectivity: A  Heideggerian Approach.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self: Themes from Division II of Being and Time, edited by Denis McManus. London: Routledge. D’Arms, Justin, and Daniel Jacobsen. 2000. “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness of Emotions’.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXI (1) (July): 65–90. Dreyfus, Hubert. 1990. Being-in-the-World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Goldie, Peter. 2002. The Emotions: A  Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graham, George. 1990. “Melancholic Epistemology.” Synthese 82 (3): 399–42. Haugeland, John. 1985. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2013. Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Company. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2009. “Two Kinds of Agency.” In Mental Action, edited by Lucy O’Brien and Matthew Soteriou. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moods as Active 231 Mendelovici, Angela. 2014. “Pure Intentionalism about Moods and Emotions.” In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, edited by Uriah Kriegel, 135–57. London: Routledge. Moran, Richard. 2001. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2003. “Responses to O’Brien and Shoemaker.” European Journal of Philosophy 11: 402–419. doi: 10.1111/1468-0378.00193 ———. 2018. “Frankfurt on Identification: Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Life Collected.” In The Philosophical Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mulhall, Stephen. 2005. Heidegger and Being and Time (Routledge Philosophy Guidebook). London: Routledge. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry, and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raz, Joseph. 1997. “When We Are Ourselves: The Active and the Passive.” Aristotelian Society S71 (1) (July): 211–27. Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sartre, J. P.  2001. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (Routledge Classics). London: Routledge. Smith, Angela M. 2005. “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life.” Ethics 115 (2) (January): 236–71. Solomon, Robert C. 1993. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Taylor, Charles. 1985. “Self-Interpreting Animals.” In Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Withy, Katherine. 2015. “Owned Emotions: Affective Excellence in Heidegger.” In Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by Denis McManus. London: Routledge.

13 Against Our Better Judgment Matthew Burch

People violate their own plans all the time. Jean intends to go to bed early, and then stays up late binge-watching Breaking Bad. Hector resolves to go vegan, and then mainlines a “Meat Lovers” from Pizza Hut. Tina promises to take a break from drinking, and then ends up at her favorite bar, asking for “the usual.” Why do we do these things? The philosophical tradition on akrasia boasts an impressive range of ingenious and sophisticated answers to this question. But after more than 2,000 years, it has yielded no consensus. What has emerged instead is widespread disagreement about how to define akrasia, how to explain it, and whether akratic action is even possible. Should we just agree to disagree and move on? A better option, I  propose, is to consider whether we don’t disagree about akrasia so much as talk past one another. There are at least two good reasons to take this proposal seriously. First, standard approaches define akrasia in terms of judgment—i.e., they hold that we act akratically when we act freely and intentionally against our better judgment—and this makes the dispute hinge crucially on how we understand the role of judgment in action. For instance, if we follow the figure of Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras and claim that we always do what we judge it best to do, then akrasia looks impossible— you can’t act against your occurrent better judgment if you always take the action that you currently judge best. Alternatively, if judgment only determines what we think we should do but not what we in fact do, akrasia loses its air of mystery. Of course, I  can act against my better judgment! My judgment determines what I think it best to do, not what I do. In this light, the dispute looks less like an exchange about akrasia and more like a proxy war between competing conceptions of judgment. The second reason we talk past one another is that we rely on a single term—i.e., akrasia—to capture a variety of ways that agents break with their own plans. Looked at this way, the tradition hasn’t failed to generate consensus about a single phenomenon; rather, it has successfully identified a variety of phenomena. But instead of enriching our vocabulary to capture this diversity, we’ve tried to squeeze them under a single

Against Our Better Judgment 233 conceptual heading. As a result, we talk past one another, using the term akrasia to refer to multiple phenomena. In what follows, I try to avoid these sources of misunderstanding. To avoid the first, I go against the tradition of defining akrasia in terms of our better judgment—hence my title. The category of phenomena that interests me includes all actions that share the following structure: an agent explicitly settles the question of what to do and then—still aware of her plan and without explicitly revising it—she freely and intentionally does something else. And I try to clarify the structure of these phenomena without getting embroiled in disputes about judgment. To avoid the second source of confusion, I contend that the category of interest covers a variety of phenomena, two of which I describe in this chapter, namely, Intention-shift: action taken freely and intentionally against my explicit plan (or future intention) and with a clear conscience. Akrasia: action taken freely and intentionally against my explicit plan (or future intention) and accompanied by some self-critical emotion (e.g., guilt, shame, self-directed anger) or a mixture of such emotions. The chapter  has three sections. The first section sets the stage for my approach to these phenomena with a novel account of the phenomenology of human interests; and the following two sections offer phenomenological analyses of intention-shift and akrasia. I have two main goals here. First, I aim to find a way out of a longstanding philosophical disagreement by providing novel accounts of two important phenomena. Second, I want to call the attention of other phenomenologists to a neglected area of research. The phenomenological tradition has much to say about inauthenticity, estrangement, and bad faith, but it has remained relatively silent on discrete failures of agency like akrasia, leaving analytic philosophers and researchers in the cognitive and social sciences to do all the talking. I hope to encourage more phenomenologists to add their voices to this dynamic area of inquiry.1

1. Human Interests and Spontaneous Action Traditional approaches tend to make the conflict involved in plan-discordant actions look like a battle between mental faculties: rational judgment favors one thing, while irrational desire fancies another. I will argue, however, that we can better understand the relevant conflict as a contest between competing interests. To set the stage for my alternative approach, this section begins with a look at the phenomenology of care, with a focus on human interests and their relation to spontaneous non-deliberative action. Everyday agency has a fundamentally outward-directed orientation toward the people and things we care about. We spend our days,

234  Matthew Burch as Heidegger put it, “attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking [something], accomplishing [something],” and so on (1962, 83). Indeed, everyday action focuses so much on what’s outside us that its mode of self-awareness often borders on self-oblivion. For example, when my sixyear-old daughter sidles up to me and takes my hand, I spontaneously affirm the gesture by giving her a friendly look and her hand a gentle squeeze. As I do so, I don’t think about what I’m doing or my reasons for doing it. I attend to her. Now in Heidegger’s book, this tendency to lose ourselves in the people and things we care about often takes on a negative valence: he seems keener to wrest the authentic self from the fallen world than to explore how particular people and things give our lives meaning. Harry ­Frankfurt—another philosopher who places care at the heart of agency— provides a useful corrective on this point. According to Frankfurt, the specific people and things we care about serve as centers of gravity in our practical lives: they shape our priorities, guide and limit our conduct (1999, 129), and furnish us with the “framework of standards” (Frankfurt 2004, 52) that we strive to live up to. I take Frankfurt’s general direction of travel here. But I eschew the language of love from Frankfurt’s later works on caring. For love, as Frankfurt rightly notes, involves “a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved” (2004, 42)—i.e., a concern for the beloved for her own sake—and I’m after a broader category of concern that includes the people and things we might care about in an instrumental or even selfish way. Instead of objects of love, then, I  call the things we care about our interests, or those things that matter to us and in which we have a stake.2 Although having an interest in someone often involves a loving concern for the good of that person for her own sake, it doesn’t have to. The sociopath’s exploitative interests structure his life and guide his conduct just like noble interests do for good people. Vicious or virtuous, your interests shape your priorities and furnish you with a framework of standards that govern your conduct. Human interests vary widely, and so does their intensity. We care about persons, places, things, processes, projects, practices, institutions, ideals, and so on; and these interests claim us with an intensity that varies from deep to superficial. Deep interests occupy a privileged place among the things that matter to us and serve as a measure for the relative value and hierarchical organization of our other interests. If you have a deep interest in your work, for example, then you not only put it before your lesser interests—even to the point of neglecting those interests—but you will also tend to arrange your less important interests to limit how much they interfere with your work. Deep interests thus shape the structure of your life. Moreover, deep interests have what Sripada—when discussing the very similar notion of a “care”—calls “a syndrome of dispositional

Against Our Better Judgment 235 effects that includes motivational, commitmental, evaluative, and affective elements” (2016, 1209). If I have a deep interest in X, then I find X intrinsically motivating, I’m committed to promoting X, I tend to evaluate X favorably, and I’m emotionally attached to X. Superficial interests, on the other hand, demand little attention, only occasionally guide my actions, and tend to be subordinated to my deeper interests. A superficial interest also has a syndrome of dispositional effects—including motivational, commitmental, evaluative, and affective elements—but these effects are relatively weak. While Frankfurt helps us better elucidate the way specific interests shape our lives, a phenomenological approach can return the favor by clarifying two aspects of our interests that Frankfurt identifies but leaves underexplored. The next two subsections address each aspect in turn. 1.1 Interests Are Reflexive The first aspect of our interests that Frankfurt identifies without clarifying much is the fact that our interests are “reflexive” (1999, 138)—to care about an interest is to care about myself, and to betray an interest is to betray myself (2004, 51). Phenomenology is especially well suited to clarify this fact, because its method focuses precisely on the essential correlation between intentional objects and the structures of agency that make those objects intelligible. We will thus consider the characteristics we’ve attributed to our interests and ask which features of our own agency they reflexively implicate. Consider first the affective powers we attributed to our interests—they impinge on our emotions and motivate us to act. These powers aren’t intrinsic to our interests. To affect us this way, our interests depend on the work of at least two of our agential capacities. First, we must be open and attached to our interests through our emotions. For example, it’s only because I love my daughters that they affect me the way they do. Love disposes me to attend to their finer qualities, empathize with their struggles, meet their needs, and encourage their interests. Moreover, that love securely ties my felicity to theirs—their joy pleases me and their suffering pains me, because I love them. Emotional attachment is thus a condition for the possibility of investing in our interests, and such attachment makes our emotional well-being hinge on how our interests fare. Correlatively, whatever fails to at least minimally engage my emotions won’t count among my interests. Our interests thus have their distinctive affective powers only in virtue of the fact that our emotions open us to, allow us to be affected by, and attach us to them. But these affective powers depend not just on emotion but also mood. Moods, unlike emotions, are not intentional states directed at specific aspects of the world. Rather, as Heidegger puts it, moods disclose “Beingin-the-world as a whole” (1962, 176).3 Depression, for example, doesn’t

236  Matthew Burch just affect our relation to a specific object or state of affairs but rather presents the world as a whole as bleak and hopeless. Thus, moods like depression affect the way all our interests weigh with us, because moods can dampen, enhance, and otherwise transform the way our emotions open and attach us to our interests. Take another parent as an example. Simon loves his kids, but suffers from bouts of major depression. When he’s not depressed, his love attaches him to his children in the typical way. When seized by the “noonday demon,” however, his capacity to feel love gets disrupted, which dampens the affective and motivational effects his children normally have on him. Simon knows how he usually feels toward them, but his depression blocks his typical emotional responses. Our interests’ affective powers thus depend on their relation to our emotions and moods. Anything that affects my interests will impact my affective life, and any affective changes—i.e., alterations in my emotions or moods—will likewise affect, at least to some extent, how my interests weigh with me. But this only captures part of what makes our interests reflexive. Our interests also have normative powers—they guide our conduct and furnish us with standards. For example, my interest in an important friendship involves (i) a general sense that I can succeed or fail to be a good friend and (ii) context-sensitive intuitions about how I might succeed or fail to be a friend to this specific person across a range of circumstances. How is this possible? If my affective capacities make my interests matter to me, which aspects of my agency allow me to recognize and respond appropriately to the normative claims my interests make on me? To bear normative expectations, my interests must be situated in a context of significance governed by standards that measure success or failure.4 No normative standards, no normative expectations—for an expectation can have a normative, imperatival character only if it’s logically possible that I might fail to live up to it. “Drink, or don’t drink. See if I care!” is not a normative injunction; it’s the expression of someone who has given up on making demands. Normative expectations prescribe what you ought to do, and thus present you with the logical possibility of endorsing or rejecting that prescription in action.5 Demands are normative, then, if and only if failure is a logical possibility; and that possibility itself presupposes some norm that can reliably mark the difference between success and failure in the relevant context. Such norms are provided by our community’s social practices. So, for example, when I experience my friend, wife, and children as persons who demand and deserve a specific kind of treatment from me, those demands make sense to me in virtue of my personally inflected understanding of the norms that govern the practices of friendship, marriage, and parenthood (as practiced in my small corner of the world). Practice here denotes a set of purposive activities organized around a human interest (or interests) and structured by an open-ended set of norms that are at stake and

Against Our Better Judgment 237 recursively worked out in those activities.6 Of course, the mere existence of a norm-governed practice doesn’t make me sensitive to the normative expectations associated with an interest; rather, to acquire the right kind of normative sensitivity, I must be invested in that interest and socialized into and thereby familiarized with the normative expectations associated with the relevant practice. Such social learning leaves me with what Heidegger in Being and Time calls a Seinkönnen: the “ability-to-be” a competent participant—or to do what “one does”—in some social practice. There’s no perfect English translation for Seinkönnen. Some, like Mark Okrent (1999) and Steven Crowell (2013), translate the term as practical identity—for to possess some ability-to-be is to be able to understand myself in terms of some practice. This is an apt translation in many respects, but it runs into a problem: readers, quite reasonably, project their associations with other uses of the term practical identity onto the Heideggerian notion. This confuses things because other authors tend to use practical identity to refer only to thick, substantive components of one’s sense of self—e.g., parent, spouse, and teacher—while Heidegger’s notion has a broader scope. That is, Seinkönnen encompasses everything from these thick substantive roles to simple practical abilities, including abilities that people would rarely, if ever, consider fundamental to their sense of self. Brushing my teeth, for example, doesn’t feature in my reflections about who I really am, but it’s nevertheless a Seinkönnen: it’s a practical ability that allows me to participate in and understand myself in terms of a set of norm-governed purposive activities organized around a human interest. Whether that ability makes a substantive contribution to my identity is a separate matter. Since the term Seinkönnen covers all my abilities to participate in norm-governed practices—from simple practical abilities to substantive practical identities—I do not translate it as practical identity. Instead, rather literally, I’ll translate it as ‘ability-to-be’: the capacity to participate competently and so understand myself in terms of a set of norm-governed purposive activities organized around a human interest.7 It’s important to note that having some ability-to-be isn’t primarily a matter of social recognition but rather practical competence. Consider two men. One is a con artist who wins and enjoys full social recognition as a physician without any relevant know-how; the other is an unemployed immigrant with a doctor’s training and skillset but no legal entitlement to practice medicine and no social recognition as a physician. As I intend the term, the immigrant physician, not the con artist, has the ability-to-be a doctor. Having an ability-to-be, then, is mostly a matter of having the right skills or know-how. Through the long-term practice that social learning entails, I learn to respond appropriately to the normative expectations of the practice, and this furnishes me with an ability-to-be. Finally, acquiring an ability-to-be isn’t a matter of memorizing rules. Just as the norms that govern social practices are always contested, evolving,

238  Matthew Burch and at stake, each ability-to-be I take up is likewise dynamic, at issue, and recursively worked out in my activity. Projecting myself into an abilityto-be thus requires not only a familiarity with the relevant norms but also the kind of phronetic, situation-specific discernment that allows me to relate those norms appropriately to my current circumstances. We now have a fuller understanding of our interests’ normative powers. My interests bear normative expectations because they’re situated in norm-governed social practices; and I  can respond sensitively to those expectations because social learning and ongoing practice equip me with the ability-to-be a participant in those practices. In other words, socialization affords me the baseline, practice-relevant know-how I need to detect and respond to the normative expectations associated with my interests. Thus, my interests’ normative powers depend on my abilities-to-be. Moreover, this further explains the reflexive character of our interests. Every interest correlates with some ability-to-be: my interests bear normative expectations for me in light of the same standards that measure my success or failure in my efforts to project myself into some abilityto-be. Thus, failure to meet the normative expectations of some interest amounts to a failure to satisfy the standards that measure my success of failure in trying to instantiate some ability-to-be. When I fail to meet such normative expectations, then, I also, at least to some degree, fail to be who I’m trying to be. For example, I experience the normative claims my children make on me in light of my personally inflected understanding of the norms that govern fatherhood. My daughter’s distress constitutes a normative claim for me, then, in light of the kind of father I’m trying to be, i.e., in light of my largely implicit, practical sense of what it means to be a father. Moreover, to meet such normative demands is to succeed at being the kind of father I want to be, because the normative standards that shape those demands are the same standards that measure my success or failure as a father. Correlatively, in failing to live up to the normative claims my children make on me, I not only let them down, but I also fail to be the kind of father I want to be. Any failure to live up to the normative claims an interest makes on me entails some degree of failure to be who I want to be. To be clear, although every interest correlates with some ability-to-be, not every ability-to-be necessarily correlates with an interest. For example, say Dan has the practical ability to take out the bins—it’s a social practice that he can competently participate in—but he has no interest in doing it. Dan just doesn’t give a damn about the bins—they make no affective or normative claims on him whatsoever. When he fails to take them out, then, he doesn’t fail to be who he wants to be. He just doesn’t take out the bins. The normative reflexivity of our interests is due to the fact that every interest has normative powers shaped by and intrinsically linked to the normative standards that govern some ability-to-be; but not every ability-to-be necessarily correlates with an interest.

Against Our Better Judgment 239 1.2 Interests Solicit Spontaneous Responses The second important feature of our interests that Frankfurt highlights but does little to explain is the fact that they solicit spontaneous responses. To illustrate this point, Frankfurt recalls Bernard Williams’s classic example of the man who sees two people drowning, one a stranger and the other his wife, and wonders whether it’s ethically permissible to favor his wife in such circumstances. Playing off Williams’s famous remark that the man’s moment of reflection represents “one thought too many,” Frankfurt claims, “the strictly correct number of thoughts for this man is zero” (2004, 36, n. 2). He should act “Without thinking at all” (Ibid.). This claim is intuitive, but why? Conveniently for our purposes, the same features of agency that make our interests reflexive also explain our capacity to respond spontaneously to their claims. First, spontaneity is a hallmark of affective life. Mood and emotion will do their work without any effort on our part—we simply find ourselves affectively claimed by our interests. We can try to intervene in the case of our emotions—to temper them with countervailing reasons and admonitions—but no such work is required. They open us and attach us to our interests spontaneously. Thus, the affective and motivational effects our interests strike us spontaneously through the automatic activity of mood and emotion. Second, our skillful abilities-to-be allow us to respond spontaneously in appropriate ways to the normative expectations associated with our interests. When I work on this chapter, talk to my wife, look after my kids, or meet with a student in office hours, I can engage in these activities fluidly and passably well without explicit reflection, because I’ve acquired the skills associated with the practices of philosophy, conversation, parenting, and teaching. These skills open me up to a normatively ordered world of significations, allowing me to tune out irrelevant noise and respond sensitively to practice-relevant phenomena. Think of it this way. Practical reasoning uncovers the means to our ends; practical knowhow makes such means immediately apparent; so, practical know-how often makes practical reasoning unnecessary. Our skillful abilities-to-be often allow us to act appropriately without thinking at all. We can spontaneously take unreflective and normatively suitable action across a diverse range of contexts, then, because our affective capacities automatically open us to the affective powers of our interests, and our skillful abilities-to-be allow us to respond spontaneously and sensitively to their normative powers. 1.3 Summary Everyday action is shaped profoundly by our interests—they order our priorities, guide and limit our conduct, and furnish us with a framework

240  Matthew Burch of standards. Our interests vary widely and so does their intensity—from deep to superficial. Interests have a reflexive character; they solicit spontaneous yet normatively sensitive responses from us; and both these facts are due to the intrinsic link our interests bear to our agential capacities. Mood and emotion open us and attach us to our interests, so that we suffer or thrive as they do. Moreover, our norm-governed abilities-to-be allow us to recognize and negotiate the normative expectations associated with our interests, so that any failure to meet these expectations simultaneously amounts to some failure to be who we want to be. Finally, our affective capacities and abilities-to-be also account for our ability to respond spontaneously to our interests’ affective and normative powers.

2. Intention-Shift Now it’s time to see what light this account of human interests and spontaneous action can shed on our target phenomena. We begin with ­intentionshift: an action taken freely and intentionally against my explicit plan (or future intention) and with a clear conscience. Consider two examples: 1. Renee loves to run. A former cross-country champ, she runs nearly every day. But she’s also conscientious and tries not to overdo it. One morning, she wakes feeling down and worn out, and with some discomfort in her left Achilles tendon. Mindful of her body’s needs, she plans to take the day off. But later, as she walks home through the park, she finds herself in the mood for a run and—still aware of her plan to rest and without explicitly revising it—she dashes off for a quick 10k. Exuberant, she runs without a trace of self-recrimination. 2. Driving home after an emotionally draining therapy session, Lisa’s struck by a sudden insight: she’s falling for her analyst. First, she thinks, “This happens all the time. Just go for it! Be happy for once!” But on second thought, she fears she might end up another footnote in the annals of doomed erotic transference. “That settles it,” she tells herself, and she decides to keep her feelings to herself. Then, in the waiting room before her next session, she feels nervous and excited, and the moment she walks into her analyst’s office—still aware of her plan and without explicitly revising it—she intentionally confesses her love. Lisa’s own action surprises her, as she scraps her plan without thinking twice, but she’s fine with it. The moment just feels right. The tradition tends to frame cases like these as a conflict between rational judgment and irrational desire—judgment forges a plan based on reasons, and myopic desire thwarts that plan. But that frame’s an awkward fit for our examples. Renee and Lisa hardly seem irrational—they

Against Our Better Judgment 241 could offer acceptable reasons for what they think and do. A  better picture of their predicaments, I propose, would portray it as a conflict between competing interests. Renee cares about running but she also has an interest in self-care; Lisa feels claimed by a new romantic interest but she also cares about having a healthy relationship. There’s no intrinsic conflict between their interests. Running and self-care, love and healthy relationships—these things tend to pair well. It’s just that their situations put these typically complementary interests at odds. Moreover, since human interests are reflexive, each woman’s conflict of interests correlates with an internal conflict. When Renee’s interests in running and self-care clash, so do her abilities-to-be as a runner and a person committed to self-care. Lisa’s internal conflict needs more explanation. When her romantic interest conflicts with her interest in a healthy relationship, her internal conflict is not between two abilities-to-be but rather between competing versions of a single ability-to-be, namely, the ability to pursue a love relationship. This kind of conflict is possible because, as we noted above, abilities-to-be, like practices themselves, are dynamic, open-ended, and always at issue. So, for example, when Lisa imagines a romance with her analyst, she relates to that interest in terms of a freewheeling, risk-taking version of someone looking for love; and when she focuses on her interest in a healthy relationship, she does so in terms of a more circumspect, risk-averse version of the same abilityto-be. In short, Renee’s conflict of interests correlates with an internal conflict between two abilities-to-be that matter to her, and Lisa’s with a conflict between two competing ways of appropriating a single abilityto-be. And this follows from the reflexivity of human interests: any conflict of interests is simultaneously an internal agential conflict. Although their conflicts are at once internal and external, the outwarddirected focus of everyday action means that Renee and Lisa will primarily attend to the external conflict. For instance, Renee’s thoughts and feelings about whether to run will tend to focus not on her self-understanding as a runner but rather on running and the considerations that count in favor or against her going for a run today. But this is just a tendency. Some situations motivate conflicted agents to engage in more internal reflections about who they want to be in the world; and others require them to shift their attention back and forth between the internal and external dimensions of their conflict. In most cases, however, our tendency toward an outward focus keeps our eyes on the external conflict. Now that we’ve described our characters’ predicaments in terms of their interests, let’s take a closer look at how each case unfolds. Renee’s deep interest in running has a syndrome of dispositional effects—she cares about running, she’s intrinsically motivated to run, she’s emotionally attached to running, she tends to evaluate running in a favorable light, and she tries to meet the normative expectations that she associates with running. But she also has a deep interest in self-care with its

242  Matthew Burch own suite of dispositional effects. When she wakes with a bad mood and sore tendon, then, she feels conflicted. She wants to run but she also wants to take care of herself. This faces her with the question of what to do: “Should I rest, or risk it?” To settle that question, Renee deliberates, assessing the affective and normative claims associated with each interest in light of her current situation. And she concludes by forming a plan (or future intention) to rest today and see how she feels tomorrow. Later in the day, however, affective and circumstantial changes shift her attention back to her interest in running. With her legs in motion, Renee finds herself in an elevated mood and a sunny setting that calls out to her sensibilities as a runner. Thus, while still aware of the plan shaped by her interest in self-care, she responds spontaneously to the affective and normative powers of her interest in running. In other words, a sudden change in motivation leads her to take spontaneous, free, and intentional action against her explicit plan. So, Renee forms a plan with one interest in view, and then, still aware of that plan, she acts spontaneously against it in response to another interest. This is intention-shift: she spontaneously shifts away from her prior intention (or plan) and takes a different intentional action. Lisa’s case tells a similar story. Torn between two interests, she faces the question of what to do. To settle that question, she deliberates. Initially, she focuses more on her interest in a healthy relationship, and, although she remains conflicted, she plans to keep her feelings to herself. Then, still perfectly aware of that plan, changes in her affective life and circumstances motivate her to respond spontaneously to the dispositional effects of her romantic interest. Which changes does she respond to? Well, she was emotionally drained and alone in her car when she thought it best to repress the erotic stirrings of her passions, which disposed her to choose the risk-averse option; and then she confessed her love when she found herself no longer tired and alone but rather nervously excited and in the presence of her potential lover. So, like Renee, Lisa undergoes a sudden change in motivation and takes spontaneous non-deliberative action against her explicit plan. Changes in affect and circumstance also help explain why Renee and Lisa act with a clear conscience. They feel fine about violating their own plans, because what mattered to them when they made those plans no longer matters in the same way. Due to changes in affect and circumstance, Renee no longer sees her run as a risk and Lisa stops looking at her romantic interest as potential self-sabotage. Thus, their explicit plans just hang inertly in consciousness like advice from someone who doesn’t really understand their new circumstances. Conscious of violating their plans, they don’t care, because changes in their situation have affected the way things weigh with them. Against their prior intention, they follow their intuitive, unreflective sense of what’s best and act with a clear conscience.

Against Our Better Judgment 243 Before turning to akrasia, I want to sharpen my account of intentionshift by considering two critical worries. First, readers might object to the alleged guilt-free character of intention-shift. Renee and Lisa’s actions could easily lead to feelings of guilt. Renee might badly injure herself and so feel guilty in retrospect for failing to stick to her plan. And Lisa’s revelation might poison her therapeutic alliance with her analyst and so leave her feeling remorseful. Moreover, either woman might grapple with guilt from sources other than a sense of her own weakness, e.g., memories of similar actions that went wrong, or even unconscious sources of guilt she doesn’t quite understand. Guilt crops up in unpredictable ways, and so it seems unwise to define intention-shift by the absence of guilt and other negative emotions. I agree. Intention-shift can have bad, guilt-inducing consequences, and an-archic feelings of guilt can emerge from nowhere, so guilt and other negative emotions can certainty accompany intention-shift. My point, however, is that such negative emotion is never intrinsic to intentionshift. In intention-shift, you violate your own plan but feel no negative emotion for that violation itself, because the plan you violate no longer claims you as it once did. You betray your prior plan—not yourself. This doesn’t inoculate you against negative emotions from other sources; it only means that there’s no negative emotion intrinsic to intention-shift. The second critical worry pertains to control. One standard requirement for free and intentional action is that it be under an agent’s control. And I’ve said that intention-shift is a form of spontaneous, non-­deliberative action. Can second-nature skilled actions that seem to border on instinct really be under our control? As I’ve argued elsewhere (2018), I think the answer is yes. I don’t have space to rehearse the entire argument here, but I’ll try to capture the gist. On my view, to act at all is to be guided by the norms that govern some ability-to-be. For example, when I’m running a seminar, I do so in accordance with my own personally inflected understanding of what it means to be a teacher. Now, ordinarily, I don’t explicitly think about my ability-to-be as a teacher. Instead, I focus on my students and what we’re talking about. But remember: my interests are reflexive. The affective and normative powers my students have for me depend on my idiosyncratic affective life and my personally inflected ability-to-be as a teacher. Moreover, although I’m typically not explicitly aware of that fact while I’m teaching, I  do know it—I have practical non-observational knowledge of the ability-to-be I’m currently exercising. Thus, if put on the spot and called to give an account of what I’m up to in the classroom, I can answer with confidence and sufficient warrant that I’m trying to teach. And if badgered for a more detailed account of my behavior, I  might end up in a conversation about what kind of teacher I’m trying to be. In skilled action, then, I  have non-observational practical knowledge of which ability-to-be shapes my action. And I  must, because it’s only

244  Matthew Burch in light of the norms that govern that ability-to-be that I  can respond to my students’ normative expectations. It’s plausible to think that my intention-shift is under my control, then, because such actions, like most spontaneous actions, are guided by my ability-to-be. Of course, whether and to what extent such control makes us responsible for intention-shift in a way that warrants blame is a larger issue that I can’t deal with here.

3. Akrasia People rarely talk about intention-shift, because it just isn’t newsworthy when you act against your prior intention with a clear conscience. Imagine that headline: “Area Man Does What Feels Right.” By contrast, philosophers and researchers in the cognitive and social sciences shower attention on akrasia, because it features prominently in a diverse set of bad behaviors and social problems. For an illustrative but by no means exhaustive list: akratic agents overeat, drink too much, smoke, gamble, cheat on their partners, break resolutions, act out, get belligerent, commit domestic violence, return to abusive relationships, and so on. These actions demoralize those who commit them, inflict untold harm on others, and all-too-often look like a gateway to full-blown addiction, moral turpitude, and criminality. Now that’s a headline: “Akrasia Ruins Lives!” Just in case it slipped your mind by now, akratic actions, on my view, are actions taken freely and intentionally against my explicit plan (or future intention) and accompanied by some self-critical emotion (e.g.,  guilt, shame, self-loathing, self-directed anger) or a mixture of such emotions. Let’s begin our analysis once more with a pair of examples: 1. Nearing his fiftieth birthday, Joe feels rundown. He’s packing on pounds, his joints hurt, and his gastrointestinal health is nothing to brag about. To stem the tide of his senescence, he resolves to embark on a gluten-free, vegan dietary regime. With his newfound interest in good health, he’s now committed to dietary rigor, and he adheres just fine when he’s on his own. But Joe also has an established interest in a social life that has never involved killjoy teetotalism, and so his dietary resolve tends to peter out when he gets together with friends and family. This sets up a recurring conflict. Before each social event Joe decides he’s going to “control himself” this time; and then when the party is underway and temptations and social pressures get to work on him, he undergoes a shift in motivation and acts against his plan, pigging out on forbidden foods. Joe enjoys these transgressions— a lot—but his pleasure mingles with feelings of guilt and shame. 2. Antonio loves his wife, but he feels restless in his marriage and begins to contemplate an affair. Thinking things through, he feels torn. He sees honesty and fidelity as essential to being a good partner, which

Against Our Better Judgment 245 rules out a secret affair. But he also envies his friends who have managed extramarital flings without blowing up their marriages. Feeling pulled in both directions, he decides to remain faithful. On his next work trip, however, he meets someone and cheats on his wife. Guilt tears away at him as soon as the affair begins—and his self-loathing gathers intensity in the days that follow—but at the same time he’s consumed by the dizzy pleasures of the affair. We can explain these cases much like we did Renee and Lisa’s actions. Joe and Antonio both experience a conflict at once external and internal. Joe’s interest in health clashes with his interest in a certain kind of social life, which corresponds to a conflict between his newfound ability-to-be as a “health nut” and his more entrenched self-understanding as a happygo-lucky socialite. Antonio’s interest in fidelity is clearly at odds with his interest in an affair, and that conflict generates tension internal to his ability-to-be as a husband: he relates to his interest in fidelity as someone trying to be a faithful husband; but he relates to his interest in an affair as a furtive adulterer. And this represents a conflict within a single abilityto-be, I contend, because faithful husband and furtive adulterer are two different ways to be a husband. Like Renee and Lisa, then, Joe and Antonio undergo a conflict at once external and internal, and this faces them with a question about what to do; they settle that question by deliberating and making an explicit plan, i.e., a future intention to take a specific course of action; and then—still aware of that plan and without revising it through further deliberation—they spontaneously do something else. Our four characters have this much in common. They differ, however, on an affective level. Renee and Lisa act with a clear conscience, while Joe and Antonio experience feelings of guilt and/ or shame intrinsically related to their akratic actions. What accounts for this difference? The examples recommend an answer. In Renee and Lisa’s cases, affective and circumstantial changes not only motivate them to act spontaneously against their own plans, but these changes also effectively neutralize the affective and normative claims associated with those plans. In the park and primed to run, Renee’s plan to rest no longer claims her; it just hangs there inertly in the back of her mind. And the same goes for Lisa: the idea of keeping her feelings to herself now leaves her cold. Our examples of akrasia differ starkly in this regard. The affective and circumstantial changes Joe and Antonio undergo suffice to motivate them to act against their plans; however, those changes fail to neutralize the affective and normative claims associated with those plans. Joe still cares about his health and sees strict adherence to his dietary regime as a defining commitment of that interest. Thus, when he violates that commitment, he suffers feelings of guilt and shame, because he freely and intentionally fails to meet the normative expectations of a deep interest

246  Matthew Burch that still actively claims him in that moment. Moreover, given the reflexive character of our interests, in betraying those normative expectations he simultaneously betrays himself. The same goes for Antonio. Since he still cares about fidelity even as he cheats, he feels stricken with guilt for failing to meet the normative expectations associated with that interest. But isn’t this putative distinction between intention-shift and akrasia a difference without a difference? If both terms denote acting freely and intentionally against your own explicit plan (or future intention), why not stick to the orthodox approach and treat them as synonyms that refer to a single phenomenon that sometimes involves negative emotion? This is a potentially devastating objection. At the outset of this chapter, I claimed that we need to enrich our vocabulary to capture the diverse phenomena at stake in this area of research, and I promised to motivate that claim by highlighting two such phenomena. But if this objection succeeds, and my distinction between intention-shift and akrasia collapses, then the argument of this chapter founders, and I make no progress toward my broader goals. Fortunately, the distinction is indispensable. Negative emotion is no accidental aspect of akrasia; it’s an essential feature that points to the following four characteristics that distinguish akrasia from intention-shift: 1. Akrasia involves a synchronic conflict of interests. This comes through clearly in our examples: when Joe indulges himself at social events, he still feels claimed by an interest in his health; and when Antonio cheats, he’s still struck by the affective and normative powers of his interest in fidelity. Unlike Renee and Lisa, then, when Joe and Antonio betray their plans, they also betray their interests; and, given the reflexive nature of human interests, this betrayal simultaneously amounts to a kind of self-betrayal. These layers of betrayal are what the negative emotions in akrasia are about: we betray our interests and ourselves, and the wages of such betrayal are guilt, shame, self-directed anger, and other negative emotions. 2. Akratic actions express a part of ourselves that we see as a flaw.8 The akratic agent’s internal conflict makes him feel ambivalent about what he does. When I betray my interest, to some degree, I simultaneously fail to be who I want to be—I fail to meet the standards that govern some ability-to-be that matters to me. And when I do so, I  relate to my action both from the standpoint of the ability-to-be I  act on and from the standpoint of the ability-to-be I  betray. My standpoint is thus divided. Consider Joe in this light. In his revelry, he relates to what he does in terms of his ability-to-be as an upbeat partygoer and enjoys himself a good deal; but at the same time, he sees his behavior from the standpoint of his self-understanding as a man on a mission to improve his health, and from that vantage his behavior looks self-destructive. In this way, our akratic actions

Against Our Better Judgment 247 express part of our self that another part sees as a flaw. And this contributes to feelings of guilt and shame, because the agent knows that if he didn’t have this flaw, he wouldn’t do the thing that part of him deems bad. 3. A sense of failure is intrinsic to akrasia. In akrasia, negative emotions like guilt and shame serve as real-time indicators of your failure, by your own lights, to do what you ought to do. Our examples illustrate this clearly. When Joe indulges his appetites, he fails to be the cleanliving purist that part of him feels called to be; and when Antonio cheats on his wife, he fails, rather spectacularly, to live up to his commitments as a faithful husband. They fail to meet the normative expectations built in to some of their deep interests, and so, to that extent, fail to be good by their own lights. And these actions produce negative emotions like guilt and shame, because such emotions are intentional states that signal this sort of existential failure. 4. Akrasia involves a feeling of weakness. Akrasia literally means “without power,” and we typically translate akrasia as weakness of will, because the phenomenon is fundamentally characterized by a sense of weakness. Although we act freely and intentionally in akrasia, we simultaneously feel weak, insofar as we fail to live up to the normative expectations of some deep interest. For example, since Joe continues to care about his goals for clean living even as he violates them, the health nut in him feels too weak to overcome his inner Falstaff. We can express the intuition as a counterfactual: if his commitment to being healthy were stronger, Joe wouldn’t succumb to temptation. Since he does succumb, the part of him that fails to live up to its own standards feels weak. The same goes for Antonio: were his commitment to fidelity stronger, he wouldn’t cheat. But he does cheat, and so the part of him struggling to be faithful feels weak. The faithful husband in him says, “Oh, Lord, grant me continence!”, while his inner rakehell adds, “but not yet.” On top of the negative emotions associated with their flaws and failures, then, Joe and Antonio feel guilty for being weak. Intention-shift exhibits none of these features. Recall Renee and Lisa one last time. First, although both women face a conflict of interests prior to their intention-shift, by the time that shift occurs their conflict has resolved. When Renee takes off running, she no longer feels claimed by any reasons not to run; and when Lisa declares her love for her analyst, she no longer finds that declaration degrading. Thus, the two experience no synchronic conflict. They might not grasp that fact ­intellectually— since they’re still aware of their prior plan as they violate it—but it comes through clearly in their emotions: their spontaneous action just feels right, which signals a lack of conflict. Second, they don’t see their action as anchored in a flaw; they only experience it as rooted in a deep

248  Matthew Burch interest. Third, and for related reasons, Renee and Lisa’s akratic actions aren’t accompanied by a sense of failure. No longer claimed by their prior intentions, they feel no sense of failure for not acting on them. Finally, their actions involve no weakness. No sensible person would consider Renee weak for taking a run in her circumstances; they would more likely admire her commitment to fitness. The same goes for Lisa: if anything, her confession reflects not weakness but pluck. Moreover, the counterfactual test we applied to Joe’s and Antonio’s cases seems irrelevant here. It’s not as if Renee would have laid off running had her commitment to self-care been stronger, nor would Lisa have kept her feelings to herself if she were more committed to being a risk-averse lover. Weakness isn’t the issue: they weren’t too weak to respond to active normative claims; rather, the relevant claims were simply no longer active. Intention-shift comes with a clear conscience, then, because, by our own lights, there’s nothing to feel bad about. No conflict, no deep-seated flaw, no failure, no weakness—just a sudden change in motivation that leads to spontaneous, free, intentional, and normatively suitable action. We can summarize the differences between intention-shift and akrasia in the following table: Intention-Shift

Akrasia

Clear Conscience Resolved Conflict Action seen as expressive of an interest No Sense of Failure No Feelings of Weakness

Negative Emotion Synchronic Conflict Action seen as expressive of an interest and anchored in a flaw A Sense of Failure Feelings of Weakness

Incidentally, recent work in experimental philosophy supports this picture. Give study participants a vignette that describes a person who plans to do something bad and then spontaneously does something good, and the majority will not call him weak-willed. Flip the scenario, so that he scraps a good intention for an immoral action, and most participants will see him as weak-willed (May and Holton 2012). This fits my view nicely: the first vignette describes intention-shift, the second akrasia.

Conclusion There’s more than one way to violate your own plans, and we’ve looked at two: intention-shift and akrasia. This only scratches the surface of the work I hope to do in this area. I plan to use the tools of phenomenology to analyze other relevant phenomena about which the tradition has said relatively little, e.g.,  agential breakdown, diachronic akrasia,

Against Our Better Judgment 249 rationalization, and addiction. I believe these crossover efforts will yield rich results, and I hope others agree, and we start to see more work in this relatively neglected area of phenomenological research.9

Notes 1 I defend a phenomenological approach to akrasia in Burch (2018). My view has evolved since I published that piece, but the main claims remain the same. 2 This tracks with Feinberg’s (1984) definition of interests. 3 For an excellent discussion of this distinction between emotions and moods, see Crowell (2014). 4 I won’t defend the claim that individual interests only make sense in a context of significance; instead, I’ll just ask the skeptical reader to identify a human interest that’s intelligible independent of its relation to a wider context of meaning. 5 For an in-depth argument that normativity requires the logical—but not the actual—possibility of failure, see Lavin (2004), from whom I also borrow the “Drink, or don’t drink” example. 6 The fact that the norms that govern social practices are dynamic, open-ended, and recursively worked out in the practice is an important point developed and defended powerfully by Rouse (2007, 2015). 7 Practical identity is a misleading translation because it suggests that every Seinkönnen contributes significantly to defining who you are. In Burch (2018), I translated Seinkönnen as existential ability, but I have since abandoned that translation because it now strikes me as misleading in the same way. Hence, I’m now using the more literal translation: ability-to-be. 8 Once again, I take inspiration from Sripada (2016) on this point. 9 My approach to phenomenology is deeply indebted to my friend and teacher, Steve Crowell. Working with him not only shaped my understanding of phenomenology but also my entire way of doing philosophy. I  can’t thank him enough for his teaching, guidance, and friendship.

Bibliography Burch, Matthew. 2018. “Making Sense of Akrasia.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences: 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9568-9. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. “Responsibility, Autonomy, Affectivity: A  Heideggerian ———.  Approach.” In Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, edited by Denis McManus, 215–42. Feinberg, Joel. 1984. The Moral Limits to the Criminal Law Volume 1: Harm to Others. New York: Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, Harry. 1999. “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love.” In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 129–41. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Lavin, Douglas. 2004. “Practical Reason and the Possibility of Error.” Ethics 114 (3): 424–57.

250  Matthew Burch May, Joshua, and Richard Holton. 2012. “What in the World Is Weakness of Will?” Philosophical Studies 157 (3): 341–60. Okrent, Mark. 1999. “Heidegger and Korsgaard on Human Reflection.” Philosophical Topics 27 (2): 47–76. Rouse, Joseph. 2007. “Social Practices and Normativity.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (1): 46–56. ———. 2015. Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sripada, Chandra. 2016. “Self-Expression: A Deep Self Theory of Moral Responsibility.” Philosophical Studies 173 (5): 1203–32.

14 Everyday Eros Toward a Phenomenology of Erotic Inception Jack Marsh

For Jenny Love arrives. —Angelou Incipit vita nova. —Dante

What would it look like to place love at the center of a rigorously phenomenological Sinn-analysis? This chapter will pursue just this question by conducting a phenomenological analysis of “romantic love,” henceforth referred to as “eros.”1 More specifically, I analyze how eros inaugurates itself in the ongoing rhythms of our everyday lives and do so with the methodological tools of Heidegger’s Being and Time (hereafter BT). Since the question of eros is too complex to cover adequately in a single chapter, what I offer here is preparatory work for a larger project with at least three distinct analytic phases: (1) erotic inception, (2) erotic birth, and (3) erotic life and death. I deal only with (1) in this chapter, and in a way that I hope provides a viable opening for further analysis. I mention these three phases here because my treatment of erotic inception anticipates later moments of analysis that inform these descriptions. I therefore note relevant problems and themes not treatable herein as I proceed. Schuback is surely right that “Heidegger . . . rarely speaks about love,” and when he does his suggestive—even poetic—utterances seem always inflected by wherever he happens to be standing on the winding path of his vast authorship (Schuback 2012, 15).2 Similarly, Freeman (2009) rightly implies that BT’s silence on love necessitates a fresh look at the “thing itself,” and in such way that puts to work its formidable methodological tools.3 Though I agree with Schuback and Freeman, I think Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein provides a rich philosophical context for the analysis of eros. Heidegger did not take a particular interest in ethics or metaethics, yet in recent years many authors have offered profitable Heideggerian analyses of such issues (e.g., Olafson 1998; Hodge 2012; Mcmullin 2013; Crowell 2013). I hope to do the same for the phenomenon of eros.

252  Jack Marsh One important measure for achievement in the phenomenology of eros is the extent to which its disclosive analysis is intelligible on phenomenological grounds alone. In other words, the analysis must not merely be a piece of culture-bound autobiography but rather an analysis of structures common to experiences of eros as such. As the reader will see, my own analysis starts from (post-) modern, multi-racial, youthish, and urban contexts, but I do not give those contexts the last word on love’s sense. I try to avoid uncritically presuming direct and easy access to the things themselves, distinguishing between the content of our everydayness—the diverse practices, norms, and senses of a given historico-cultural world— from the more formal methodological commitments, and the structures they involve. By bracketing our everyday commitments toward the rigorously first-person perspective characteristic of the phenomenological standpoint, we help “neutralize” our tendency to assume the “normality” of our own preferences. So although not every reader may see herself in every detail of the descriptions that follow, she should be able to grasp first-personally the meaning structures that make this, and other culturally mediated descriptions, possible.4 In what follows, I  will show: everyday eros begins in (1) the given lifeworld of Dasein’s socialization, (2) with an initial affective-elective moment of erotic interest that draws an attracting attention to the interplay of another’s bodily details with their lived alterity; (3) when communication begins between a potential couple, and if they jointly carry forth a new relationship in mutual desire, they (4) set off a process wherein both individuals project competing visions of the future, oscillating between the euphoria at the possibilities made available in the new relationship, and a difficult and sometimes painful reckoning with the insistent limits and relative fit of their respective styles, traumas, histories, and aspirations.5 In the dynamic play of dating, and in the shared practice of what I call tending-the-ground, couples (5) carry out an implicit assessment of each other as candidates for erotic commitment. Erotic inception brings a relational “We” to proto-life, and guides erotic Dasein toward erotic birth.

Everyday Eros: The Weekend Yes, I know it’s the weekend, mama And everybody’s having fun —B.B. King We’re King and Queen of the weekend. —Lorde

Everyday eros emerges in the ordinary rhythms of a given culture, in the habituated patterns of life we are socialized into as belonging to a given

Everyday Eros 253 lifeworld. We always already understand these rhythms in an average and general sort of way. Eros first shows up in this what- and with-world of everyday life: a given culture’s ordinary situation and the broad styles of play and rest this involves. A primary way a lifeworld gets organized is by the conventional way it allots time to various tasks. For example, what we conventionally call the weekend is a popular way to denote our fun time: days set apart for a bit of play and rest in contrast to our busy workweek. Though today’s technological situation is playing a transformative role in how we do our work, play, and rest—even in how we pursue eros (my partner and I met through OK Cupid), the weekend still remains the primary time in which we seek out and engage particular erotic situations: parties, dinner, movies, clubbing, hikes, etc., and the hobbies and interests that exercise our particular Dasein. Eros can of course happen nearly anywhere across the course of our ordinary schedules. But to be drawn into the full potential for love’s unfolding in a particular erotic encounter, we necessarily have to reckon with our everyday schedules. This reckoning usually unfolds in how we spend our fun time, and for most folks this typically happens on the weekend. Before taking a closer look at the ways love can befall us, let me introduce an important distinction to carry forth as we proceed. In a letter to Arendt in 1925, Heidegger writes, “to be in one’s love = to be urged to the most proper existence”6 (Heidegger 2003; Schuback 2012, 137). Eros indeed does involve an “urge” of sorts, but as he hints here: one that can accord with Dasein’s potential for—“propensio in . . .” (Heidegger 1962, 232)—authenticity. Following Freeman (2009), there is a distinction to be had here between an “urge” that opens, frees, and lights up, and an “urge” that violates and suppresses Dasein’s potential for being-a-self and being-with-others authentically. Heidegger writes, Insofar as the urge takes over the primary kind of being of Dasein, it suppresses the already-being-involved-in something along with that something, but it also suppresses the explicit being-ahead-of-itself. For in urge, care is now merely a concern for a ‘toward and nothing else.’ Urge as such blinds, it makes us blind. We are in the habit of saying that ‘love is blind.’ Here, love is regarded as an urge and so is replaced by an entirely different phenomenon. For love really gives us sight. Urge is a mode of being of care, specifically care which has not yet become free, but care is not an urge. (Heidegger 1992, 296) Things get murkier still when he later asserts, “if understood correctly, that is, in the sense of fundamental ontology, Sorge can never be differentiated from ‘love’ ” (Schuback 2012, 138). If to be in (“one’s” or “the”) love = to be “urged” (or “forced,” gedrängt), and if further Liebe is identical to Sorge, then it cannot be the case that “care is not an urge.”

254  Jack Marsh If his letter to Arendt matters, an “urge” of a sort proper to care must be possible without obliterating the possibility of authenticity. This requires a more thorough analysis I  cannot undertake here, but let’s provisionally assume that a distinction between a blinding and lightening “urge” remains possible on Heidegger’s own terms, and in such a way not wholly identical with more general disclosive processes. Though it may be tempting to map this distinction onto the more ordinary differentiation between the brute “urge” of sexual desire and the longing “urge” of endearing affection, we should resist doing so. Whatever else eros might involve, and whatever may come of the question of the urge, love deals with Dasein as a whole, and not originally as if it were a psychophysical doublet. With this in mind, Schuback is right to describe love as a unique “overtaking and befalling, reaching existence as an arrow pierces the body of the soul” (Schuback 2012, 132). Eros begins by seizing our everyday attention, but in such a way that does not annihilate the potential for authenticity.

World-Entry: Standing Out We get to choose who we let into our weird little worlds. —Good Will Hunting Step out, show me what you all about. —Notorious B.I.G.

Standing-out-among. Everyday eros can often begin, not with full-fledged encounters, but rather with a particular detail that catches the eye: an endearing gesture, the unique texture of her laugh, his alluring scent, etc.7 Such moments just happen to us, with varying intensity, as in a “knowing glance” between two pedestrians: a split-second “flicker” of smiles and eyes as they pass each other by on the street.8 Let’s call our passing strangers Dana and Devon. When Dana and Devon’s eyes meet, each is distinguished for the other within the crowd, and gives rise to an inner stir: a spark of desire. If their moment is genuinely shared, each don’t only or merely have a spark, they are this spark. In the case of passing strangers going about their everyday business, the flicker comes and goes: they’re each geared into their daily tasks, perhaps already committed to other partners, and otherwise engaged in the flow of their routine situations. At this level of everyday moments the other doesn’t fully “announce” herself, or doesn’t “speak herself out” in full concretion.9 A single small detail captures their attention, sparks desire, and brings each other into focus as a living, though in this case passing, question; and it’s the interplay of their bodily, self-presentational details and their lived alterity that constitutes the allure in the moment: who is he? But reciprocally shared

Everyday Eros 255 or not, whenever another catches the eye and kindles desire, he standsout among the crowd as a particular erotic question. While my description here owes something to Levinas, it also puts some critical pressure on one of his central claims. As Derrida first pointed out, the other never truly “reveals” herself as a total or “absolute” alterity.10 Dana and Devon can share a knowing glance, and in a blink mutually understand a reciprocal allure, because they are always already beingin-the-world. As the moment unfolds, the bodily details of each appear as already expressive of their own deliberate self-care: the clothes each chooses to wear, a confident stride, a book under the arm, earbuds, and so on. In this shared moment, their attention spontaneously grasps and interprets each other’s bodily and self-presentational details, and these jointly give an overall sense of their respective styles. These styles in turn refer to larger recognizable cultural trends and types that they both embody and defy by individuating and augmenting them in their respective and unique ways. It’s only in the contrast with this quite general sort of background understanding that their uniqueness can be noticed and come to reciprocally matter to them. For whoever else the other is or might be, the other is certainly not only or merely their bodily details or active style. Suppose Dana presents himself as a “hipster.” If Devon stops and talks to him, and he curtly tells him that he’s a street actor late for a performance down the block, as Dana hurries off Devon will have discovered (1) perhaps the allure was not shared after all, and (2) Devon’s spontaneous social understanding of Dana might be completely off base, since he is in wardrobe for his impending performance. In this case Dana’s clothes and hairstyle aren’t actually self-expressive, his book and earbuds are props, etc. But say they stop for leisurely conversation. Devon might slowly discover that at least some of his spontaneous interpretive assumptions were in fact right. The more Devon gets to know Dana, the more his alterity—his “not only or merely”—might increasingly come to matter to him, by firing the desire to spend more time with him as the living question that he is. Stepping-out-among. Eros can move beyond a passing standing-out to a more deliberate stepping-out. Let’s say Dana and Devon have not yet met, and are enjoying a night out at the dance club with their respective group of friends. On arrival, Devon’s smile catches Dana’s eye and provokes a spark in his. Devon hasn’t seen him, and modest mouse that Devon is, he instantly looks away, darting into the anonymity of the crowd. Dana nervously tries to be Gyges as the night unfolds, keeping a discreet, intermittent, and multi-angled eye on Devon during trips to the bar, while dancing with friends, and from the safe confines of his table. With each timid glance across the floor Dana notes some new detail, new aspects that increasingly fill out a vivid sense of Devon’s overall style: an affable laugh, tasteful outfit, a confident gait, playfully muted dance movements, etc. In this particular situation, with the increasing

256  Jack Marsh determinacy of Devon’s appearance to Dana, the latter’s desire to meet him correspondingly heightens; the more his desire heightens, the more the crowd simultaneously recedes into the background of Dana’s attention; the more that the crowd recedes, the more Devon stands-out among them as an increasingly more pressing question. This process is moreover attended by veritable fantasia: a series of free-floating fantasies erupt for Dana of he and Devon in various erotic situations. Fantasia isn’t only sexual in thrust (though it often involves this), but is rather a spontaneous and holistic process of imagining Devon engaged with him in the various activities and pursuits that partly make Dana who he is. In this process, Dana progressively stands-out to Devon as a living question, and the more this question seizes him, the more vulnerable to Dana he becomes. Asking Devon to dance entails the risk of shattering Dana’s fantasies, risks potential rejection or disappointment, possibilities Dana cannot countenance in this case (say, he’s been hurt in the past). By this time in the evening, Dana is a total cache of anxious energy: he so desperately desires to dance with him, but just cannot. No amount of tipsy seems to aid him in summoning the courage to ask the question. As Dana sits in a fit of paralysis, a voice calls out to him through the music: “hello!” Dana looks up. “Let’s dance!” Surprise! As Dana and Devon’s eyes finally meet, the former’s cache of anxious energy erupts in a surge of excited “happy.” At his “hello!” Devon has stepped-out. At Dana’s ebullient “yes!” Devon’s standing as a living question undergoes modification: he begins to unfold as a genuine erotic possibility. Stepping-out-from. With Devon’s call and Dana’s response, an important transformation of the situation takes place: (1) Devon no longer merely catches the eye as one among a crowd, rather he has decisively caught Dana’s own eye. By calling out to Dana, Devon has called him out of his fearful paralysis, bringing his active fantasies about Devon to a momentary halt. He singles Dana himself out from the crowd as in some sense worth his time in the shared fun of the particular situation. Since in this case Dana has been hurt in the past, Devon’s “hello, let’s dance!” poses a risk and presents him with a choice. If Dana were so damaged that he bolted away at Devon’s question, despite the fact that he desires to know him, he would only remain a question, and their erotic inception would never have a chance to commence. For each to count for the other as a genuine erotic possibility, each must face the risks of getting hurt again, of getting out of their heads in confronting the pain that saddles them, of potentially discovering that the other might come to hate them, use them, or turn out to be an infernal bore, and so forth. Only by shouldering this risk does eros stand-a-chance of coming to birth. (2) While Devon’s initiating question enacts a stepping-out-among, it is only in Dana’s “yes!” that he moves from this to properly stepping-out-from, namely, stepping-out-from the crowd together in the fun of the particular situation.

Everyday Eros 257 In passingly-standing-out-among, the other is ephemerally differentiated within the crowd and happens as a momentarily alluring riddle. In pressingly-standing-out-among, the other is decisively differentiated— picked out—from the crowd, is picked out as desired, and happens as an anxious absorption in a living question. In the former, our passing strangers are absorbed in their everyday routines, and the flicker is not enough to disrupt those routines. In the latter, Dana is obsessively absorbed in the desired, anxiously “in his head” with various fantasies that are hopelessly entangled with all the weight of pain and the past. The only way to halt his obsessing is to either (a) risk initiating personal communication or (b) affirmatively respond to the other’s communicative initiative. With this call and response, Dana and Devon come to genuinely count for one another within the situation. Stepping-out-from first allows for the threefold differentiation of self, other, and crowd; for a “we” in contrast to only “me” and “they,” such that Dana and Devon become potentially identifiable by the crowd as a couple. At this point, though, Dana and Devon are still determined by the excitement of their first meeting, caught up in the fun of this particular situation, and hence only an indefinite couple (for just this dance? for the remainder of the evening? for a few day dalliance? etc.). As such, when Dana rises to dance with Devon, they do not properly take the floor; rather, the floor takes them as caught up in the fun of the moment. Now, multiple possibilities emerge as they are moved to the dance floor. On the one hand, perhaps Devon moves too fast, and Dana is turned off and leaves the dance floor. Perhaps in later conversation, Dana finds him boring, rude, uptight, or unintelligent, and hence resolves not to see him again. Whatever the reason or its way of unfolding, in each of these cases Dana bumps into a detail or trait that douses the fire. When the fire dies, the other’s standing as a living question does not thereby cease, but rather is modified such that he folds back within himself and recedes into a standing stranger. The question that he is is no longer alive for Dana as an erotic possibility, but his being is not altogether determined by Dana’s own desire. But on the other hand, say they enjoyed dancing the night away. When the floor first hits their feet, Dana is a total bundle of nervous zing, and hence deliberately enacts his “safest” dance moves. Devon does too, reprising the playfully muted “cool” he’s done all night. At first their respective moves are very individual, and when they first draw close to dance together, it’s a bit clumsy and disjointed. But early on Dana intuitively see two things: (a) he’s a better dancer than Devon is, and (b) Devon seems nervous! His moves are just a tad more tense than earlier, and when he draws in close to Dana he stops just on the verge of his “personal space.” This makes Dana oh so happy, and gives him the boost he needs to really step-out in the dance. To help Devon relax, Dana begins to imitate his dance moves: enacting very slight and easily performed

258  Jack Marsh variations on his simple motile hook. Devon immediately perks up, and begins to mimic these variations, interposing his own variations in turn. After a few playful turns in their dynamically adjusting “sync up,” Dana breaks off into a whole new improvised dance theme. Devon again follows suit, risking a new and somewhat corny set of improvised moves. Throughout the dance, they move in and out between “syncing up” and playful jousts of expressively individual movement. By this point Dana is pretty good at anticipating Devon’s movements. The next time Devon begins to draw in close to Dana, he gracefully steps in and draws near.11 Their bodies touch for the first time. Dana is momentarily breathless. For the rest of the evening they reprise their playful beginning in numerous and novel variations: moving in and out of coordinated moves and jousting individual improvisations, such that toward the end of the night their dancing together acquires a rhythm and style of its own. They continue on in fun and fire to all the wee hours. At daybreak, eros once more puts them to a choice: does each desire to spend more time with the other? Or do they let each other pass into the happiness of living memory? With the latter each folds back into a stranger, a neighbor, or perhaps a friend. With the former, and indeed if both desire spending more time with each other, eros continues its unfolding in the playful and sometimes anxious dance of dating. Here I  want to suggest that stepping-out-from constitutes an erotic modification of what Heidegger calls “world-entry” [Welteingang]. In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger asserts: World is the free surpassive counter-hold of the for-the-sake-of. Only insofar as Dasein in its metaphysical essence, freely presenting its own for-the-sake-of, overshoots itself [überschwingt], does Dasein become, as upswing [Überschwingende] toward the possible, the occasion (from a metaphysical viewpoint) for beings to emerge as beings. (Heidegger 1992, 193) Setting aside the sense of “metaphysics” Heidegger utilizes here, this can be read as restating one of BT’s central insights: it’s only in Dasein’s owned projects—in trying-to-be something (a teacher, mother, lover, etc.)—that other entities can show up as what they are. Dasein “overshoots itself” in the sense that its lived projects include various implications of which Dasein is not always explicitly aware when committing to a specific practice. World is a “counter-hold” in the sense of the real context in which a specific project is carried out, and that presents resistances that challenge or thwart a particular project of trying-to-be. In an erotic context, for example, trying to be a lover involves various sorts of social competence: being a good listener, sensitivity to a particular other’s unique needs and style, the ability to hold others accountable in

Everyday Eros 259 constructive ways, willingness to apologize, etc. We are not yet at the point of analysis to fully unpack these matters but, for now, I want to suggest that it’s in stepping-out-from proper to communication that the other as a potential erotic partner properly enters my particular world. In this sense, “intraworldliness is the condition for existing Dasein’s experience and comprehension of things as they are” (Ibid: 194). In an erotic context, it is only because I desire and I am my desire that the other and his desire can come to matter to me, such that he can come to stand-out for me as a living question, such that in initiating communication we can step-out-from the crowd, and amidst that crowd, be caught up on the dance floor. Though Dasein is being-in-the-world, and world as such is not something that can be wholly or unilaterally altered at a whim, we do have a say in “who we let in to our weird little worlds,” e.g., the world of our personal lives. This “letting in” is determined by who and what we spend time on.

The Dance of Dating: Upswing This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, To cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. —Rumi Dressed up to the eyes It’s a wonderful surprise To see your shoes and your spirits rise —The Cure

Upswing. As we’ve seen, in Heidegger’s discussion of world-entry he characterizes Dasein as Überschwingende: “upswing toward the possible.” Heidegger is trying to specify how Dasein serves as a condition for occurrent entities to show up in our awareness. Dasein of course doesn’t “fabricate” daisies, birds, or the pediatrician’s kids. Dasein lets others show up as the particular beings they are, but always in relation to its own particular trying-to-be (a teacher, mother, lover, etc.). He calls trying-to-be a “transcendence” because living through a committed practice supplies a larger perspective in which various things, persons, and practices can enter our awareness.12 For example, if I’m trying-to-be a baseball player, various artifacts become meaningful to me—balls, bases, mitts, etc.—that might be inscrutable to, say, an inhabitant of North Sentinel Island. And beyond mere artifacts, trying to play baseball attunes me to a definite set of bodily movements and motile skills that are required to play the game well, skills and movements that take considerable time and commitment to master. My being practiced in baseball can in turn form a basis for, say, appreciating the graceful excellence of a ballet dancer, or can lay down specific habits of mind and motile competencies that can

260  Jack Marsh be taken over for a quite different sort of project: a carpenter or framer, say, or a rock climber, or any other practice that requires expert skill and sensitivity with one’s own bodily movements. Finally, beyond artifacts and movements, trying to be a baseballer involves absorbing an implicit understanding of the rules that make the game what it is, and grasping this holistic sense supplies a ground for understanding and considering other sorts of practices: cricket, say, or even a practice of a different kind, say, infantry techniques, a waltz, etc. In any particular project of trying to be, Dasein engages implicit understandings of the “for-the-sake-ofwhich” of that project, and of its situatedness in the world as teleologically structured whole, and the movement of a “for-the-sake-of-which” delineates Dasein’s “transcendence.” But as we saw above, trying to acquire excellence in baseball always involves traversing resistances of various sorts. Mastering the ball grip and arm swerve required to pitch a curve ball takes a lot of practice to achieve both the curve, and the landing of a curve in the strike zone. Some of these resistances involve full-fledged “powerless[ness]” (Ibid.,  215), for example: given the dimensions of a baseball field and the relevant physics in play, trying to pitch a 100 mph curve ball is impossible. To try to acquire this particular skill is therefore a waste of time. Though we really are free to try to be nearly anything that strikes our fancy in a given social context, to do so authentically we must engage the practice “transparently,” and with commitment, e.g.,  soberly assess where we actually stand in terms of skills and potential, take on a practice regime to achieve improvement in skills that are actually attainable, try to learn from those who have already acquired excellence that demonstrably surpasses my own, etc. Moreover, authentically engaging in a practice necessarily requires making the practice my own: pursuing excellence in a given project while caring about the things, moves, and rules that jointly constitute it as what it is. If I claim to be a Christian, but never go to church, pray, meditate on the scriptures, or engage in the other activities that are normative in Christianity, my mother or my pastor will rightly question if I am a Christian at all. We are now positioned to more fully understand what Heidegger means by “swinging” (and no, it doesn’t here involve exchanging sexual partners at certain parties). Acquiring competence or excellence in a practice by trying to be something involves an attuning “oscillation” between my possibilities and my facticity, my abilities and limits, my possible futures and actual past. My care about the things, moves, and rules of a given practice lights up a range of possibilities that “outstrip” (Ibid., 221) the merely extant options on offer in the conventional world of my everyday life. The “up” in up-swing refers to just this excess of possibility, and it’s just this well of excess that empowers innovation in a particular tradition of practice (think of a Gandhi, Joyce, Einstein, Jordan, Picasso, or Monk). We can moreover experience this elevation in various ways: the

Everyday Eros 261 euphoria after a dissertation defense, the pulsating “yes!” at achieving a hard-won political goal (say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964), or indeed, the dawn of a new erotic relationship. In each of these cases, I am a movement of transcendence: whether a move beyond a realized achievement (becoming credentialed in philosophy, a precisely measurable uptick in my guitar chops, etc.) or toward a living question or mystery (the intoxicating inception of a new romance, achieving a potentially exemplary new style in my chosen vocation, etc.). In each of these cases I encounter and live through, as Kisiel nicely puts it, “an effusive exuberance of possibilities” (Kisiel 2005, 200–1), an expansive opening upon the world that is empowering and enriching. Yet the freedom and possibility experienced in the upswing inevitably bumps into the world’s (and other’s) “counter-hold.” This means that though our experience can reach beyond the merely extant, I  run up against decisive limits of what I can do or try to be. Despite my rigorous efforts, I was never able to get a secure grip on the curve ball, and hence only ever became available to my baseball coach as a sort of reliever of last resort. The limits of my thrown situation—which include the limits of my own kinaesthetic dexterity and bodily skill—translated into a decision to stop shooting for “professional athlete” and to turning my attention to experimenting with other practices (politics, music, philosophy, etc.) as potential candidates for my vocation. This encounter with limits clearly has political ramifications too, as is clear in ongoing class, antiracist, LGBT, etc. struggle. The deflating experience of suffering failure or injustice in trying to be, or at the troubles I must traverse in an ongoing committed practice, can be called a “downswing,” because they usually involve disappointment or strife of some sort, and at the exceptional limit I can periodically experience a global breakdown of interest in trying to be anything at all, an experience that discloses the finite limits of Dasein as such. This last exception aside, trying to be unfolds as an “oscillation” between expansive upswings and contracting downswings, between my lived sense of possibility and the actual limits of my thrown facticity, between my potential futures and actual past. With this idea of “swinging” in view, we are now positioned to analyze the possibilities and limits that open in the practice of dating. World-modification. As with world-entry, dating, too, presents multiple erotic possibilities. Our dancing couple might decide to “keep it light” as “friends with benefits,” i.e., remain on-hand for each other’s pleasure as friends, and nothing more. Or perhaps they might indefinitely totter on, caught up in the fun for as long as it might happen to last. But let’s say their fun at the club made them both want to see each other again. They like what they’ve seen thus far, and they hence desire to take more time together. Though they now “have an eye” for each other, their desire to see each other exclusively at this point is only implicitly felt and not, as yet, articulated. As beautifully moved in their unfolding moment,

262  Jack Marsh they haven’t yet “had the talk,” or thematically made definite their specific standing as a couple. In erotic inception, our couple is beautifully moved on the upswing. Their respective grounds have been loosed, and as a felt “we,” our couple soars into life. This “loosed” flight primarily manifests in what I will call world-modification. World-modification primarily means that our newly unfolding couple comes to respectively change ready aspects of their usual weekly routines, and do so in light of their serendipitous meeting. Simply, they desire to take time with each other. Instead of my ordinary Friday pubbing with friends, I’m instead with him: dancing the night away. Instead of my Saturday shopping with friends, I’m with him hiking up Bushburn Falls. Though I usually brunch with Mom on Sundays, I’m instead in pajamas with him catching up on classic movies. The fire of our inception loosens up the ground of my life, throws me soaring into an upswing, and the dancing sparks of our flame lights up the world of my everyday concerns and amusements. I do activities with him that I don’t normally do, special outings that I always meant to do but never got around to while absorbed in my weekly routines. This is one reason erotic inception can be so elating and euphoric: in a very concrete sense, I soar above my everydayness as my humdrum routine is upended and modified. The desired reorders those dimensions of my life most susceptible to change, opening new and ready tasks and amusements as I prioritize spending time with him. On the upswing, I undergo an alteration of potentially my whole being. This elation is moreover open, or clearly manifests to my family, friends, co-workers, and sometimes even to strangers. Hence the jokes and comments one often receives when caught up in the process of erotic inception: my co-worker asks, “What is with you? I’ve never seen you this happy.” My mother half-jokingly advises, “Just wait and hold on to your head, take account of another impending date: a date with gravity.” In the case of our dancing couple, these sorts of comments confirm and reinforce their felt sense of themselves as a couple, as a “we.” I of course “know” my mom is right, but in the euphoric throws of an erotic inception, I resist this realism: “never!” my affects insist, “I will love him forever!” But of course—with some matters at least, as usual and alas: Mom has seen it all. Downswing. Early on in the process of erotic inception, all can be roses and rainbows, as if the whole world has been reborn as a song meant just for “them.” Our dancing couple has flickered into a flame, and are loosed upward in the flight of a happy world modification. As loosed and soaring, they catch a genuine glimpse of “the possibilities.” But on the upswing they frolic and play in “the possibilities” as unhinged, or in other words, as free floating possibilities. Their imaginations run wildly to-and-fro with all sorts of fantastic and amusing plans, such that in some cases they become quasi-salvific “demigods” to one another. Like Aristophanes, they project upon each other the ability to wholly “complete”

Everyday Eros 263 them. Though their fire and flight has rendered their initial worldmodification happy, it is an ultimately “angelic” or naïve sort of happy. The heady wine of erotic inception has rendered their dance a giddy totter, such that friends and family are lovingly amused at the spectacle. The drunken glory of new love, though naïve, is not for that reason necessarily specious or pure “illusion,” but is rather still untested by the vagaries of fully concrete life. For our dancing couple have thus far altered only the most ready dimensions of their respective lives and schedules, those aspects most susceptible to change. This is enough to deliver a powerful sense of “the possibilities,” as erotic Dasein overshoots (überschwingt) itself in imagining itself as altogether plastic. It is precisely in the creative force of this overshoot that lovers implicitly test out their mutual relational compatibility, and this begins a process of becoming irreplaceable to one another. But this is still not enough to bring eros into its own full and viable birth. As it turns out, my Mom the oracle is once more right: the Not does and must have its say. Gravity inevitably gets its grip in the downswing of the lover’s quarrel. Eros’s inception has so empowered our dancing couple, they have overshot themselves into a resettled, happy everydayness. But as everydayness, their newly minted schedules cannot, in fact, support and sustain their new dreamily angelic expectations. Happily absorbed in one another, their new schedule begins to become a “new normal,” or in other words, just normal. As normality begins to take hold, our couple begins to respectively feel themselves as “falling.” All those cutesy peccadilloes and minor annoyances pushed aside in the ferocity of inception now show up in force. It’s as if every unflattering detail and annoying moment eagerly pushed aside early on now has come to litter nearly the whole ground of their fledgling “we.” They begin to stumble over them. My lover irritates me: her narcissism, his vapidity; his stupid and incessantly repeated jokes, her inane extravagance with the checkbook; his lack of care with the toilet seat, her dulling use of his shaving razor, etc. Early on we were quick to forgive, forget, and collaborate. Now we react and accuse: those friendly jousts of individuality on the dance floor have now become a full-fledged Swiss Schwengen: the proverbial “wrestling match” of a contest for relational supremacy in a clash of quarreling wills. He and I  are not angelically “whole” after all. What was once erotic fire now becomes the sharp burn and suffocating smoke of their ruin. What was once undergone as serendipity is now suffered as a curse. He calls off work, escaping into distracting hobbies in a bid to speed forgetting. She works incessantly in a bid to numb the burn. Alas, an erotic inception so brimming with life and promise has entered the world stillborn, in this case like a meteor: in a momentarily brilliant but in the end catastrophic demise. Luckily, relational demise is not the only possibility in the unfolding of everyday eros. Demise is one erotic possibility, where I let an erotic “we” come to a definite death, and very often for quite definite (and

264  Jack Marsh sometimes damaging) reasons. In a We-death, Dasein lets the “We” of an initial erotic fire get doused or vacated: it has become meaningless for me, or only meaningful once more in the everyday sense of just another passed relationship. My former lover is no longer felt as irreplaceable, and everyday Dasein can take this to mean, “it wasn’t meant to be after all.” Depending on the specifics of the situation, this can be bad faith. Erotic breakdown and its relation to erotic inauthenticity is too complex to take up here, so I note it and set it aside for the moment. Tending-the-ground. Let’s say our dancing couple has not yet fully encountered the potential for we-death. This means that their up- and downswings have thus far unfolded relatively smoothly. Though they feel a faint unease in the fall of each downswing, they have met each stumble in the give-and-take of collaborating by coordinating through communicating. Succeeding in overcoming each stumble strengthens lovers’ confidence in the viability of their “we.” The existential meaning of these “three Cs” is what I will call tending-the-ground. In the force of erotic inception, everything I dislike about the beloved is spontaneously moved to the margins of my attention, and hence I’m not always fully aware of each and every potential problem or issue. Problems simply lurk indefinitely in the margins. But instead of littering the ground with petty annoyances and off-putting details by pushing them aside, as each problem turns up we instead take it up. We tend-the-ground. If she despises tobacco smoke and I love my Monte Christos, I don’t smoke them in the apartment, I wash up after smoking, etc. If I can’t abide Sex in the City and it’s her absolutely favorite show, she only watches it when I’m writing. We-swinging is a continual process of give-and-take in the unfolding of everyday eros. In the midst of erotic inception, lovers experimentally test each other out in a social iteration of circumspective concern. Whether carefully performed or carried out implicitly and haphazardly, it’s in the give-and-take dance of swinging that we carry out a worlded assessment of the relational compatibility and living potential for the full-on birth of erotic commitment. But as we saw with erotic demise above, early into an erotic inception our couple is drunk-in-love, and in those moments they actively zero in on the other’s focal details that they feel attracted to and compatible with. Out-of-joint details are pushed to the side or deployed in playful jousts of individuality in their ongoing practical life. Here, “opposites attract” and other clichés become readily on-hand in the process of erotic sense-making, as we feel out the desired as an erotic question. The real test occurs when our dancing couple stumbles on or into an issue that causes the entire structure of their “We” to totter. In other words, when an issue turns up that cannot be resolved with relative ease. This takes place as a putting my world, as such, in question; or in other words in an issue that requires a radical transformation of one or the other’s everydayness.

Everyday Eros 265

Conclusion I will conclude with a brief summary. Everyday eros begins in (1) the given lifeworld of Dasein’s socialization, (2) with an affective-elective moment that draws an attracting attention to the interplay of another individual’s self-presentational details with their lived alterity; when communication begins between potential erotic partners, and if they jointly carry forth a new relationship in shared mutual desire, (3) they flicker into a gentle flame, and set off a process of “swinging.” Swinging proceeds as an oscillation between euphoria at “the possibilities” made available in the new relationship, and a difficult and sometime painful reckoning with the insistent limits and relative fit of their respective histories, styles, traumas, and aspirations. In the dynamic dance of dating, and in their shared practice of tending-the-ground, couples carry out an implicit assessment of each other as candidates for erotic commitment. Erotic inception brings a relational “We” to proto- life, and guides erotic Dasein to the possibility of erotic birth.

Notes 1 The bulk of this essay was composed in February 2018. I dedicate this essay to my wife, Jenny Lorena Franco-Marsh, for inspiring this work; I  thank her and my friend Ahmed Eldemardash for their constant support as my primary interlocutors throughout the writing. I’m deeply grateful to my coeditors, Irene McMullin and especially Matthew Burch, for their considerable time and effort spent on aiding me in writing this essay. Finally, my work here is deeply indebted to Steven Crowell (2017, 2013). In my view, Crowell exemplifies the ongoing critical and creative power of the phenomenological method as such, and of Heidegger’s phenomenology in particular. My current project would be impossible without his careful, innovative, and ongoing treatment of the central import of normativity—and specifically of the first-person character of norm-responsiveness—for the phenomenological method. I moreover follow his lead in moving beyond historical and terminological questions, into a fresh engagement with the “things themselves” and their conditions of possibility. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in all quotations are from the original. 2 As Schuback’s piece shows, Heidegger’s treatment of eros is always calibrated by his more general project, spanning from his early phenomenology through the various turns his “thinking” took through metaphysics and throughout his late work. 3 Well, almost silent. Liebe, aimer,  & charité appear in notes on Pascal and Augustine, see Heidegger, 1962, 492. While noting the beautifully suggestive vignettes we find in Heidegger’s 1925–8 Letters to Arendt, Freeman (2009) rightly refuses Nancy’s too ostentatious claim that “[they pose] a specific existential analytic of sharing according to which love would not substitute itself to death, but would coincide with it.” More phenomenological work is needed to bear out such a claim. 4 I’m indebted to Burch for this last point, and to McMullin 2010 throughout. The phenomenology of eros must attend to the universal while “avoiding

266  Jack Marsh the danger of losing the individual other to the anonymity of an a priori category” McMullin 2010, 10, 58–76. 5 While I  can’t wholly unpack the matter here, Heidegger calls this “oscillation” by a variety names depending on the focus and level of generality of the context under analysis, for example “concernful circumspection (besorgende Umsicht)” in Being and Time, or the later “worlding” (Welten). See Heidegger, 1962, 143; Heidegger, 1982, 171, 208–209; and Kisiel, 2005. 6 Schuback’s translation, slightly modified. The original: “In der Liebe sein = in die eigenste Existenz gedrängt sein,” Heidegger 2003, 21; Schuback 2012, 137. 7 Erotic inception can begin in widely diverse ways, from a chance meeting on the street to a surprising spark between long-standing friends. I treat the former here because it affords it clearer contrast between our absorption in everyday routines and the beautifully disruptive character of encountering an erotic possibility. I thank Matthew Burch for this distinction. 8 For rich treatments of “the look” and its phenomenological import for social relations, see Sartre, 2003, 276–286 and Levinas, 1969, 194–216. 9 Cf. McMullin 2010, 100, 161. 10 See Derrida 1978; Marsh 2016. 11 Is there a covariance correlation between stepping-in toward a potential beloved and stepping-out-from the crowd? My description here recalls Husserl on bodily self-constitution. See Husserl, 1950, 89–148 and Heinämaa, 2014. 12 See Crowell 2013, 239–303.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1996. Love and Saint Augustine. Translated by J. V. Scott and J. C. Stark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2017. “Exemplary Necessity: Heidegger, Pragmatism, and Reason.” In Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology, edited by O. Švec and J. Čapek, 242–55. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freeman, Lauren L. 2009. “Love Is Not Blind: In/Visibility and Recognition in M. Heidegger’s Thinking.” Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences XXVI. www.iwm.at/publications/5-juniorvis iting-fellows-conferences/vol-xxvi/love-is-not-blind/. Accessed January 4, 2018. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, MerleauPonty, Beauvoir. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2014. “The Animal and the Infant From Embodiment to Empathy to Generativity.” In Phenomenology and the Transcendental, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Timo Miettinen, 129–146. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1982. Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translated by Michael R. Heim. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1992. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Everyday Eros 267 Heidegger, Martin, and Hannah Arendt. 2003. Letters: 1925-1975. Translated by Andrew Schields and edited by Ursula Lutz. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Hodge, Joanna. 2012. Heidegger and Ethics. London: Routledge. Husserl, E. 1950. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by D. Cairns. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Kisiel, Theodore. 2005. “The Demise of Being and Time: 1927–1930.” In Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays, edited by R. Polt. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press. Marsh, Jack. 2016. “Flipping the Deck: On Totality and Infinity’s ‘Transcendental/Empirical’ Puzzle.” Levinas Studies 10: 79–114. McMullin, Irene. 2013. Time and the Shared World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Olafson, Frederick. 1998. Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A study of Mitsein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.-P. 2003. Being and Nothingness. Traanslated by H. E. Barnes. London: Routledge (Scheler, M. 1987). Schuback, Marcia Sá Cavalcante. 2012. “Heideggerian Love.” In Phenomenology of Eros, edited by J. Bornemark and M. S. C. Schuback. Huddinge, Sweden: Södertörn University, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 10.

Section V

Epistemic Normativity

15 Normativity and Knowledge Walter Hopp

In one of the clearest statements of his overall phenomenological project, Husserl writes: “To elucidate [the] connections between veritable being and knowing and so in general to investigate the correlations between act, meaning, object is the task of transcendental phenomenology” (ILTK, 434). Spelling out these “correlations,” or rather “essential relations” (Ideas I, § 142, 283) would, if successful, provide us with an account of how objects of every possible type can be given or meant in acts of consciousness and, in the case of all existing objects, in possible acts of knowledge. It would, that is, comprise a theory of the constitution of objects of every type. On Steven Crowell’s view, however, Husserl’s program of transcendental phenomenology cannot be carried out in the terms that Husserl specifies. The problem, briefly, is that the intentional triad of act, meaning, and object is grounded in something more fundamental, namely a normative structure of practices, and practices and the needs that give rise to them “cannot be reduced to acts of consciousness” (Crowell 2013, 162). Only in the context of practices can things “show up as something,” and it is only in virtue of showing up as something that things can be meant and known in acts of consciousness (Ibid.). One welcome consequence of this position is that the world is not the intentional correlate of a transcendental ego, but the environment of the embodied and socialized human person (Ibid., 163). In addition to grounding the Husserlian structure of intentionality in our practices and the “existential commitment[s]” that sustain them (Ibid., 162), Crowell appears to regard intentionality itself as something that should be analyzed in normative terms: “intentionality is a normatively structured notion, governed by conditions of success and failure” (Crowell 2013, 193–4). This claim permits of several readings. The weakest interpretation is that intentional acts can only be carried out by persons with needs, commitments, and the ability to engage in and conform to various practices. I take that claim to be enormously plausible. On another interpretation, however, intentionality is a constitutively or intrinsically normative kind, and the disciplines that investigate it are normative as opposed to descriptive sciences.1 One good reason to think

272  Walter Hopp this is that there is an intimate connection between intentionality and evidence or knowledge. As Crowell puts it, “Representations are not mental items or brain states but ways of taking the world that are defined in evidential—that is to say, intrinsically normative—terms” (Ibid., 105). There is no doubt that, for Husserl, intentionality is to be understood with reference to evidence and knowledge (see, e.g., CM § 24, 58, and FTL § 60, 160). If evidence and knowledge are themselves constitutively normative, then it would seem to follow that intentionality is as well. In what follows, I will not dispute this conditional claim. Rather, I will argue that knowledge and evidence are not intrinsically normative kinds, and that the discipline that investigates them, epistemology, is not a normative discipline.2 If knowledge and evidence are not intrinsically normative kinds, then it seems to follow that intentionality is not either.

Normativity “A norm,” writes Crowell, “is anything that serves as a standard of success or failure of any kind.” He continues, “Thus the normative is found wherever we can speak of rules, measures, standards, exemplars, ideals, concepts, and so on; wherever distinctions between better and worse, success and failure, can be made” (Crowell 2013, 2). Obviously, in the sphere of knowledge we can speak of all of these things and make all of these sorts of distinctions. There are various rules one must abide by in order to know, measures and standards that determine whether one knows, exemplary cases of knowing against which other putative cases can be measured, and so on. In fact, on this view of normativity, knowledge may well turn out to be normative many times over. Knowledge, according to a well-established tradition, is justified true belief, plus something else to avoid the kind of counterexamples produced by Gettier.3 And justification, truth, and belief are all quite plausibly normative on this conception. Take truth. This is, according to Crowell, “a normative notion, a standard for evaluation of the success of failure of propositions” (Crowell 2013, 239). It is also widely taken to be the “norm” or “aim” of belief (Wedgwood 2002). Belief appears to be normative as well. Although it does not itself seem to serve as a standard, it can be measured by various standards, most obviously truth and knowledge. As for justification, its normativity seems to speak for itself. “Justification,” writes Kim, “manifestly is normative” (Kim 1988, 383). Robert Audi concurs, “the concept of justification is a paradigm of a normative notion” (Audi 2015, 119). Knowledge, then, seems quite obviously to be normative. The broader one’s conception of normativity, the easier it is to establish that knowledge is normative. One might worry, however, that if our conception of normativity is too broad, it will efface the distinction between descriptive and more properly normative concepts and properties. There

Normativity and Knowledge 273 is a sense in which natural laws function as rules governing the phenomena falling under them. Nevertheless, the law that information cannot travel faster than light is not a normative law. Again, an object of any length bears a relation to the standard meter stick in Paris, and can be measured against it. But being one meter long, or not, is not a normative property. Something can succeed or fail to be a meter long, but here to “succeed” in being a meter long does not mean anything more than satisfying the criterion for meterhood—that is, being a meter long. And in that sense, everything succeeds in being just what it is, and fails at being everything that it is not. But this is not an acceptable conception of normativity, and is certainly not what Crowell has in mind in his work on the normative underpinnings of intentionality, meaning, and, by implication, knowledge. We come closer to the realm of normativity proper when we treat success and failure, not as being or not being an F for some predicate “F,” but as being or doing what one ought to do or be, or not. To be a meter long as such is not to succeed or fail at being anything. It only becomes so when there are standards against which being good or bad, or being as one ought or ought not to be, are in play. Being one meter tall is a matter of indifference when it comes to weeds in the wild, a success when it comes to meter sticks, and a failure when it comes to front doors. Now obviously we can find success or failure in this genuinely normative sense in the area of belief, epistemic justification, and knowledge. It is generally better to believe what is true than what is false, and even better to do so on the basis of conclusive evidence. Acts of believing and knowing are constituents of indisputably normative states of affairs. But that still does not entail that these properties, or the concepts which designate them and the disciplines which investigate them, are themselves normative. As Richard Fumerton points out, dullness is generally a bad property in knives, and accelerating slowly is generally a bad feature of cars, but it does not follow that sharpness or accelerating slowly are normative properties (Fumerton 2001, 57). We can readily appreciate Fumerton’s point by distinguishing, as several authors have done, between concepts and properties that are constitutively normative from those that are “normatively important.”4 Normatively important properties include those on whose basis we evaluate objects, actions, events, and states of affairs as good, right, praiseworthy, or their opposites. They are properties of things whose presence or absence matters to us. Not all such properties, however, are intrinsically normative. Schroeder uses the example of death, which is about as normatively important as anything but “is a biological property and not a normative one” (Schroeder 2015, 382). We could multiply examples of fundamentally descriptive, “natural” properties, entities, and states of affairs which can be evaluated in the light of intrinsically normative properties, values and norms, including the most general values and norms such as good, bad, right, and wrong. As

274  Walter Hopp Horwich says in his argument against the view that truth is normative, “Clearly, just about everything is subject to evaluation of one kind or another; so it would be surprising if truth were an exception” (Horwich 2018, 1128). The fact, then, that something falls under norms does not entail that it is constitutively normative. Nor does the fact that something functions as a norm. Perfectly descriptive, non-normative features can and do function as norms or standards. To use an example from Anandi Hattiangadi (2006, 224), if an amusement park ride requires that riders be at least forty-eight inches tall, then being forty-eight inches tall functions as a norm or standard determining who is and who is not permitted to ride. But being that tall is not thereby constitutively normative. This, moreover, does not stem solely from the fact that being this tall only contingently functions as a norm. Even the fact that something necessarily functions as a norm does not ensure that it is constitutively normative. Consider the proposition “if something is pleasurable, it ought to be promoted.” As McHugh and Whiting (2014, 700) point out, “If this is true, it is presumably necessarily true. But that does not show that pleasure is intrinsically normative.” The bearing of these remarks upon epistemology as a discipline and knowledge as a subject matter should be clear. The fact that knowledge is of immense intrinsic and instrumental value for human beings does not entail that it is constitutively normative. Neither does the fact that knowledge can function as a norm or standard against which we measure the goodness or badness of beliefs or various doxastic practices. Nor, finally, does the fact that fundamental epistemic concepts figure in either hypothetical or categorical ought-statements. That we ought to acquire knowledge, that we ought to accept propositions on the basis of evidence, that we ought to believe only what we know, and similar claims do not entail that knowledge and evidence are constitutively normative, any more than the fact that we ought to minimize pain entails that pain is constitutively normative. As Rosen puts it, “The indisputable fact that belief is governed by norms is consistent with the following picture: The doxastic facts are constituted entirely from non-normative materials. But once in place, they engage with an independent body of cognitive norms.”5 In order to determine whether knowledge is constitutively normative, and whether epistemology is a normative discipline, I turn to Husserl’s conception of a normative discipline.

Husserl on the Structure of a Normative Science In his Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations, Husserl distinguishes between theoretical and normative sciences. Sciences, says Husserl,

Normativity and Knowledge 275 involve connections among (a) “cognitive experiences,” (b) “the matters investigated and theoretically known in the science,” and (c) the “logical pattern of connection” among the propositions about those subject matters (LI Prol., § 48, 185–6). A science is not, however, composed of experiences or their subject matters, but of the last mentioned items— propositions and proofs (LI Prol., § 66B, 234). These are in turn made true by the subject matter of the field and known in various mental acts. The unity of a theoretical science is determined by its subject matter, quite independently of any contribution from us (LI Prol., §  2, 54–5). A  theoretical science is one which specifies the interconnections which obtain within a region of being and the laws in virtue of which they obtain, whether real, as in the case of physics or biology, or ideal, as in the case of mathematics. Normative sciences, by contrast, owe their unity to a “basic norm,” which specifies what features something must have in order to be a good or bad instance of a given kind (LI Prol., § 14, 85). Kant’s categorical imperative and principle of utility are examples of putative basic norms in ethics (Ibid.). A basic norm, says Husserl, is not itself a proper normative proposition, but more akin to a definition (Ibid., 85–6). We arrive at properly normative propositions when we determine which things do and do not satisfy the basic norm. Ethics and aesthetics stand as two of the more familiar normativepractical disciplines. There are many others; Husserl mentions “surveying, practical calculation techniques, architecture, and strategics” (ILTK, § 9, 27). Unlike theoretical disciplines, whose unity is “determined exclusively by a theoretical interest directed to investigating matters that really belong together theoretically, in virtue of the inner laws of things” (LI Prol., §  14, 86), normative disciplines and technologies can be unified by any set of norms, aims, or interests. There could be an almost limitless number of possible normative disciplines and corresponding technologies. There are norms and techniques governing bird watching, lion taming, kayaking, eating vast amounts of food in short periods of time, manipulating one’s enemies, and destroying a nation’s infrastructure. What makes these disciplines normative is not, of course, that in each case their basic norms are valid or true or have legitimate normative force, but that they have normative content (see Côté-Bouchard 2016, 3182). They tell us what ought to be the case, even if they don’t all tell the truth. Furthermore, while a normative-practical discipline might draw from only one theoretical science, it may also draw material from any number of them. Medicine as a normative-practical discipline draws from all sort of non-normative disciplines: biology, chemistry, psychology, and physiology, just to name a few. Whether a normative science draws upon only one theoretical science or, as is more often the case, many, Husserl argues that every normative science must be founded on a non-normative

276  Walter Hopp basis;  each normative discipline “must have a theoretical content free from all normativity” (LI Prol., § 16, 87). Here is his argument: Every normative proposition of, e.g., the form ‘An A should be B’ implies the theoretical proposition ‘Only an A  which is B has the properties C’, in which ‘C’ serves to indicate the constitutive content of the standard-setting predicate ‘good’ (e.g.  pleasure, knowledge, whatever, in short, is marked down as good by the valuation fundamental to our given sphere). (LI Prol., § 16, 87–8) Husserl is not, I think, proposing a broadly naturalistic theory according to which goodness is identical with any non-normative property C or disjunction of such properties, much less claiming that the concept “good” is identical with any non-normative concept. What he is proposing, rather, is that the basic norm of any normative discipline must predicate goodness or rightness of something which can be specified and described nonnormatively, and whose obtaining is sufficient for goodness or rightness of the relevant kind to obtain. A true basic norm, that is, should function as a principle specifying a supervenience relation between descriptive and normative properties and states of affairs. Not only do normative sciences rest on a body of non-normative content concerning what is posited as fundamentally good or desirable, normative sciences rest on a body, and often a vast body, of non-normative content that enables us to determine whether a given entity, action, policy, or practice really does promote or realize the good in question. If utilitarianism tells us that we ought to assist the poor, that is because (a) we ought to minimize suffering and (b) assisting the poor minimizes suffering. Premise (a) is normative, but premise (b) is not. Suffering itself is not a constitutively normative property, and it is an empirical question whether and to what extent it is minimized by assisting the poor. As this example makes clear, many of the normative propositions making up the body of a normative science can be represented as conclusions of arguments consisting of a normative premise—often a basic norm or something entailed by such a norm—together with non-normative premises. Accordingly, in order to know what one ought to do in a given sphere of activity, one must have a considerable body of non-normative knowledge. A competent medical practitioner not only knows that health is a good, but knows what descriptive features and conditions are constitutive of health and knows what promotes and restores it. And it is not enough to develop a normative ethics, much less one capable of orienting human conduct in the face of life’s complexities and an often reluctant or ambivalent will, to know that suffering is bad or that persons must always be treated as ends in themselves. One must be able to reliably identify which things are and are not persons and what is and is not

Normativity and Knowledge 277 suffering, and correctly identify in non-normative terms what does and does not count as alleviating suffering or treating a person as an instrument rather than an end. Insofar as every normative science rests on a non-normative discipline or collection thereof, one way to determine whether a putatively normative science is genuinely normative is by asking which non-normative discipline or disciplines it is founded upon. If the answer is the putatively normative science in question, then plainly it is not a normative science after all. One science which does not pass the test, according to Husserl, is logic. The critical question for the normativist about logic is, “Which theoretical sciences provide the essential foundation of the theory of science?” (LI Prol., § 17, 90). Psychologicists claim that it is psychology, a position that Husserl assails with well-known arguments. Husserl’s answer is that it is, principally, pure logic itself. “One must,” he writes, “always distinguish between laws that serve as norms for our knowledgeactivities, and laws which include normativity in their thought-content” (LI Prol., §  41, 168). Logical laws do not have such content. Take, to give Husserl’s example, the proposition that if everything which is A is B, and if S is A, then S is B. This proposition does not implicitly or explicitly assert that anything ought to be the case. In particular, it says nothing whatsoever about what anyone ought to believe. Nor does it claim that anything is good or praiseworthy. We can, together with a (true) basic norm that we ought to have consistent beliefs, convert this into an equivalent normative one—that one ought to judge that S is B if one judges that all As are Bs and that S is A—but that is not what the logical law itself asserts. “That this proposition contains the faintest thought of normativity must be strongly denied. We can employ our proposition for normative purposes, but it is not therefore a norm.”6 If, Husserl goes on, it asserted a norm just in virtue of being equivalent to a normative proposition, then, given that we ought to believe what is true, all true propositions in all theoretical fields would be normative as well. “It is clear,” writes Husserl, “that any theoretical truth belonging to any field of theory, can be used in a like manner as the foundation for a universal norm of correct judgment” (LI Prol., §  41, 170 emphasis in original). Normativists about logic have confused the role of a proposition with its content; they have “failed to recognize the difference between theoretical laws destined by their content to the regulation of cognition, and normative laws which are intrinsically and essentially prescriptive” (LI Prol., § 43, 175 emphasis in original). One objection to this conclusion is that logic deals fundamentally with truth. Crowell, as we have seen, characterizes truth as “a normative notion, a standard for evaluation of the success or failure of propositions” (Crowell 2013, 239). It is not entirely clear whether Crowell himself believes that truth is intrinsically normative or simply normatively important; his remark is compatible with either position. In any case,

278  Walter Hopp propositions do not seem to be what we are evaluating when we use truth as a measure of success or failure. The proposition “The world will end today” is false, but it doesn’t seem to have failed at anything. And, of course, it is an overall good that the proposition is false; in light of most of our fundamental commitments, its falsity is a success. It would be more accurate to say that truth is the standard by which we evaluate which propositions are to be believed. As Wedgwood puts it, “Clearly, there is nothing wrong or defective about false propositions as such; what is defective is believing such false propositions” (Wedgwood 2002, 267 emphasis in original). Even so, serving as a standard does not, as we have seen, ensure constitutive normativity, and so does not ensure that truth is constitutively normative (Horwich 2018, 1131). One may respond that “truth” is synonymous with “correctness,” and “correctness” is a fundamentally normative concept. But this, I think, is to equivocate on the term “correct,” which has both a normative and non-normative use (Hattiangadi 2006, 224). As Wedgwood remarks regarding his thesis that “a belief is correct if and only if the proposition believed is true,” this is not the trivial claim that a belief is correct just in case its content is correct or true just in case its content is true. “To say that a mental state is ‘incorrect’ is to say that in having that mental state, one has got things ‘wrong’ or made a ‘mistake’; one’s mental state is in a sense ‘defective’ ” (Wedgwood 2002, 267). Wedgwood’s thesis regarding the goal of belief is an informative one with plausible contenders. One might hold that a belief is “correct,” or as it ought to be, if and only if its content is justified (Gibbons 2013, 5) or just in case it is known (Williamson 2000, 47). It seems plain that truth as Husserl conceives of it is not constitutively normative. Truth is a relation between propositions and the states of affairs that they represent. Corresponding to a proposition is a state of affairs, precisely the one that is posited in it as obtaining. If the proposition is true, then the state of affairs actually obtains (and the object-about-which actually exists), and it does not obtain if the proposition is false.7 Provided a proposition is true, there is an obtaining state of affairs that it represents. And provided a state of affairs obtains, there is a true proposition about it, whether or not it is or will ever be thought. These two things are given together a priori, and are mutually inseparable. Nothing can be without being thus or thus determined, and that it is, and that it is thus and thus determined, is the self-subsistent truth which is the necessary correlate of the self-subsistent being. (LI Prol., § 62, 225–6)

Normativity and Knowledge 279 To characterize a proposition as true is not to say that it is good or lives up to a standard of excellence, but simply that it represents something, and what it represents obtains. Since truth is a property that beliefs inherit from their propositional contents, there is nothing constitutively normative about beliefs being true either. I believe truly that Moscow is bigger than Boston, and in doing so believe as I ought. But that I ought to believe that Moscow is bigger than Boston, or that I have done well in doing so, doesn’t follow from the fact that it is true alone. It is the conclusion of an argument consisting of two premises: (a) I ought to believe what is true, and (b) the proposition that Moscow is bigger than Boston is true. The first premise is indisputably normative. The second, however, is not.

Normativity and Epistemology Can we construct a similar argument for the view that knowledge is not constitutively normative? I believe we can, though I admit that the case is not quite as strong. The first consideration against the normativity of epistemology is that it does not, contrary to widespread opinion, bear much of a resemblance to the most paradigmatic normative discipline, ethics. According to Selim Berker, “the most fundamental question in epistemology is ‘What should I believe?’ ” (Berker 2013, 338), a question that parallels the most fundamental question of ethics, “What should I do?” (Berker 2013, 337). So similar do epistemology and ethics seem that Terence Cuneo has argued in favor of moral realism on the grounds that if there are no “moral facts,” there are no “epistemic facts” either (Cuneo 2007, 113). It is not convincing, however, that epistemology, even normative epistemology, investigates what we should believe simpliciter. There might, familiarly, be cases in which it is prudentially or morally permissible for me to believe what is not epistemically justified for me. As Kornblith writes, “If I  could assure world peace by committing some epistemic impropriety, surely it would be worth the price.”8 If this is even possibly a defensible choice—and it is—then epistemology cannot simply be the discipline whose subject matter is what we ought to believe. Even if one disagrees with Kornblith’s particular example, we can appreciate the force of his argument by considering what sorts of variations or changes we could imagine the discipline of epistemology undergoing. Suppose that we ought to believe what makes us happier, that the proper aim and end of belief is human well-being, and that we became convinced of this. There would, no doubt, exist a discipline dedicated to investigating which beliefs make us happier, how to acquire and retain them, and so on. And suppose, further, that there were still people investigating the nature of perception, evidence, rationality, reliable cognitive processes, and so on—the things epistemologists presently investigate.

280  Walter Hopp Who, in this scenario, would be doing epistemology? I think it is clear that it would be the latter group, those investigating the topics presently investigated by epistemologists. Those determining the conditions under which beliefs conduce to happiness might be doing something of the utmost importance, but they would not be doing epistemology. They would, however, be investigating what we ought to believe. So, epistemology is not the science of what we ought to believe, except accidentally. It investigates what we ought to believe, but that’s because it primarily investigates knowledge and evidence, and known and evident propositions are the ones we ought to believe. It doesn’t aim first at what we ought to believe and consequently concern itself with knowledge and evidence on the grounds that we ought to believe propositions which are known and evident. Epistemology would be concerned with knowledge and evidence even if ignorance was bliss and bliss was the highest end of all belief and action. This points to an important dissimilarity between ethics and epistemology. Ethics concerns itself with what we ought to do and how we ought to be—whatever that is. Epistemology does not aim in a similar de dicto fashion at the good of belief. Its subject matter is knowledge, irrespective of its rank in the order of doxastic or other goods. There is nothing one could specify as comprising the subject matter of ethics in a similar fashion. Maximizing pleasure, or cultivating the traits of temperance and courage, or anything along these lines, is not what ethics is primarily and intrinsically about. If ethicists are concerned with pleasure or courage, it is not qua pleasure or courage, but only because and insofar as pleasure and courage are something good. Ethics is primarily concerned with the good, and only consequently concerned with pleasure or courage. It is the task of another, non-normative science to tell us what pleasure and courage are. This does not show that epistemology is not a normative discipline, however. And much of Husserl’s language suggests that it is. He defines the discipline of “noetics,” for instance, as the “theory of norms of knowledge.” Its primary task is to “investigate[] cognitive acts . . . and evaluate[] the relationships of legitimacy belonging to them” (ILTK, § 27, 132). The most fundamental noetic principle is his “Principle of All Principles,” according to which “each intuition affording [something] in an originary way is a legitimate source of knowledge,” or, somewhat differently, “that whatever presents itself to us in ‘Intuition’ in an originary way . . . is to be taken simply as what it affords itself as, but only within the limitations in which it affords itself there” (Ideas I, § 24, 43). This is arguably a normative principle (or pair of principles rather, since these two formulations do not say quite the same thing, though for convenience I will treat them as one). The principle specifies what sort of cognitive attitudes are fitting or appropriate in the light of certain conditions. It characterizes originary givenness as a “legitimate source of knowledge”

Normativity and Knowledge 281 and specifies how an originarily given object “is to be taken,” where this is certainly a prescriptive use of language. Husserl himself draws out the fundamental normative importance of originary intuition when he writes elsewhere that “to deny self-givenness in general is to deny every ultimate norm, every basic criterion that lends sense to knowledge” (IdPh, 45). To strengthen the case in favor of normativism (and, temporarily, against the view I wish to defend), note that this is not only a normative principle, but also one whose scope includes even those incapable of comprehending and assessing it. Its scope is entirely general. It is true, as Harald Wiltsche notes, that Husserl’s is an internalist theory of justification (Wiltsche 2015, 66). It is not, however, a strong form of internalism according to which all of the “justificatory ‘factors’ . . . must be ‘accessible’ to the person” (Bonjour 2010, 34). That one’s belief falls under the Principle of All Principles, which is one such “factor,” need not itself be accessed or even accessible to the person whose belief is justified. Quite obviously not, since the principle says that having an object given in intuition is sufficient for justification, and having an object so given is surely not a sufficient condition of knowing the principle or that one’s belief satisfies it. The principle itself need not be known or even accessible; it is “not a principle I have to apply in order to gain knowledge; I need only fall under it” (Van Cleve 1979, 70). As Dallas Willard remarks, if I know that a certain book is in my briefcase, What I  know is something about that book, namely, that it is in my briefcase. And likewise, when I know that, I may not know that I  have an ‘appropriate basis’ for representing it as I  do—though I might know that too. It is enough that it is true, and that I do have an appropriate basis for representing it as I do.9 In order to satisfy the Principle of All Principles, the sufficient “appropriate basis” for believing as I do is the givenness of the relevant object. Husserl’s internalism, then, quite clearly amounts to a form of accessibilism about the evidence which justifies the content of one’s beliefs, but an externalism about the “non-evidential justifiers” (Lyons 2009, 24) in virtue of which one’s state of believing is justified, including the intrinsic features and parts of the state itself and the various psychological, phenomenological, and epistemological laws under which it falls. Earl Conee holds a similar view: What can be external to the mind of a person whose belief is justified . . . are epistemological facts about what evidence provides the person’s justification and about the nature of the epistemic link of the belief to its justifying evidence. What must be internal, i.e., accessible to the person by reflection, is evidence that does in fact suffice to justify the belief.10

282  Walter Hopp Husserl’s (and Willard’s) view is somewhat different, however, since the evidence in question is not available only “by reflection.” It is there in the unreflective experience itself; “the subjective act must harbor within it what pleads and warrants its claim to legitimacy” (ILTK, § 27, 129). It is enough simply to undergo an experience of originary givenness. No reflection or capacity to reflect on the experience itself is required. This is a norm, then, which applies to anyone capable of intuiting things in an originary way and “taking” them to be as they are intuited. Bearing in mind that every normative discipline is founded on a nonnormative basis, we can now ask, what is the non-normative discipline or set of disciplines that provide normative epistemology with its theoretical content? The most important concepts in Husserl’s epistemology are truth and evidence. We have already examined the former, and I have argued that it is not constitutively normative. It is more difficult to determine whether the same is true of evidence, since Husserl does often characterize it in normative terms. “In the broadest sense, evidence denotes a universal primal phenomenon of intentional life, namely . . . the quite preeminent mode of consciousness that consists in . . . the self-giving . . . of an affair.”11 We can, however, characterize evidence in descriptive terms: “Evidenz is nothing but a word for the quality of givenness.”12 Evidential experiences are those in which we apprehend objects themselves, directly and “in the flesh” (PAS, 140). Evidence is originary intuition—exactly what the Principle of All Principles specifies as sufficient for justification. Examples include sense perception and reflection on one’s ongoing experiences. They are opposed to merely “empty” intentional acts in which the intentional object is in no way present to consciousness, such as my current thought that it is raining in New York. Evidential acts of originary givenness can be integrated into higherorder acts of recognition or fulfillment. In fulfillment, we apply concepts to and make judgments concerning what is given in perception, reflection, and other forms of intuition, judgments which can be made and understood by others even when the intuitive experience has passed (EJ, § 80, 319). Seeing a cat on a mat is one thing, but recognizing the cat as a cat and judging that the cat is on the mat is a different ability. Hearing a middle C is one thing, but recognizing it as a middle C is something else. In fulfillment, “the object is seen as being exactly the same as it is thought of” (LI 6, § 8, 696)—something clearly more complicated than merely seeing, merely thinking, or even doing both simultaneously (Willard 1995, 152; Crowell 2016, 188). Fulfillment is a complex act, founded on and relating to one another an act of intuition and of thought. It is also the distinctive sort of act in which the contents of beliefs are confirmed, not on the basis of other beliefs or their contents, but on the basis of an encounter with the objects that they are about. All knowledge, for Husserl, is grounded in intuition or evidence,13 and all propositional knowledge is grounded in acts of fulfillment.

Normativity and Knowledge 283 It is, admittedly, almost impossible to miss the normative connotations of the term “fulfillment.” The “Articulation of the perceptual content” that occurs in fulfillment is, Crowell notes, “the telos of the judgment, the measure of its success or failure” (Crowell 2013, 38). That is true. And yet, it is also compatible with the claim that fulfillment is not a constitutively normative relationship among possible contents of conscious experiences. These relations are not, for Husserl, “natural” in any sense that could be accounted for within a fully naturalistic ontology. But they are not normative either. They are fully descriptive relations grounded in the essences of certain experiences. Particular acts of fulfillment are instances of “ideal relationship[s] which obtain[] in the unity of coincidence . . . among the epistemic essences of the coinciding acts.”14 That an experience is of a certain object rather than another—that, for instance, my present perceptual experience is of my room and not Napoleon or a bullfight—is grounded in what my experience is. “The essence of experience itself entails not only that it is consciousness, but also of what it is the consciousness” (Ideas I, § 36, 63). And that this experience provides evidence for the proposition that my room contains three chairs is, again, grounded in its nature. Because of its intentional content, it bears certain intentional relations to my room, and certain fulfilling relations to the contents of possible judgments, that is, propositions. The partial identity of their intentional objects—partial because the experience invariably presents much more than the proposition—ensures that they have partially identical correctness conditions; that one of them presents that intentional object in the flesh ensures that it is revelatory of the very same reality that the proposition merely represents. “What the intention means, but presents only in more or less inauthentic and inadequate manner, the fulfillment . . . sets directly before us, or at least more directly than the intention does” (LI 6, § 16, 720). The content of my perceptual experience of my room bears an evidential relation to the proposition that my room has three chairs in it, and this relation is determined by what each of those contents intrinsically is. It doesn’t succeed in being an intuitive content which is of the very same thing the proposition is of, or in being able to enter into a synthesis of fulfillment with it; it just is and does, and there’s no possibility of it being or doing otherwise. The situation now looks remarkably similar to that regarding logic. If I  believe that my room contains three chairs based on a clear perceptual experience of it and its furnishings, I am “justified” in doing so in a normative sense; I  believe as I  ought to believe. I  also, of course, have evidence that it does. The fact that I have evidence is not, however, grounded in the fact that I am justified. Rather, the grounding relation runs the other way.15 That I believe as I ought to believe, that I am justified, is instead the consequence of two claims: (a) I have evidence that my room contains three chairs, and (b) I ought to believe in accordance with my evidence. The second premise is normative, but the first is not.

284  Walter Hopp And it is in virtue of that, together with the fact that my belief is true, that I know that my room contains three chairs. Similarly, provided my goal is unlocking my front door, I ought to use my key, the one that can open it; my key unlocks my door if, and only if, it is the key I ought to use. But it does not unlock the door in virtue of the fact that I ought to use it. Rather, I ought to use it because it unlocks the door, and that it can unlock the door is not a constitutively normative fact (Hopp 2011, 89). Normative epistemology is concerned with what we are justified in believing. Or, more accurately, it is concerned with what we are justified in believing given that knowledge is among our aims. Like any other normative discipline, however, it is founded on a non-normative discipline. To produce a normative epistemology, we must be able to specify in non-normative terms what counts as a “justified” belief. And we must be able to specify, again in non-normative terms, the essential connections between types of acts that generate such “justification.” We must be able to specify the non-normative features upon which normative features supervene. That is what the Principle of All Principles does: it claims that justification supervenes on originary intuition or evidence. The non-normative discipline responsible for specifying the descriptive and essential evidential relations among contents of acts is epistemology itself, and Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology is an example of how such a discipline might be carried out. Since the non-normative discipline underlying normative epistemology is just epistemology itself, epistemology is not a normative discipline. If this is correct, one might reasonably wonder why so much of the terminology of this allegedly non-normative discipline is normative or prescriptive. Why do we speak of “legitimacy,” “justification,” and “warrant” if we are really dealing with descriptive relations among contents of possible conscious experiences? James Maffie, I believe, has a perfectly good answer: the normative connotations of these terms are due to their pragmatic import rather than their semantic content. As he puts it, Although essentially descriptive, we standardly use epistemic language to perform normative work for us, i.e. to perform illocutionary or perlocutionary acts such as advising, directing, or expressing approval of attitudes or conduct. (Maffie 1990, 343) The pervasiveness of this pragmatic force is accounted for by the relative importance and permanence of our interest in epistemic ends (Ibid., 343). As Maffie puts it, “Epistemic utterances resonate with our conativeaffective make-up because they describe means-ends relationships considered relevant to our ends” (Ibid., 345). Since we care about knowing about things, we care about ensuring that we conduct our intellectual lives in a manner conducive to that end. That epistemology is not

Normativity and Knowledge 285 normative does not, however, entail that it is a natural or empirical science, as Maffie seems to believe. There is, as Willard points out, nothing obviously non-natural about norms, nor anything automatically natural about descriptive sciences (Willard 2000, 26–7). Epistemology is, rather, an ideal science akin to logic and mathematics, dealing with “essential relations” rather than contingent matters of fact.

Conclusion On Crowell’s view, recall, “intentionality is a normatively structured notion, governed by conditions of success and failure” (Crowell 2013, 193–4). I  have focused on a particularly strong reading of that claim according to which intentionality is constitutively normative. If intentionality were constitutively normative, then knowledge would certainly be constitutively normative. If the arguments above are correct, however, knowledge is not constitutively normative, in which case intentionality is not either. Nevertheless, the fact that knowledge and intentionality are not constitutively normative does not undermine many claims which sit at the heart of Crowell’s position. On Crowell’s view, intentionality is not just a matter of us bearing various causal relations to our environment, but involves things showing up “as something” (Crowell 2013, 193). That may well require, and certainly very often does require, that one live in a world structured by norms. “For me to experience something as a pen (for it to be the ‘intentional content’ of my ‘state’), I must be responsive to the rules which constitute something as a pen” (Crowell 2013, 194). And in order for that to occur, I must to a considerable extent “conform to the way ‘one’ does things” (Ibid.). If that is right, then the capacity to use, know, and so much as see pens as pens requires a sensitivity to norms, in which case there is a tolerably clear sense in which intentionality, and with it knowledge, is “normatively structured.” That intentionality and knowledge are “normatively structured” in this sense, however, must be kept distinct from the claim that they are themselves constitutively normative. Crowell’s position regarding the founding role of practice does not establish that there is anything constitutively normative about the “intentional contents” that logic and epistemology principally investigate or the ideal relationships among them. Rather, if successful, it establishes that those contents cannot be realized in the “states” of conscious persons unless those persons conform to a variety of norms and, possibly, have taken on a number of normative commitments. That these contents and their relations can only be realized if norms are enacted and commitments are undertaken does not entail that they are constitutively normative. It only entails that their realization is dependent upon the realization of and commitment to norms and practices. In the same way, the existence of locks and keys that open them

286  Walter Hopp quite obviously depends on the existence of skilled agents who care about things and therefore adhere to norms and have commitments. But it is not a constitutively normative fact that a certain key can open a particular lock or not. Finally, that knowledge is not constitutively normative, and that epistemology is not, in essence, a normative discipline, is compatible with the fact that knowledge is of the utmost normative importance for us and for any conceivable persons. We are all “beholden to the ‘constitutive rules’ of a certain practice” (Crowell 2013, 29), and one type of practice that we are all beholden to is that of forming beliefs and acting on the basis of those beliefs. This is a commitment we have whether we are aware of it or not, and stems from the fact that we care about anything at all. As Linda Zagzebski, who makes this point with particular power, puts it, “being epistemically conscientious in the domains we care about is not optional. It is a demand of our caring” (Zagzebski 2004, 357). If one cares about being a writer, a parent, a teacher, a skier, or anything else, one is thereby committed to caring about what does and does not count as knowledge of those endeavors and the vast array of objects, properties, rules, and so on that enable one to engage in them successfully. Since caring about something or other is not something we can avoid, neither is our falling under a variety of epistemic norms and obligations and, at a certain level of sophistication, of making them objects of care in their own right. When, as Crowell argues, we enter the space of genuine and authentic commitments, as we are called to do, we also enter a complex “space of reasons” in which we are responsible for what we do and are, and are accordingly “answerable” for it. One must “be prepared to give an account of oneself” (Crowell 2013, 210). The best accounts will be expressions of, and grounded upon, a considerable body of knowledge. And they will be best because of both the content of our goals and the nature of knowledge itself.

Notes 1 I borrow the term “constitutively normative” from Horwich 2005, 122. In an earlier draft, I used “intrinsically normative.” I am indebted to Matthew Burch for pointing out that this might not be the most accurate term, since on one construal of Crowell’s position it may be that no thing is intrinsically normative. 2 For a recent and different defense of this conclusion, see Sylvan 2018. 3 Gettier 1963; Zagzebski (1994) argues that Gettier-style counterexamples can be generated against any theory along these lines no matter what the proposed fourth condition is, provided it, quite plausibly, does not require truth for justification. 4 See Schroeder (2015, 381), where he distinguishes “concepts that are themselves normative, and those that are merely greatly normatively important.” Others have drawn a similar distinction. Paul Horwich distinguishes concepts which are “functionally normative” from those which have “normative

Normativity and Knowledge 287 significance” (Horwich 2018, 1128). Robert Audi distinguishes “normativity in content” from “normativity in upshot” (Audi 2015, 102). 5 Rosen 2001, 617; cited in McHugh-Whiting 2014, 699. 6 LI Prol., § 41, 168–9. Much later, Husserl would write, “Logic becomes normative, it becomes practical; with a suitable change of attitude, one can convert it into a normative-technological discipline. But intrinsically it is itself not a normative discipline but precisely a science in the pregnant sense, a work of purely theoretical reason—like all the other sciences” (FTL, § 7, 31). 7 ILTK, § 14, 52. Also see Willard 1984, 189: “For Husserl, truth is agreement between a propositional meaning and the correlative state of affairs.” 8 Kornblith 1993, 368; Also see Maffie 1990, 337. 9 Willard 2000, 33. Also see LI 6, § 67, 837. 10 Conee 2004, 50. Also see Conee and Feldman 2004, 78. Pryor (2000, 535) appears to hold a similar view: “I do not suppose that every time you have a justified belief that p is the case, you will also have justification for believing that your belief is justified, and know what that justification is. What makes you justified in believing p is one thing; what makes you justified in believing you have justification for believing p is something else, something more sophisticated.” And for the kind of “dogmatism” that he defends, “you have justification for believing p simply in virtue of having an experience as of p” (519). 11 CM, § 24, 57, my emphasis. Also see FTL, § 59: 158. 12 ILTK, § 30e, 153. See Heffernan 1998 for a thorough discussion of Husserl’s views on evidence. 13 See Ideas I, § 141, 280–1. Also see Berghofer 2017, 13–14. 14 LI 6, § 39, 766; also see Willard 1984, 232. 15 The argument against irreducibly normative theories of knowledge is similar to Feldman’s case against “authoritarian epistemology,” that is, any theory that explains epistemic justification in terms of what some ideal or idealized agent or observer would believe. As he writes, “good inferences may well be the ones God endorses. But if it is true that God endorses them because they are good, then it must be that there is a philosophically more illuminating theory of good reasoning to be sought” (Feldman 2004, 124).

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Normativity and Knowledge 289 Kim, Jaegwon. 1988. “What Is ‘Naturalized Epistemology’?” Philosophical Perspectives 2: 381–405. Kornblith, Hilary. 1993. “Epistemic Normativity.” Synthese 94: 357–76. Lyons, Jack C. 2009. Perception and Basic Beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maffie, James. 1990. “Naturalism and Normativity in Epistemology.” Philosophical Studies 59: 333–49. McHugh, Conor, and Daniel Whiting. 2014. “The Normativity of Belief.” Analysis 74: 698–713. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant: The Current Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pryor, James. 2000. “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist.” Noûs 34: 517–49. Rosen, Gideon. 2001. “Brandom on Modality, Normativity and Intentionality.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63: 611–23. Schroeder, Mark. 2015. “Is Knowledge Normative?” Philosophical Issues 25(1): 379–395. Sylvan, Kurt. 2018. “Knowledge as a Non-Normative Relation.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97: 190–222. Van Cleve, James. 1979. “Foundationalism, Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle.” The Philosophical Review 88: 55–91. Wedgwood, Ralph. 2002. “The Aim of Belief.” Philosophical Perspectives 16: 267–97. Willard, Dallas. 1984. Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. ———. 1995. “Knowledge.” In The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, edited by Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, 138–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. “Knowledge and Naturalism.” In Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, edited by W. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland, 24–48. New York: Routledge. Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiltsche, Harald. 2015. “Intuitions, Seemings and Phenomenology.” Teorema 34 (3): 57–77. Zagzebski, Linda. 1994. “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems.” The Philosophical Quarterly 44: 65–73. ———. 2004. “Epistemic Value and the Primacy of What We Care About.” Philosophical Papers 33: 353–77.

16 Appearance, Judgment, and Norms Charles Siewert

A controversy lately come to prominence asks, are visual appearances “rich” or “thin”? On the “thin” side, we find those (like Alex Byrne) who limit the contents of visual experience to “low-level” properties (such as colors, textures, spatial relations, shapes, luminance, and motion). By contrast, friends of richness (like Susanna Siegel) say “high-level” properties figure  not just in our beliefs about things, but also in their very “look”—properties such as being a bird, a child, a hat, a fork; being bored, amused, afraid—thus making content “rich.”1 What we say about this will do much to determine our understanding of how experience warrants and gives meaning to what we think about our surroundings. It seems to be a fundamental issue. Here I  will argue for an alternative to both Byrne’s and Siegel’s perspectives. While I agree with Siegel that “thin” views neglect the wealth of experience, unlike her I do not think visual experience is in the business of attributing “high-level”—or really any—properties to objects. We honor the rich significance of visual experience not by likening it to assertion or assessing it according to norms of reason, but by bringing it under a distinctive category of “recognitional appearance,” a kind of experience as much in the service of imagination as of judgment, and integral to the activity of looking, which is subject to norms of its own. My approach is phenomenological. That is to say, it operates under two key assumptions. First, that we enjoy a warrant for first-person judgments about our own experience that differs in kind from that had for such judgments as are made about others. Second, it is legitimate to provisionally trust judgments ostensibly so warranted, and the understanding of what is judged that they involve, in addressing philosophical issues. Phenomenology does not pretend to a blanket neutrality regarding the accuracy of our beliefs about experience, pending some sort of vindication from theories conducted from third-person observer’s stance. Nor does it uncritically accept whatever pronouncements on our own experience come to mind. Its provisional trust of first-person reflection is selective, by being responsibly critical, both in the questions it asks and in its interpretation of the answers given. Of course, much more is

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 291 needed to explain what I call “critical first-person reflection.” But what form phenomenology so conceived can take, and how it may be done responsibly, I hope to show here by example.2 I will rely on a certain interpretation of the “visual appearance” of objects—of their “looking somehow to us.” On the understanding of the term “look,” I employ: if you are a normally sighted person, it should seem truistic to you to say that, when confined in a sealed lightless room, though your eyes be wide open, nothing in that room looks anyway to you at all—as things do look to you when we turn on the lights. This “looking” that we understand first-hand, which goes missing in the dark, I will also call “visual appearance.” We further clarify this understanding by using it to make sense of the following visual impairment. Suppose that, as a result of brain injury, when you look at something before you (when you “fix your gaze” upon it), while what is in an area near to the right of it still looks somehow to you, what is an area near to the left of it no longer looks any way to you at all, where (pre-trauma) it once did. Now further suppose that, while in such a condition, you also render accurate verbal judgments, in classifying the shapes of stimuli affecting your eyes, because they are so affecting you—though these stimuli are located in the region where nothing looks any way to you at all. This is, in effect, a way of interpreting the well-known clinical condition of “blindsight.” On this interpretation, when cortically damaged subjects deny they see visual stimuli that nonetheless prompt their correct forcedchoice discriminatory judgments, there is an intelligible sense in which their denials can be right: namely, a sense in which you would rightly deny seeing what does not look anyhow to you.3 What this helps to clarify: the visual appearance of something to you is conceptually separable from your making a discriminatory judgment about it triggered by its effect on your eyes. I also assume that what visually appears to us, what looks somehow to us, are objects in our surroundings, occupying three dimensions—not, e.g., some “flat” array of “sense-data” in our minds continually warping with changes in perspective. It is true that how the shape and size of what appears to us varies with shifts in position or attention. But commonly it also visually appears to us—not to morph, shrink, or grow—but to remain the same throughout these perspectival variations. And by interacting with our surroundings, we generate such appearances of spatial constancy through perspectival variation. By this means, things there that “transcend” any experience we have during a given time visually appear to us. They appear to us to occupy certain locations. I  will call such appearances “locational.” I will also take it for granted that changes and constancies in color and brightness of what looks to us somewhere typically also are apparent to us. To make this last point explicit we might speak of “chromatic-locational appearance.” But for the most part I will leave this point implicit.

292  Charles Siewert Now to set up my main theme: we may distinguish something’s appearing to us merely locationally from its appearing F to us—where “F” stands for some multiply instantiable spatial property. Let’s say two pyramids of the same size look somehow to me, and appear to me where they are. Things in the two places they appear to me to occupy as I move around them must share some general shape property. Here we’re assuming it’s in fact the property of being pyramidal. But I can distinguish the objects’ appearing to me differently located just where they are from their appearing to me the same shape (say, pyramidal)—even if each place where they appear is one in which an object with that shared property snugly fits. For the objects appearing to me in two different locations to look to me the same shape would be for me to experience an appearance that is not only locational, but also (as I will put it) recognitional. It would be for each of them to “look recognizable to me as a pyramid.” Even if you acknowledge that you enjoy (“locational”) visual appearances of where objects are, you may still find it unclear that you also experience recognitional appearances of individuals you name (as “N”) or classify (as “an F”)—distinct from the judgments you would express by naming them or attributing some general feature to them.4 It is my task here to explain how we can also make clear to ourselves that someone “looks recognizable to us as N,” or that someone or something “looks recognizable to us as an F,” and what it means to say this. This I believe is crucial to understanding how visual experience enables us to make sense of the world.

Recognitional Appearances: Faces Let me start by clarifying how I understand the general notion of visual recognition. Consider two roles vision plays in facilitating the comprehension of speech. On the one hand, there is its role in understanding what you mean when you say, “There’s that,” thereby identifying a particular. On the other, there’s vision’s role in understanding, “There’s that one again,” and “There’s one of those again.” The latter task—that of facilitating verbal reidentification and classification—belongs to visual recognition. To get a clearer conception of this role, let’s now contrast normal with pathological cases, in which visual recognition is impaired, sometimes quite radically. What I  have in mind are forms of visual agnosia.5 First consider “associative agnosia.” For subjects without this impairment, the query “What is that?”—posed of something seen—readily elicits a quick, effortless response, in which they rely on vision to classify the item to which the questioner referred with “that.” They reply, “That’s a hat (a fork, a book, a plant, etc.)”—judgments which, as far as they can tell, they reach through no inference from the attribution of other features to the object, by which they would justify its classification. Now

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 293 impaired subjects also understand which item is the target of the speaker’s query, and understand this by where it visually appears to them. And they understand the general terms that an unimpaired subject would use to carry out the task—“hat,” “plant,” and so on. The difference is that agnosiacs are either helpless, relying on vision, to offer a classification of the target, or can offer one only by resorting to conjecture, or an overt reliance on inference, or by sticking to relatively impoverished characterizations of the object. Now consider, similarly, subjects suffering from a deficit in facial recognition (prosopagnosia). They are unable to reidentify individuals by seeing their faces, in the way most of us find routine. If you introduce them to someone, saying “This is Nicole,” though they may well understand to whom you refer with the demonstrative “this,” by seeing her face and where it is, nonetheless they cannot tell you later that Nicole has come back, by looking at her face again. Here then is what I  understand initially by “visual recognition.” It is that capacity to use vision that the impaired subjects just described lack, and that you, if you are not thus impaired, have. Now return to the notion of visual appearance. The agnosiac as I’ve conceived her is not entirely bereft of visual experience of her surroundings. It is visually apparent to her where things are around her. Thus agnosia and blindsight are at least conceptually distinct. But is there some sort of deficit in visual appearance also involved in the agnosiac’s failure in visual recognition? My claim is this. An agnosiac could conceivably enjoy locational visual appearances as acute as anyone’s. But to those of us who can visually recognize things, objects look recognizable. And, if they looked that way to an agnosiac, she’d no longer have agnosia. To experience such a recognitional appearance is not merely to make judgments naming or classifying the apparent object. Agnosia, as I  conceive of it, involves a radical deficit in appearances, and this accounts for its sufferers’ debilitating incapacity to reidentify individuals and classify objects in judgment. To contrast ourselves with agnosiacs in this way is to appreciate a pervasive sort of richness in our visual experience, which goes beyond mere locational appearance. To confirm the reality of such recognitional appearances, and clarify what they are, I propose we reflect critically on what we may understand from our own experience, starting with cases where talk of recognition seems most immediately and unquestionably apt: cases where we recognize people by recognizing their faces. Think of someone you know just well enough that you can, by looking at her face (or a photo of it) and from how it looks to you, reliably and correctly judge it to be hers. (Let this person be, as you like, a celebrity, a colleague, or a casual acquaintance.) Typically such a judgment (e.g., “That’s Nicole”) will involve the face looking recognizable to you as hers in the sense I’m after. But for someone to look recognizable to you as Nicole, it’s not necessary that

294  Charles Siewert you successfully recognize her by sight: I wish to include here cases of what we might call “misrecognition.” The sort of appearance I  have in mind is sometimes reported, more colloquially, by saying a person “looks like N to me.” But that locution is not fully adequate. For what I’m after here is to be distinguished from someone merely appearing to you to resemble a given person—and in that sense “looking like” him or her. (“She looks kind of like Nicole Kidman.”) The sort of case I have in mind is one you might reasonably report by asserting, “No, seriously, that woman looks to me just like Nicole Kidman.” Or as we might say, “She’s a dead ringer for her.” And if it turns out that the person in question actually is Nicole Kidman, that does nothing to falsify the claim. Further suppose you judge someone you see to be Nicole from how she looks to you. But someone else arrives on the scene—the true Nicole! Each of them then says of the other, “That woman is an imposter.” Thrown into consternation, you no longer judge either woman you see to be Nicole. Still, each, by your standards, looks to you just like Nicole. Now, consider: in this situation, what reason do you have to suppress your disposition to judge someone to be Nicole? It’s certainly not enough that two women appear to you where they do in different locations. It lies somehow in the fact that they look to you the same. But what is the relevant respect in which they look the same to you? They do not appear to you qualitatively indistinguishable. You could say: their noses look about the same size, their eyebrows similarly placed, and their eyes roughly the same in color. However, none of this would be sufficient to say what the relevant sameness in appearance is—that which would have given you reason to judge Nicole was in the room, absent the competition, but in its presence, gives you reason to suspend this judgment. To report the relevant sameness in appearance is, you would rightly remark, “they both look to me recognizable as Nicole.” Certain crucial points can now become clear. If there were none but locational appearances, in our scenario there would be no sense in which the two women “looked the same to you” that gave you a reason to hesitate to say who is the real Nicole. But we acknowledged there is such a sense; the crucial way of looking the same here we have called “looking to you recognizable as N.” Now this is not to be confused with a judgment that someone is N, of the sort you might make for reasons that are accessible to your reflection. For (as noted) even while the recognitional appearance persists, you might well suspend the judgment that she is N, for reasons having to do with the persistence of this very appearance. And that appearance, unlike the suspended judgment, is itself nothing of a sort made for reasons subjectively accessible to you. Nor is the appearance a mere suppressed inclination to judge. For this would again neglect the fact that someone’s looking recognizable to you as N gives you a reason to withhold judgment, when there is another who looks the same

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 295 to you—as it would also give you a reason to unhesitatingly make the judgment, were there no competition. It is now crucial to clarify this point. I have so far spoken of a person’s recognitionally appearing as someone designated by a singular term. But that does not entail that the appearance itself is a “singular representation” of someone as the individual so named. Consider: a roomful of Nicole impersonators can all look to you equally recognizable as Nicole. This does imply that they appear the same to you in some sense. But that needn’t be taken to mean that they are each represented by their appearance to be the same unique individual, Nicole (though at most only one of those representations is correct). Rather, each appears to you the same in some way that can be found in a multiplicity of individuals. Thus, while typically a recognitional appearance of someone as Nicole would serve as a reason for you to reidentify her on multiple occasions as the one and only Nicole, you might just as well use such an appearance as a reason to judge someone to be “a Nicole.” Here we would treat “Nicole” no longer as a proper name, but as a general term applicable to a plurality of individuals. We judge: there’s one . . . and there’s one of those (“Nicoles”) again . . . and again. Hence we judge ourselves to be in a roomful of Nicoles.

Recognitional Appearances: Images and Kinds This last point helps us transition from cases where someone looks recognizable to you as N to cases where someone looks recognizable to you as an F. I want now more explicitly to bring into view how recognitional appearances can provide reasons, not just for judgments identifying and reidentifying a named individual (there’s that one again), but for classifying a multiplicity of objects as sharing a common attribute. (There’s one of those again.) A good way to start here is to think about images that exhibit famous Gestalt “ambiguities.” Most readers will be familiar with Necker cubes and the duck/rabbit figure. Take the latter: few, I  hope, would deny there is a difference in how the figure looks to us when we switch between the figure’s looking to us “like an image of duck” and “like an image of a rabbit.” To enrich your appreciation of such appearances, and confirm their “recognitional” status, it may help to multiply examples of ambiguous figure contrasts beyond the (over) familiar cases. Here are a couple to consider: 9_9 —- >>> The first figure may look to you recognizable as “nine underscore nine” but also as my favorite emoticon: the “tired face.” The second may

296  Charles Siewert alternately appear as a picture of a fallen pine tree, a trio of alligators with their mouths open to the left, or an arrow pointing to the right. These examples make it striking how visual experience goes beyond “locational appearances” of spatial distribution—of where boundaries lie, how things are relatively sized and positioned—to encompass aspects of vision that are missing in the agnosiac and present in those with unimpaired powers of recognition. Toggle between appearances: nine dash nine; tired face emoticon; nine dash nine—and so on. Right pointing arrow; felled tree; gator trio; right pointing arrow—and so on. While the visual appearance changes repeatedly in the same way, just where the figure (and its constituent lines) appear to you varies little if at all, or at least not in any regular corresponding way. In fact, in these cases I believe there will be changes in appearances when one is hard pressed to note any simultaneous difference even in how finely the location of some part of the lines looks to you. (This is unlike the case of the Necker cube: there, when the figure looks to me recognizable as a cube image with one side facing out, some lines appear less clearly than they do when a different side is favored.) In any event (and this is the crucial point), in all such phenomenal “toggling,” we find recurrent types of differences in appearance that do not match types of differences in locational appearance. (Focusing on different parts of the figure that yield different areas of apparent relative clarity yields the same repeated appearance as “tiredface,” “felled tree,” “duck,” etc.) This again illustrates what I mean by recognitional appearances and helps us to confirm their reality. Note further how we can distinguish these appearances from corresponding judgments we make for subjectively accessible reasons. For first, you may simultaneously judge the figure  to be more than one of the images (“it’s a duck-rabbit”; “it’s an arrow-tree-gator-trio”), even while it appears to you only in one of its “guises.” Second, it’s one thing to judge, when you are told—this is a “tired face” or a “fallen tree,” but it’s another to see it for yourself. That may come only later—and when it does, how the figure looks to you changes. Finally, the judgment (e.g., that’s a tired-face icon) is made for a reason—that being, namely, its looking to you as it does—while its looking that way to you is not itself something made for a reason accessible to reflection. Once we have accepted the reality of recognitional appearances in these cases of “visual ambiguity” and distinguished them from judgments made for subjectively accessible reasons, we can get clearer about the kind of sameness found in such appearances. When the figure reappears to you the same intermittently, then since that particular figure on page or screen is appearing to you continually the same, the former sort of sameness in appearance is to be construed as a sameness in type. And if it is a sameness in type, it can be apparent not only (as just now) intermittently in a single token of the figure, but in two tokens different in locational appearance, side by side. In either case, we have here the sort

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 297 of appearance enabling us to understand what we mean when we say, “There’s one of those again” (e.g., one of those tired-faced icons). This parallels what we said earlier about the use of recognitional appearances to judge, “There’s another Nicole.” So far I have illustrated recognitional appearance by reference to facial recognition and visually ambiguous images. Do I want to go further? Do I say that ordinarily, as you look around you, and look at and look for people and things, they not only appear to you as in particular places, and not only do you judge them to be this or that, but they look recognizable as what you judge them to be (as socks, cars, doors, mugs, cats, and cucumbers; as girls and boys, men and women; as angry, alert, or pleased)? Yes. Admittedly, it can be harder in the real, non-image cases to draw attention to this in the manner just illustrated with “ambiguous images.” Real-life objects don’t often exhibit the kind of ambiguity that allows us to appreciate, by such reflection, the capacity for vision to vary subjectively in its recognitional aspect, even when locational appearances are held fairly constant. Take the duck-rabbit: an actual whole duck cannot look recognizable to me entirely as a rabbit—or if it did, this would occur only by its appearing to morph. And I may stare at a real cube as long as I like, but which faces look to me nearer will not “flip,” Necker-style. If it did, this would appear as a change in shape. In neither case would I have a repeatable “what it appears recognizable as,” which can be abstracted from how it appears to us to take up space. Nonetheless we should affirm recognitional appearance also in the case of ordinary recognition (and misrecognition) of types of objects. For first, the sorts of considerations noted in the case of facial recognition are applicable. Two ducks or two cubes, apparent to you in different locations, can be said to “look the same” to you in some respect that gives you a reason to judge that they are both cubes or ducks. And if you were willing to say that Nicole and her imposter both would both look recognizable to you as Nicole, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t go along with saying that two apparently distinct objects both look recognizable to you as ducks or cubes. The earlier rationale for the category of recognitional visual appearances can be reapplied in its essentials: we find in our experience objects’ “appearing the same” in ways that give us a (defeasible) reason to make a judgment about them that mere locational appearances cannot supply. Moreover, even if visual ambiguities are more elusive in the case of 3-D objects, they are not impossible to find. Consider: I may successfully go searching in a display of baskets for one that looks recognizable to me as a hat. The object that I find can either look recognizable to me as a basket or as a hat, even while it remains constant in its locational appearance. (One can find images of such hat/baskets online in connection with craft projects—“make a basket into a hat!”). Here too note that appearance

298  Charles Siewert may lag slightly behind (and thus be distinguishable from) acceptance in a judgment. (“Funny basket.” “Actually, that’s a hat.” “Um, ok . . . oh, now I see it.”) In any case, I might suspend judgment about whether it actually is a hat or a basket, while either recognitional appearance persists. One can find such ambiguities in a range of cases where one recruits an object made for one purpose to serve another. I may also experience changes in recognitional appearance as mere fancy: that saw looks to me recognizable as a giant steak knife. Once we have acknowledged that there are 3-D visual ambiguity cases, we should acknowledge the reality of recognitional appearances more generally. For it would be absurd to maintain that something can look recognizable to me as a hat only provided it can also look recognizable to me as a basket. Granting the foregoing then, we find our lives are replete with recognitional appearances of great variety.

Appearance, Judgment, and Assessment for Accuracy I can now clarify my position on the “rich or thin?” dispute between Byrne and Siegel. Given what I’ve said so far, you might expect me to side with Siegel: for something to look recognizable to me as a hat is for my visual experience to represent it (accurately or inaccurately) to be a hat. Actually, I don’t want to say that. Before explaining why, let me make clear why I do not see myself as siding with Byrne. To side with Byrne would, I think, mean that what I am describing as something’s looking recognizable to me as a hat would be more properly conceived of as my visual experience attributing to an object some thin or lower-level spatial property (≠ being a hat), together perhaps with my being inclined to believe, somehow on this basis, that it is a hat. But this sort of view does not seem right to me, because it would fail to capture the difference in appearance, when what looked recognizable to me as a basket, then looks recognizable to me as a hat. There seems no plausible difference in what “lower-level spatial property” (or locational distribution of such properties) the object appears to have, to which I might reasonably appeal to constitute the difference in appearance. The object appears to me the same shape throughout its change in appearance. And no difference in low-level shape appearances maps onto the hat/basket differences in recognitional appearances. Much the same holds with my other examples. Furthermore, the items that can look recognizable to me as hats are extraordinarily various with respect to shape. How could their all looking this way be identified with the visual representation of a specific shape? Similarly with facial recognition: suppose we say that purported instantiation of some “low-level” spatial property is all that is truly visually apparent (as distinct from judged) when someone looks recognizable to you as Nicole. What is this thin property? It can’t be identified with the shape of a cast made of her face. For it must accommodate

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 299 an indefinitely large range of recognitional appearances as Nicole, with her at different ages, and sporting different facial expressions, and it should be shared by a bevy of Nicole impersonators whose faces look differently shaped to me in certain ways. Admittedly, I can’t say I know there is no property that all these are “visually represented” to have. And it is obscure just what governs how “low” or “high” level a property is. However, I see no reason to think that in all cases where someone looks recognizable to me as N, or something looks recognizable to me as F, there is some single, clearly “low-level” property being visually represented, which exhausts how the object looks to me. Then why not join Siegel? Take any case where someone or something presents a recognitional appearance. Suppose that they also accurately appear to you in particular locations. My claim is this: whatever further accuracy or inaccuracy is to be found here lies entirely in the truth or falsity of further, optional judgments about the objects of appearance. In that sense, recognitional appearances do not “attribute” or “predicate” properties of apparent objects—they are not visual “assertions” about objects. But this is not to impoverish visual experience. Rather it’s to say that visual appearance can be much richer in “significance”—in what it “takes things as”—than in what it correctly or incorrectly represents things to be. Why do I say this? I do not (in the manner of Charles Travis (2004)) resist assessing visual experience for accuracy altogether. I affirm that we rightly speak of accurate or inaccurate locational appearances, and my “recognitional appearances” are not mere “comparative looks.” This is not the place to explain my views about the assessability for accuracy of locational appearances. So let me just say why I regard recognitional appearances as I do. I can correctly judge, of the Nicole imposter, that she is not Nicole, even though she looks recognizable to me as Nicole. And I  can perhaps say that she “falsely appears to be Nicole,” in this sense: I would falsely judge her to be Nicole, from how she appears, if nothing spoke against it. But is there any sense in which I can correctly judge that the Nicole imposter inaccurately looks recognizable to me as Nicole? Suppose I am “taken in” by the imposter, but then get a better look at her; from her new appearance, I judge her confidently not to be Nicole. So, when she becomes more apparent to me, I realize my judgment was false. But it’s just not clear that anything about her evolving appearance excludes her having been as she appeared to me (as distinct from who I judged her to be) earlier and throughout, without changing in the interim. This differs from the case in which I am subject to a visual illusion of where an object’s spatial boundaries lie (say, concavely or convexly), as I discover when I get a better look at the object: there, when I  “experience disillusionment,” the later, improved appearance cancels the other, inferior one. That is, the object (or its surface) can’t have been just where it looked to me throughout, without morphing—but in fact it

300  Charles Siewert appeared to me unchanging in where it was the whole time. So at some time it must not have been as it looked to me (locationally). However, analogous considerations don’t seem to apply specifically to the recognitional appearance case: if there is no disillusionment in locational appearance, then the more revealing appearance that exposes the imposter only improves upon, it doesn’t cancel or exclude the earlier, inadequate one. I don’t deny that someone who is not Nicole could look recognizable to me as Nicole, because the way she looks to me is inaccurate. Suppose what made her look recognizable to me as Nicole was that her hair looked straighter or curlier to me than it is, and her and eyes and nose looked much bigger or smaller to me than they are, and her complexion darker or lighter than it is. Then, yes: the way she looks to me is inaccurate. But that is because I am experiencing an inaccurate chromaticlocational appearance. Some of what I see appears other than where it actually is, and light/dark differences appear as other than they are. But that does not entail that she is incorrectly represented by me to be Nicole, just because she looks to me recognizable as her. To put this more generally: when x looks recognizable to me as N or as an F, it may indeed be the case that the way x looks to me is inaccurate, and from this appearance I falsely judge x to be N or F. But the error in such cases is to be attached only to an inaccurate locational appearance and to the false judgment. There is no specifically inaccurate recognitional appearance involved. And in that case, I see no reason to suppose the recognitional appearance is ever properly deemed “accurate” either. That is my view. But still, what recommends it? First, note how, given my previous exposition of recognitional appearance, it can seem intuitively correct to describe certain cases, as follows. Hat/Basket. My job is to find a basket that looks enough like a hat to be useable as one, without attracting the judgment: “Hey, that guy’s wearing a basket on his head!” When a find a good candidate, I find a basket that looks recognizable to me as a hat. But I have made no error regarding the basket; it does not visually appear to me inaccurately. No more, then, is the way another, identically shaped object looks to me accurate, if it just so happens that it is in fact a hat that someone snuck into the basket display. Arrow/Gator. Searching for the exit, I encounter a helpful sign with an arrow, like that depicted a couple of pages back. The arrow also—as before—looks recognizable to me as an image of a trio of gators, mouths agape. But no one fashioned it with that intent to depict. Maybe no one has ever even seen it that way before. In a sense, then, it is not a picture of gators; it is an arrow sign. However, I am not making some kind of visual error here—the figures do not appear inaccurately to me. The only error comes if I judge that it is a “picture of gators” in a sense that would require it to have

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 301 been produced with gators in mind. Perhaps we will say that just by seeing it in the way I do, I make it into an image of gators. But to say I am making it an image by taking it as one, doesn’t imply I am correctly representing it to be one. It seems to me strongly intuitive that the cases above have been correctly described. And I  have so far found no reason to revise these descriptions. Moreover, I find the following two arguments support the conception they imply. The first starts with this. We have seen how recognitional appearances may have either a judgment-supporting or a “creative” use. In the first, they are used in making judgments about how objects that appear already are. In the second, “creative” case, by contrast, they are used to “make something new” of what we see, and to engage in imitation, invention, and play—as I have illustrated in some of the cases above (the hat/basket, the arrow sign, the giant steak knife). Now notice: when the feature a given object actually has fails to match the feature it appears recognizable to you as having, this does not make for failure in the creative use of the appearance. So we find in the creative use of appearances no reason to regard them as assertoric, as “purporting” that the object has that feature. Still, maybe we should always so regard them, because we have reason to do so when they are used in judgment? But consider: where you judge correctly something to be F that looks recognizable to you as an F, there is nothing compelling you to place the assessment of correctness anywhere other than simply on the judgment. What is gained by saying the recognitional appearance is also a “correct classification”? And where what appears to you recognizable as an F you judge not to be an F, there is no reason to suppose that the object is not as it looked to you, unless it presents an inaccurate locational appearance. We gain nothing by regarding recognitional appearances as assertoric in either their creative or their judgmental use. Then we gain nothing by so regarding them at all. So let’s not. That is one (“nothing gained”) argument for a non-assertoric conception of recognitional appearances. Here is a second—the “unfair blame” argument. Whether something actually has or lacks a feature that it appears recognizable to you as having will often depend on its origins. One way in which origins can matter has to do with the intentions with which that object was brought into the world. For example, was it fashioned by a basket-weaver or a hat-maker? But such facts are not themselves recognizably apparent when you see the thing. They can only be inferred from something else that is recognizably apparent. And the inference produces a judgment made for subjectively available reasons that is not an appearance. By being sensitive to such reasons, judgment can (as appearance cannot) take into account information about the origins of an object that implies something hitherto judged of it is not, in fact, true

302  Charles Siewert of it—and thereby revise itself. Because of this, the recognitional appearance is not to be faulted for failing to assign the property to the object correctly. For the incorrectness of such a property assignment would be due to factors such experience cannot make apparent, so as to “revise” the object’s appearance to you: at most experience can aid judgment in their discovery. It should not be “blamed” for failing to do something it cannot do, but judgment can. If fault is to be found, let it fall on judgment. Similar reasoning could be used, where the origins crucial to having a given property relate not to design, but to nature. (“This looks just like hamburger to me. But it isn’t—it’s meat substitute.”) If we put appearance in the business of attributing to objects the properties it makes them recognizable as having, we would blame appearance for failures that it is judgment’s job to avoid or repair. Since that would be unfair, we should not put appearance in that business: we should not view it as assertoric. The availability of the non-assertoric view I’m suggesting may be obscured by current habits of thinking. We are liable to assume that whatever richness lies in the intentionality of perceptual experience must lie in its “content,” where this is seen as what it “represents something to be” accurately or inaccurately, what it “says” to us about how the world is. But other broad ways of understanding intentionality might better accommodate my proposal. Consider the conception Steve Crowell (2013) draws from Husserl, in which the intentionality of experience is its “being of something as something”—where what we are directed to an object as is what “meaning” it has for us. As I  understand this, it doesn’t require supposing that what meaning something has for us in experience is exhausted by the properties experience attributes to it. And antecedents for the view I’ve sketched might also be seen in Kant’s philosophy of perception (as least as interpreted by Samantha Matherne (2014, 2015)). My notion that recognitional appearance joins locational appearance to judgment, and has both judgment-supporting and creative uses, seems to me to find some parallel in the Kantian notion of the “schematism” that unites sensory intuition of objects in space with concepts of the understanding, and makes both theoretical judgment and aesthetic imagination possible.

Looking and Judging: Two Kinds of Normativity While I  have agreed with Siegel that “higher-level” properties figure  in how things visually appear to us (and not just in how we think of them), I have disagreed with her view that visual experience correctly or incorrectly attributes or predicates these (or actually any general) properties to apparent objects, as belief or assertion does. Now, similarly, while I agree with her that both we ourselves, and the ways our experience is generated, are rightly subject to a kind of normative “epistemic appraisal” that relates specifically to vision, and not just to what judgments we make on its basis, I significantly disagree with her about the form this appraisal takes.6

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 303 Siegel ties this appraisal, as I do not, to the idea that your visual experiences, like your beliefs, are generated by inferential processes—a kind of reasoning that goes on unconsciously “in the basement of the mind”— processes whose rationality (or irrationality) makes them appraisable in ways that “redound” on your own rationality (or irrationality). It is not essential to my view to deny that the unconscious processes that generate visual experience are properly construed as inferential. While remaining neutral about this, we can acknowledge a significant way in which our visual experience is generated by what we do well or badly, and with what we can try to correct or improve, and thus with what is normatively assessable in ways closely related to the epistemic support experience offers judgment. To see this, we need to make explicit a distinction between what we might call “looking-as-appearance” and “looking-as-act.” I may speak either of things looking somehow to me, or of my looking at them. The first locution conveys “looking-as-appearance,” the second “looking-asact.” When something looks somehow to me, that is not an act of mine, or something I do; but when I look at it—when I “cast my gaze upon it,” “follow it with my gaze,” or “hold it in my gaze” (when I “keep my eyes on it”)—that is something I do; that is an act of mine. I may also speak of “looking around” and “looking for something” as doings, as acts. To see what I mean, consider your capacity to understand and comply with requests such as “Look at me,” “Stop looking at me,” “Look at that pelican flying overhead,” “Look more carefully at this twenty dollar bill,” and so on. We can understand and comply with such requests, much as we can in the case of “Tighten your fist,” “Relax your shoulders,” “Point to where it hurts,” and “Knock harder.” By contrast, we are simply at a loss if someone requests that we grow our hair more slowly, coagulate our blood, or produce more thyroid stimulating hormone. In response, we would naturally protest—“But that’s not under my control!” However, where I  look is under my control. Of course, I  rarely or never plan or deliberate about how to look at something. And my gaze is often “drawn” or “attracted” to things I did not choose to look at; things from which I sometimes only with strain or difficulty “tear my gaze away.” Still, I know how to comply with an instruction or carry out my intention to look at something or to stop looking at it. To that extent looking is an act, and something under my control. So, on this conception, looking is something you do, such that what you do, in looking, is to make something look somehow to you; it’s to make it more or less apparent to yourself. We can now see that this activity of making things apparent to ourselves by looking is subject to a kind of normative assessment. For looking typically serves myriad mundane tasks, the engagement in which makes such assessment appropriate—tasks, for example, of looking for something, or of trying to tell what something is by looking. We make such assessments when we say, “I need to get a better look.” Or “I got a good

304  Charles Siewert enough look.” But this is not rational assessment. If I fail to find something I’m looking for, and you say, “You should get a better look,” often you can point to no flaw or gap in my reasoning that I might try to remedy in response. Nonetheless, we both understand well enough what norms you’re invoking and urging me to comply with in such a case. In countless instances in which we look for something, or try to tell what something is by looking, we open ourselves to appraisal with respect to the proper (or inadequate) deployment of skills. And this kind of appraisal need make no assumptions about what reasoning, good or bad, subpersonally generates our visual “conclusions.” Without invoking norms of reason at all, we can often understand whether we’ve gotten a “good enough look” at something to tell what it is or find what we were looking for. By focusing on this kind of normative assessment, we can better understand how visual experience warrants judgment, while properly respecting their distinctness. To revert to an example Siegel uses: if I want to tell by looking whether the thing someone holds is a gun—if I want to make a warranted judgment that it is one—it needs to appear recognizable to me as a gun.7 And for that, I need to get a good enough look at it. But even if it looks recognizable to me as a gun at a glance, that may not be enough to sufficiently warrant the judgment—it may be a handtool or a cellphone, not a gun: I may need to withhold judgment and get a better look. What will constitute a “good enough look” will depend on context, and discriminating better and worse “looks” may involve sensitivity to “top-down” influences and “prior outlook” (including such factors as my level of relevant perceptual expertise; my emotional state; my—perhaps prejudiced, perhaps warranted—assumptions about who is likely to be wielding a gun in these circumstances). But the point to emphasize is this. We can, as Siegel rightly suggests, see ourselves as normatively appraisable in connection with our visual experience and how it is generated, in ways that relate directly to the degree of warrant experience confers on judgment—and in doing so we need to acknowledge that “rich” and not merely “thin” properties “figure in” how things look to us. But to do this we don’t need to blur appearance into belief, and see all norms as norms of good reasoning. Nor need we drive epistemic appraisal into the mind’s basement and out of the realm of what we have the power to correct or improve by our own efforts. Equipped with the categories of recognitional appearance and looking-as-activity, we can preserve the differences between appearing and judging, and so forge a phenomenologically acceptable framework for understanding perceptual knowledge.8 9

Notes The Byrne/Siegel debate is discussed in Byrne and Siegel, “Rich or Thin?”, 59–60. 1 2 In “Socratic Introspection and the Abundance of Experience,” and “For Analytic Phenomenology,” I explain and defend my phenomenological approach

Appearance, Judgment, and Norms 305 in more detail, against the radically third-person approach of Dennett (Consciousness Explained, “Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained”) and in the face of Schwitzgebel’s skepticism about introspection (“The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection”). 3 I spell out in greater detail the interpretation of blindsight that refines my conception of visual appearance in Siewert, “Saving Appearances: a Dilemma for Physicalists.” I am indebted to Weiskrantz, Blindsight: A Case Study Spanning 35 Years and New Developments, for my understanding of the psychological research on actual blindsight (though I should make it clear that I interpret this in terms of a different conception of consciousness than he adopts). 4 MacPherson suggests (without clearly endorsing) such a view, when discussing “cognitive penetration” (“Cognitive Penetration of Color Experience: Rethinking the Issue in light of an Indirect Mechanism,” p. 35). She says she finds it plausible that the subjectively noted difference between simply seeing a pine tree and visually recognizing it as one lies in a judgment accompanying the experience, not in the visual experience itself. Firestone and Scholl also suggest such a view: when arguing against “top-down” influences on perception, they indicate that for them differences in recognition are by definition not genuinely perceptual, since they depend on memory, “Cognition Does Not Affect Perception: Evaluating the Evidence for ‘Top-Down’ Effects” pp. 15–16. I do not aim here to affirm the reality of “cognitive penetration” or “top-down influences” as these are understood by MacPherson or Firestone and Scholl. I only aim to clarify a conception of visual experience on which differences in how things look to us can constitute the exercise of recognitional abilities. 5 I owe much of my understanding of the phenomena of visual agnosia to Farah, Visual Agnosia. 6 Her view is explained in detail in Siegel, The Rationality of Perception. 7 Siegel alludes to the work of Payne which provides evidence that racial attitudes affect whether, given very little time to look, subjects will identify an object as a tool or a gun (“Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon,” 181–92). This raises many questions of interpretation. For my purposes what’s crucial is just the idea that what Siegel calls “prior outlook” (including racial attitudes) can affect how “good a look” one needs to get before a judgment based on recognitional appearances is sufficiently warranted. 8 More on my views about the normativity of perception and “getting a good look” can be found in Siewert, “On Getting a Good Look: Normativity and Visual Experience.” 9 I wish to express my gratitude to all those with whom I’ve discussed these issues in preparing this paper. Special thanks to Steve Crowell and Samantha Matherne for their helpful feedback and comments.

References Byrne, A., and S. Siegel 2017. “Rich or Thin?” In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception, edited by B. Nanay, 59–80. New York: Routledge. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown. ———. 2003. “Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9–10): 19–30. Farah, M. J. 2004. Visual Agnosia. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

306  Charles Siewert Firestone, C., and B. J. Scholl. 2015. “Cognition Does Not Affect Perception: Evaluating the Evidence for ‘Top-Down’ Effects.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences: 1–71. Matherne, S. 2014. “Kant and the Art of Schematism.” Kantian Review 19 (2): 181–205. ———. 2015. “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception.” Ergo 2 (29): 737–77. MacPherson, F. 2012. “Cognitive Penetration of Color Experience: Rethinking the Issue in Light of an Indirect Mechanism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (1): 24–62. Payne, B. K. 2001. “Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2): 181–92. Schwitzgebel, E. 2011. “The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection.” In Perplexities of Consciousness, 117–37. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Siegel, S. 2017. The Rationality of Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. “Saving Appearances: A Dilemma for Physicalists.” In The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, edited by George Bealer and Robert Koons, 67–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. “Socratic Introspection and the Abundance of Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies: Describing Inner Experience: A  Symposium Debating Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) 18 (1): 63–91. ———. 2015. “On Getting a Good Look: Normativity and Visual Experience.” In Normativity in Perception, edited by Thiemo Breyer and Maxime Doyon, 17–37. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. “For Analytic Phenomenology.” In Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Analytical and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives, 95–109. Berlin: De Gruyter Publishers. Travis, C. 2004. “The Silence of the Senses.” Mind 115: 57–94. Weiskrantz, L. 2009. Blindsight: A  Case Study Spanning 35  Years and New Developments. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

17 Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Transcendental Projects From the Natural Attitude to Functioning Intentionality Dermot Moran My focus in this chapter is the manner in which phenomenology properly understood operates as transcendental philosophy. I  explore Husserl’s and Heidegger’s transcendental projects, taking my orientation from a certain insight of Merleau-Ponty, who, I  believe, correctly identified trends in the later Husserl, to which, at that time, Husserl’s own published works (1975/2001, 1995/2014, 1931/1960, 1974/1969) did not attest. In his 1959 essay, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,”1 MerleauPonty addressed the complex intertwinings between the natural and the transcendental attitudes (a distinction, as Eugen Fink already observed, between two transcendental concepts).2 Merleau-Ponty highlights the manner in which the transcendental ultimately must be embedded in the natural and return to it.3 How does this conclusion stand relative to the projects of Husserl and Heidegger? I propose to explore this question with a view to understanding precisely how phenomenology must be transcendental. Let us recall that Husserl’s transcendental turn was inaugurated by both his “discovery” of the reduction and by his related discovery of the natural attitude. The reality we take for granted, and which is explored in the natural and human sciences, is not an independent self-standing being-in-itself (Sein an sich), but is being revealed under an attitude (Einstellung) imbued already with Geradehinsein (as Fink puts it), with firm conviction of its actual existence (Wirklichkeit) or extantness (Vorhandensein), a conviction that essentially masks the constituting activity of transcendental subjectivity. In other words, what traditional ontology has studied is actually the ontology made manifest by the natural attitude and hence a relativistic ontology. In contrast, a new dimension of being is uncovered in the transcendental attitude; hence Husserl characterizes the transcendental attitude as a “breakthrough” attitude built on a certain transformation of the always ongoing natural attitude. Allied with the discovery of the transcendental is Husserl’s novel characterization of the essential nature of the objectivity that belongs to theoria, to the “theoretical attitude,” in so far as that is built on the natural attitude, and his assessment of the dangers inherent in any naturalistic

308  Dermot Moran objectivism that reifies consciousness and its intentional activities. Transcendental philosophy must always contextualize claims that are supposedly generated by the objectivist theoretical attitude. Although the theoretical certainly overcomes some of the relativities inherent in the natural attitude and gives humans a standard for objectivity, it is naïve as to its groundedness in subjectivity. Hence the transcendental attitude is needed to correct both the original natural attitude and its sophisticated outgrowth, the theoretical attitude. Despite the centrality of the natural attitude in Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s phenomenological follower (at least from 1917 to 1927), barely ever invokes the “natural attitude” and certainly never makes it thematic, although clearly in some sense he too is an explicitly transcendental philosopher, e.g., time is the “transcendental horizon” of the question of the meaning of being in § 8 of Being and Time (hereafter BT). So what is the relationship between their respective considerations of phenomenology in relation to the identification and systematic disruption of the natural attitude? To highlight this problem, consider that, already in Phenomenology of Perception (1945),4 Merleau-Ponty cites Husserl as considering Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit to be primarily an exploration of the Lebenswelt (Merleau-Ponty 1945, lxxi, i). Both Husserl and Heidegger began to use the term Lebenswelt around the same time—approximately 1917 to 1919 (in Husserl’s Ideas II manuscripts, and in Heidegger’s earliest Freiburg lectures)—so there is some truth to Husserl’s observation as recorded by Merleau-Ponty (and presumably transmitted by Fink).5 As we know from his later writings, especially Crisis of European Sciences,6 Husserl thinks of the life-world as primarily a transcendental concept, one which has to be interrogated in a new way. Does Heidegger, in fact, have an account of the Lebenswelt and is it similarly accessed through transcendental methodology? To answer this, we must first get a clearer sense of what Husserl means by the “lifeworld” and our mode of interrogating it.

Ontology in Husserl’s Late Crisis of European Sciences In the Crisis, Husserl claims to have uncovered the life-world as a fundamental and novel phenomenon previously invisible to the sciences and to have identified it for the first time as a “universal problem” (1931/1960, § 34). Husserl aims to uncover “the pregiven world, the ontic universe [das ontische Universum]” (1931/1960, § 37, 142; Hua VI, 145). Indeed, there is—as Husserl himself insists—a specific and entirely new science of the life-world itself (1931/1960, § 51) that would, among other things, offer a new basis for grounding the natural and human sciences, one that shows more clearly the rootedness of theoretical science in the world of the natural attitude. Husserl is clear that the unthought norms governing the life-world have an impact on the conduct of the objective sciences.

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 309 This new life-world science requires a special epochē, as Husserl says in Crisis § 36, and would be descriptive of the life-world in its own terms, bracketing conceptions intruding from the natural and cultural sciences, and identifying the “types” (Type) and “levels” (Stufe) that characterized this world. In this sense, Husserl speaks of an “ontology of the lifeworld” (Ontologie der Lebenswelt, see 1931/1960, § 51, and Hua XXIX, 140), presumably the equivalent of the ontology of the natural attitude but without the scientific “spin” applied by the sciences, although, in the Crisis itself, he certainly does not give the concept the full elaboration it demands, and many commentators feel his account falls short of the necessary “thick” description of our cultural world. Concepts like “garden,” “landscape,” “domestic animal,” and “pet,” belong to the life-world. Husserl writes: The bodies familiar to us in the life-world are actual bodies, but not bodies in the sense of physics. The same is true of causality and of spatiotemporal infinity. These categorial features of the life-world have the same names but are not concerned, so to speak, with the theoretical idealizations and the hypothetical substructions of the geometrician and the physicist (die theoretischen Idealisierungen und hypothetischen substruktionender Geometer und Physiker). (1931/1960, § 36, 139–40; Hua VI, 142–3) Husserl believes the a priori description of the world (as provided by mathematics) can never be an account of the whole world as such (a world that includes spiritual life).

Heidegger’s Critique of Husserlian Phenomenology as Missing the Meaning of Being Heidegger claimed that Husserl’s account of the life-world, while offering a revolution in ontology, misses something essential. Namely, Husserl failed to inquire into the “being of the intentional” (Sinn des Intentionalen) and into the “sense of being as such” (der Sinn von Sein). For Heidegger, Husserl’s account was not ontological enough. Heidegger sees Husserl as mischaracterizing what is discoverable in the natural attitude (which for him means the world of everyday practices and projects) insofar as he characterizes it as an attitude. In his 1925 Marburg lectures on The History of the Concept of Time,7 Heidegger explains what an attitude is—it is a stance toward things, a peculiar stance that reveals things in a certain light. But then he poses a penetrating question: Is this natural attitude perhaps only the semblance of one [nur der Schein einer solchen]? This kind of comportment and experience [Verhaltungs- und Erfahrungsart] is of course rightly called an

310  Dermot Moran attitude [Einstellung], inasmuch as it must first be derived from natural comportment, from the natural way of experience: one must so to speak “place oneself into” [hineinstellen] this way of considering things [and so assume an attitude toward them] in order to be able to experience in this manner. Man’s natural manner of experience [Erfahrungsweise], by contrast, cannot be called an attitude. (1979/1985, § 12, 113; GA 20, 156) For Heidegger, then, the natural attitude only appears to be an attitude; it is not properly a thetic attitude or stance, because it has a much deeper ground—a deeper ground that Husserl’s account mischaracterizes. Invoking some passages from Ideas II, Heidegger rejects the view that in the natural attitude human beings consider themselves “zoologically” as animals, or as psycho-somatic unities, a view he ascribes to Husserl. This misses the nature of human comportments and treats human beings merely as “at hand” (vorhanden) to which “comportments” (Verhaltungen) are added as “appendages” (Annexe), whereas the being of the human is essentially characterized by its comportments (1979/1985, 113; GA 20, 156). Heidegger cites Husserl as saying that the personalistic attitude envelops the naturalistic attitude (1979/1985, 122; GA 20, 168), but he immediately goes on to criticize Husserl’s description of the personalistic attitude as inspectio sui, as Cartesian self-consciousness (cf. Husserl 1952/1989, § 54, 223; Hua IV, 212): The personalistic attitude and experience is characterized as inspectio sui, as an inner inspection of itself as the ego of intentionality, the ego taken as subject of cogitations.8 Heidegger says the very expression reminds us of Descartes. For Heidegger, Husserl is still too naturalistic—he is still beginning the consideration of Dasein from the point of view of the physical, natural being to which a consciousness is attached, and the mode of access to the consciousness is still determined as self-inspection. Heidegger rejects Husserl’s invocation of inspectio sui as the manner in which the subject grasps itself, since it prioritizes the ego’s self-awareness and seems to make self-reflective consciousness the fundamental ground of subjectivity or Dasein. This, for Heidegger, is too narrow to understand the transcendence of Dasein and its role in the disclosure of Being. Heidegger’s view of human comportment is that it is deeper and more pragmatic than any kind of Schauen, “looking” or “inspecting,” especially of oneself. Heidegger rejects “picture book phenomenology” which is simply descriptive of things as they appear. Things reveal themselves in their manipulability in relation to tasks, contexts, and ends in view, Bewandtnis.9 Hence Husserl’s language of “attitudes” leads phenomenology astray.

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 311

Husserl’s Assessment of Heidegger as an “Anthropologist” of Dasein When Husserl finally got around to reading and annotating Heidegger’s BT,10 he thought its existential analytic of Dasein in its everydayness was actually a descent into the very relativistic “anthropologism” and psychologism that Husserl had been battling against since the Prolegomena (1900) to the Logical Investigations.11 Where is the truly transcendental in Heidegger? Husserl asks. Despite his references to his inquiry as transcendental philosophy and his invocation of the “fundamental constitution of human existence” (Grundverfassung des Daseins, Heidegger 1993/1962, 17, 52), Heidegger gives no account of how he arrives at his undeniably transcendental stance, so his hermeneutic descriptions of Dasein end up being naturalistic—despite the fact that in BT he sometimes gives the impression that, like Husserl, he is a transcendental idealist: If what the term “idealism” says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is “transcendental” for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant. (1993/1962, 251, 208) There is clearly some mirroring between their respective approaches, yet both want to mark the explicit differences. When Heidegger announces in BT (1993/1962, 31, 11) that the clarification of the meaning of Being is the fundamental task of “all ontology” that is not “blind and perverted from its own aim,” Husserl writes in his marginal comments, “This would be a reproduction of my doctrine, if ‘clarified’ means ­constitutively-phenomenologically clarified” (Husserl 1997, 281).12 Later he writes in the margin of BT: Heidegger transposes or changes the constitutive-phenomenological clarification of all regions of entities and universals, of the total region of the world, into the anthropological; the whole problematic is shifted over: corresponding to the ego there is Dasein, etc. In that way everything becomes ponderously unclear, and philosophy loses its value. (Ibid., 284) If Heidegger presents himself as a transcendental philosopher (at least in BT), it is not clear that he arrives at this stance along the same road that Husserl proposes (i.e., bracketing the natural attitude and performing the phenomenological transcendental reductions). Heidegger

312  Dermot Moran himself, for instance, almost never explicitly discusses the natural attitude (aside from his expositions of Husserl in his 1925–27 lectures in Marburg). The “natural attitude” is not mentioned once in BT, although “the theoretical attitude” does appear, when Heidegger traces it as arising from (and never ultimately departing from) “circumspective concern with the ready-to-hand” (Heidegger 1993/1962, §  69, 408, 356). In this section Heidegger embeds the theoretical detached understanding in Zuhandensein (1993/1962, 409, 358), often seen as an implicit critique of Husserl. How, then, should we assess these competing conceptions of the relationship between the natural and the transcendental attitudes—and the being capable of adopting them?

The Transition From the Natural to the Transcendental Attitude According to Husserl Husserl has a broad range of terms for the natural attitude (die natürliche Einstellung) including the “pre-scientific” (Hua VI, 121, 152, 156) or “extra-scientific attitude,” the “natural theoretical attitude” (Husserl 1995/2014, § 50, 91; Hua III/1, 94), the “natural-naïve attitude” (Hua V, 148) and with the correlative discovery of the notion of “world” (die Welt), initially understood as “my natural surrounding world” (meine natürliche Umwelt, 1995/2014, § 28), the “intersubjective natural environment” (die intersubjektive natürliche Umwelt, 1995/2014, § 29), the world in which I find myself all the time and which supplies the necessary background for all intentional acts, and for all other worlds which it is possible to inhabit (e.g.,  the world of science, the world of mathematics, the world of religious belief, and so on), my “natural worldly life” (natürliches Weltleben, Husserl 1962/1970, VI 121, 152, 156), the “pregiven life of experience” (die vorgebegene Erfahrungswelt, Ibid., VI, 120). Husserl likens this “dimension” (Ibid., § 32) to a missing domain in part unknown because of the “power of historical prejudices” that dominates us all (Ibid., 120; Hua VI, 122). There are many issues that are not clear in Husserl’s discussion of the natural attitude and I cannot address them all here. One issue is the relation of the natural attitude to the theoretical outlook known as “naturalism.” Already, in his 1906/7 Lectures on Logic and Epistemology,13 Husserl refers to naturalism (and psychologism) as the “original sin” (Hua XXIV, 176), as the “sin against the Holy Spirit of philosophy” (Hua XXIV, 177). In his middle writings, beginning with “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1910/1911),14 naturalism is portrayed as an inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the “natural attitude” (die natürliche Einstellung 1995/2014, § 27) into what he calls the “naturalistic attitude” (see for instance 1952/1989, § 49). He writes,

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 313 It is not easy for us to overcome the primeval habit of living and thinking in the naturalistic attitude and thus of naturalistically falsifying the psychical [so das Psychische naturalistisch zu verfälschen]. (1911, 271; Hua XXV, 31) The natural attitude itself is “prior to all theory” (1995/2014, § 30); it is a “natural way of thinking” (natürliche Denkhaltung),15 but it can lead to naturalism because it is seduced by the spirit of unquestioning, “naïve” acceptance of the world that permeates the natural attitude, leading to the “reification” (Verdinglichung) of the world, and its “philosophical absolutizing” (Verabsolutierung, 1995/2014, §  55, 129; Hua III/1, 107).16 It is noteworthy that, in the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” essay (as often elsewhere), Husserl slips, without signaling it as a change of register, from talking about the natural attitude to the naturalistic attitude (in naturalistischer Einstellung zu leben, 1911, 271; Hua XXV, 31), something he also does in the related text in Ideas II § 49. In fact, Husserl seems to have a rather complex layered view of the relations between the “natural attitude,” the “naturalistic attitude,” and indeed what he occasionally refers to as the “nature attitude” (die naturale Einstellung). For our purposes, we are interested not in the inevitable descent to naturalism (akin to Heidegger’s Verfallen as an existentiale of Dasein) but rather in the manner in which the prevailing natural attitude can be altered and disrupted, while still going on permanently in the background (as our “default” operating system, as Robert Sokolowksi has put it). The natural attitude is omnipresent but, as such, blind and unknown to itself. Thus the mature Husserl maintains that the natural attitude, despite its indispensability in everyday human life, is essentially “onesided” (einseitig) and “closed” (geschlossen, Hua VI, 209), because it fails to recognize its own nature as an attitude (Einstellung), which— contrary to the Heideggerian interpretation above—Husserl views as much more than one psychological state among others. An attitude is an overall orientation of thinking and acting, more like a framework within which things are disclosed under an aspect. In fact, to be in the natural attitude means precisely not to recognize it as such—hence it is an attitude lived in ignorance of its own nature. It assumes it is not an attitude but a transparent access to its object-domain. It assumes it is absolute—that it is a direct contact with the “real world.” Hence, as Kant would have said, empirical realism is true, i.e., it is true relative to the disclosure of the natural attitude. But, as Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis purports to disclose, the natural attitude itself is, despite its omnipresence and everydayness, relative to the “absolute” transcendental attitude. This transcendental attitude has a self-awareness and self-grounding character which makes its essentially different from the natural and indeed the theoretical attitudes.

314  Dermot Moran The natural attitude, moreover, can only be apprehended as such through a methodically applied shift of perspective—and one that must be more than a mere shift in the ego’s mode of inspectio sui: The transcendental focus which is set up through a radically consistent and conscious transcendental reduction, signifies nothing less than an altering of the whole form of life [Lebensform] previously practiced not only by the particular “I” and “we” but also historically by humanity as a whole; an absolute, all-embracing, and radical shift in the natural living-along of life [eine absolute und radikale Änderung des natürlichen Dahinlebens und Hineinlebens] and one’s natural living in a pregiven world; a change in the mode of experiencing, of thinking, and of every other kind of activity, and also in all the modes of reason. The radical undergirding [Unterbindung] of this sort of life and work and attitude [Einstellung] of all of life on the foundation of transcendental experience must by virtue of its absolute alienness [Fremdartigkeit] from everything to which we have been accustomed, be, like anything new, very hard to understand. And likewise with the meaning of a purely transcendental science. (Husserl 1997, 252; Hua IX, 347–8) The transcendental reduction is a shift in one’s form of life that allows one to grasp other attitudes—and their corresponding objectivities—as such. Hence Husserl describes it as “educational” (1952/1989, § 49 (d), 189; Hua IV, 179). Only transcendental phenomenology operating under the transcendental reduction allows us to investigate attitudes (and actually take them up) and understand also “the correlates constituted by them” (1952/1989, § 49 (d), 190; Hua IV, 180). The reduction makes us realize that the natural attitude is an attitude—and we thereby become sensitive to other attitudes. Despite this recognition of the unique status of the transcendental attitude vis-à-vis the natural attitude, Heidegger is not convinced that Husserl has really abandoned his usual commitment to the priority of the natural, physical world of things. Thus Heidegger writes in his 1925 lectures (commenting on Husserl’s draft manuscript of Ideas II) that, for Husserl, “the fundamental stratum is still the naturally real [das Naturwirkliche] upon which the psychic is built, and upon the psychic the spiritual” (Heidegger 1979/1985, § 13, 124; GA 20, 172). Heidegger here is rejecting the original outlook of human Dasein as being oriented to nature and the real in any way—and accusing Husserl of failing to implement this understanding into his phenomenological approach. But if one recognizes that the natural attitude is itself embedded in the personalistic attitude, as Husserl also attests in Ideas II § 49, then its correlate seems to be the social, spiritual world, the world of persons, the spiritual world, die geistige Geist (Hua IV §  54, 144). As we have seen, this is

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 315 what Husserl in the Crisis will call the “life-world.” Indeed Husserl can already write in Ideas II, similar to the passage we quoted earlier in the Crisis, that our daily experience is of life-world objects, tools, implements, cultural products: In ordinary life we have nothing whatever to do with nature-objects [Naturobjekten]. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools, etc. They are value-objects [Wertobjekte] of various kinds, use-objects [Gebrauchsobjekte], practical objects. They are not objects which can be found in natural science [Es sind kein naturwissenschaftlichen Objekte]. (1952/1989, § 11, 29; Hua IV, 27) Hence Husserl insists that the natural attitude is not to be understood as naturalistic in the sense that Heidegger suggests (Hua VI, 306). Heidegger, as we have seen, in his 1925 Marburg lectures, gives a respectful account of Husserl’s Ideas II on the natural and personal attitudes, but says that Husserl has mischaracterized the human everyday mode of existing as an “attitude.” It is in fact a kind of “comportment” (Verhalten) that is not yet attitudinalized, so to speak. But we can now recognize that this is precisely what Husserl himself is saying—hence he will call it in other contexts an Urglaube or Urdoxa, a basic belief, a fundamental and pre-conscious way of behaving and thinking. MerleauPonty sees that Husserl already has this understanding of the natural attitude, but Heidegger, for his own reasons, choses to read Husserl in a less generous manner. For Husserl, an attitude is not necessarily explicitly cognitive (as standardly used in philosophy of mind). Rather a stance is correlated to an open horizon of entities. There are many attitudes, e.g., the mathematical attitude, the psychological attitude, the aesthetic attitude (all attitudes Husserl explicitly mentions). These attitudes can interpenetrate or also cancel and conflict with one another. For Husserl, the natural attitude grounds the theoretical attitude of the sciences, which involves a certain set of procedures to inhibit aspects of the natural attitude (consider the Galilean stance toward “secondary” qualities, for instance, as a way of determining what is objectively real and available to theoretical inspection). The theoretical attitude was a great breakthrough for humanity, one that was brought about by a “few Greek eccentrics” (ein paar griechischen Sonderlingen)—as Husserl says in the Vienna Lecture (Husserl 1962/1970, 289; Hua VI, 336), enabling a new kind of context-­ transcendence and universalism and a view of human knowledge not restricted by interest and open to infinite tasks. Husserl thinks, however, that the theoretical attitude has become distorted by naturalization and its supposed “value neutrality” masks a specific approach that is not itself thematized (any more than the natural attitude can break with its own

316  Dermot Moran naiveté and see itself as an attitude, as opposed to the unmediated experience of the true world). Thus, it is not the case that Husserl prioritizes the theoretical attitude (as Heidegger suggests in BT). Husserl recognizes the extraordinary power of the theoretical attitude—it has opened up the possibility of genuine scientific knowledge, of infinite tasks; it has broken with the sacred canopy of the mythological attitude that has kept some cultures limited and stagnant in history. The theoretical attitude has given birth to modern science and thereby has transformed forever human existence. On the other hand, the theoretical attitude, as is evident in the evolution of modern Galilean science, has rigidified into a naturalistic outlook. The modern discipline of psychology, for instance, treats subjectivity as a natural occurrence in the world that is amenable to objective scientific exploration. But thereby the contribution of transcendental subjectivity has been obscured and ignored. Husserl, then, thinks the theoretical attitude needs to be reined in, needs to be given a clarification through transcendental philosophy. Husserl agrees with Heidegger, then, in viewing the theoretical attitude as not being neutral of concern. Rather, it is embedded in circumspective concern: “theoretical discovery ‘arises’ out of circumspective concern” (Heidegger 1993/1962, 408, 356), he writes. Indeed, generally speaking, Heidegger’s concept of understanding (Verstehen) sees it as a motivated attitude. The late Heidegger will see a natural tendency of the theoretical attitude to treat the world as “stock” or “resource” (Bestand) for technological exploitation. In this sense, Husserl and Heidegger do not fundamentally disagree. Heidegger wants to claim that traditional ontology approached the world as Vorhandensein, whereas he wants to give priority to Zuhandensein. But what is Zuhandensein unless it is the world as encountered in the primordial natural attitude? Husserl, then, is saying the same thing as Heidegger, albeit in a different linguistic and semantic medium. It was, as I have noted, Merleau-Ponty’s genius to have seen that Husserl in fact aligns with Heidegger in this regard—rather than reading him as the more stock Cartesian intellectualist found so frequently in the tradition (Hubert Dreyfus, for instance, while seeing the agreement between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty uses the foil of a Cartesian Husserl to make his point).

Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl on Operative Intentionality In his 1959 essay on Husserl, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” MerleauPonty develops his understanding of Husserl as essentially recognizing the intertwining between the natural and the transcendental attitudes: “It is the natural attitude, by reiterating its own procedures, that seesaws in phenomenology” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 164). Furthermore, MerleauPonty underscores Husserl’s claim in Ideas II that the transcendental attitude is in its own way “natural” (Ibid., 164—quoting Ideas II § 49, “in a

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 317 certain sense it is very natural but it is not a nature-attitude [in gewissen Sinn sehr natürlich, aber nicht natural ist],” 1952/1989, 189; Hua IV, 180). Merleau-Ponty is rightly insistent on the need to distinguish the “theoretical attitude” (the objective attitude of the sciences) from the “philosophical attitude” (which I take to be equivalent to Husserl’s transcendental attitude, properly understood): There is indeed an I which makes itself “indifferent,” a pure “knower,” in order to grasp all things without remainder—to spread all things out before itself—and to “objectify” and gain intellectual possession of them. This I is a purely “theoretical attitude” which seeks to “render visible the relationships which can provide knowledge of being as it comes to be.” [Hua IV, 26] But it is just this I which is not the philosopher, just this attitude which is not philosophy. It is the science of Nature, or in a deeper sense, a certain philosophy which gives birth to the natural sciences and which comes back to the pure I and to its correlative, “things simply as things” (blosse Sachen), stripped of every action-predicate and every value-predicate. From Ideen II on Husserl’s reflections escape this tête-à-tête between pure subject and pure things. They look deeper down for the fundamental. (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 162–3) Merleau-Ponty is claiming that Husserl, from Ideas II onward, investigates what is beneath the “pure I” and beneath “mere things” (blosse Sachen) and is offering an account of an a priori correlation between subjectivity and objectivity that is going on at a deeper level. The correlation between subject and object is founded on a deeper truth, MerleauPonty says (Ibid., 163), which Merleau-Ponty calls the “pre-theoretical layer on which both of these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone beyond” (Ibid., 165). Merleau-Ponty then talks of the natural attitude being enfolded in the personalistic attitude that cannot ever be naturalized. Merleau-Ponty is very accurately conveying Husserl’s analysis here—we live in the human, personal world, but this world is founded on an intentionality which is not that of a cognizing subject but lies deeper, as we shall see. In fact, Merleau-Ponty is reading Husserl as much closer to Heidegger. Indeed Merleau-Ponty recognizes that part of Husserl’s breakthrough is his recognition of the deeper layer of operative intentionality bringing him closer to Heidegger’s account of “Verhalten” or what Dreyfus calls “expert coping.”

Husserl’s Operative Intentionality as Discovered by Merleau-Ponty Both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, as we have seen, characterize the true natural attitude as not a “tissue of judicatory and propositional acts” but as a Weltthesis “prior to all theses” (Ibid., 163). In this case,

318  Dermot Moran both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are actually endorsing Husserl’s own view. The natural attitude involves an Urglaube and Urdoxa (Merleau-Ponty must be citing Ideas I §  104—neither term is found in Ideas II)—more ancient than any attitude or point of view. Thus Merleau-Ponty, taking his direction from Husserl’s late reflections, distinguishes the primordial natural attitude from the attitude that gives rise to naturalism: The natural attitude itself emerges unscathed from the complaint which can be made about naturalism, because it is “prior to any thesis,” because it is the mystery of a Weltthesis prior to all theses. It is, Husserl says in another connection, the mystery of a primordial faith and a fundamental and original opinion (Urglaube, Urdoxa) which are thus not even in principle translatable in terms of clear and distinct knowledge, and which—more ancient than any “attitude” or “point of view”—give us not a representation of the world but the world itself. (Ibid., 163) This deeper connection cannot be fully revealed in ordinary reflection— its originary power is precisely that. Merleau-Ponty says mysteriously— but in a manner very close to Heidegger: “Reflection cannot ‘go beyond’ this opening to the world, except by making use of the powers it owes to the opening itself” (Ibid., 164). It is for this reason, Husserl argues, that phenomenology must be transcendental: the Weltthesis prior to all theses is not accessible to everyday, natural reflection; it can only be uncovered through the transcendental reduction. Husserl agrees, then, that the natural attitude is permeated by a “general thesis” (Generalthesis, Ideas I, §  30), an absolutely unshakeable, even apodictic, belief in the world, which he calls Weltglaube. He even speaks of the natural attitude as a “primordial” and “anonymous passivity” (anonyme Urpassivität), which means it underlies all cognitive intentionality, the intentionality of acts. Merleau-Ponty argues that—like Heidegger—this can be best understood in Husserl terms of the notion of intentionality; specifically, Husserl’s notion of functioning or operative intentionality, which Hubert Dreyfus—inspired by Heidegger—calls “expert coping.”17 Merleau-Ponty sees that Husserl is struggling to make sense of the constitution of the pregiven world. In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty invokes the Husserlian idea of the always already there which is “pre-constituted” prior to human intentional acts. This domain of the pre-constituted is described as “those kernels of meaning around which human being and the world gravitate” (Ibid., 165) and he refers to it as “an operative or latent intentionality like that which animates time, more ancient than the intentionality of human acts” (Ibid., 165).

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 319 Merleau-Ponty notes the contrast between “operative” intentionality (l’intentionnalité opérante) and “act” intentionality or “thetic” intentionality. He writes in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception: This is why Husserl distinguishes between act intentionality [l’inten­ tionnalité d’acte], which is the intentionality of our judgements and of our voluntary decisions (and is the only intentionality discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason)—and operative intentionality [l’intentionnalité opérante] (fungierende Intentionalität) is the intentionality that establishes the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life, the intentionality that appears in our desires, our evaluations, and our landscape more clearly than it does in objective knowledge. Operative intentionality is the one that provides the text that our various forms of knowledge attempt to translate into precise language. The relationship to the world, such as it is untiringly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxxii, xiii) Merleau-Ponty talks again about this operative intentionality much later in his chapter on “Temporality,” where he identifies operative intentionality with Heidegger’s transcendence: In Husserl’s language, beneath “act intentionality,—which is the thetic consciousness of an object, that, in intellectual memory for example, converts the “this-thing” into an idea,—we must acknowledge an “operative” intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität), which makes the former one possible, and is what Heidegger terms “transcendence.” (Ibid., 441; 478) The exact concept of “operative intentionality” is, however, not actually found in Husserl in that form. Husserl’s formulas is “functioning intentionality”—a reasonably rare formulation in his work. MerleauPonty equated this with Heidegger’s “transcendence” (his name for intentionality).18 Merleau-Ponty’s proximate source is Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, where the term “living . . . functioning intentionality” (lebendig fungierende) appears in § 94 (1974/1969, 235; XVII, 242); and it also appears in The Internal Time Consciousness lectures as published in the 1928 version, edited by Heidegger.19 In his Amsterdam Lectures of 1928, Husserl speaks of the world that is pregiven to us through “anonymous functioning intentionality” (Hua IX, 336), as we have seen.

320  Dermot Moran “Functioning subjectivity” (fungeriende Subjektivität) is the later Husserl’s term (e.g.,  Crisis, §  72—but first introduced at Crisis, §  13 (see also Hua XXXV, 98)—to refer to the kind of anonymous, background, pre-reflective, passively experiencing subjectivity that is continuously functioning to produce the unified experience of the world as pregiven in experience. The adjective “functioning” (fungeriend) is relatively frequent in Husserl. He speaks of the “functioning lived body [Leib]” at 1931/1960, 172) and of normally functioning organs (Ideas II), of “functioning consciousness,” or “functioning ego” (1952/1989, Hua IV, 337). Husserl usually sees functioning as a kind of anonymous passive process that precedes and lays the ground for all the intentional activity of the ego. For Husserl, anonymous subjectivity, for example, is responsible for the flow of time, which is an absolute basis of all consciousness, and also for the enduring sense of the world’s unity and constancy—moreover, not just the constitution of this factual world, but of all possible worlds. More and more, Husserl came to emphasize the importance of this preconscious, passively experienced intentionality. If one examines the sections (§§ 94–7 especially) in Formal and Transcendental Logic where Husserl discusses this “functioning intentionality, one finds a foreshadowing of many themes later explicated by MerleauPonty. For instance, Husserl writes there about “living,” “functioning intentionality”: The living intentionality [lebendige Intentionalität] carries me along; it predelineates [zeichnet vor]; it determines me practically [bestimmt mich praktisch] in my whole procedure [in meinem ganzen Verhalten], including the procedure of my natural thinking, whether this yields being or illusion. The living intentionality does all that, even though, as actually functioning [als lebendig fungierende], it may be non-thematic [unthematisch], undisclosed [unenthüllt], and thus beyond my ken [meinem Wissen entzogen]. (1974/1969, § 94, 235; XVII, 242) This “living intentionality” is not normally made thematic by us and runs on unnoticed in the natural attitude. It is a vital intentionality, producing not just the world of my experience but the pregiven world that it there “for us” all (Ibid., §  95). In essence, then, functioning intentionality underlies the natural attitude and makes it possible. Husserl’s later focus on functioning intentionality is not the introduction of a new kind of intentionality, then, but a clearer articulation of the intentionality already inherent in the natural attitude. It is the aim of transcendental phenomenology to uncover this life of functioning consciousness underlying the natural attitude: Thus there arises the idea of a universal task: Instead of living in “the” world directly in the “natural attitude” and, so to speak, like

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 321 “children of this world” [Weltkinder]; that is, instead of living within the latently functioning life of consciousness [in dem latent fungierenden Bewusstseinsleben zu leben] and thereby having the world, and it alone, as our field of being—as now-existing for us (from out of perception), as past (from out of memory), as coming in the future (from out of expectation)—instead of judging and valuing this world of experience and making it the field of theoretical or practical ­projects—instead of all that, we attempt a universal phenomenological reflection on this entire life-process, be it pre-theoretical, theoretical or whatever [eine universale phänomenologische Reflexion auf dieses ganze vortheoretische, theoretische und sonstige Leben]. (Husserl 1997, 85; Hua IX, 239)20 By the time we get to the fourth draft of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, on the basis of Heidegger’s interventions, the passage has been rewritten to highlight (from a more Heideggerian perspective) that the theoretical attitude has to be disrupted as part of this “turning around” (Umwendung) of the natural attitude: To the essential sense of the transcendental problem belongs its universality, in which it places in question the world and all the sciences investigating it. It arises within a general reversal [Umwendung] of that “natural attitude” in which everyday life as a whole as well as the positive sciences operate. In it the world is for us the self-evidently existing universe of realities which are continuously before us in unquestioned presence-at-hand [Vorhandenheit]. So this is the general field of our practical and theoretical activities [Betätigungen]. As soon as the theoretical interest gives up [aufgibt] this natural attitude and in a general turning around of our regard [Blickwendung] directs itself to the life of consciousness in which the “world” is for us precisely the world which is present to us we find ourselves in a new cognitive situation [Erkenntnislage]. Every sense which the world has for us (which we have now become aware of), both its general indeterminate sense and its meaning as determined according to real particularities, is, within the internality [Innerlichkeit] of our own perceiving, imagining, thinking, and valuing life-process, a conscious sense, and a sense which is formed in our subjective genesis. (translation modified, Husserl 1997, 168; Hua IX, 288) One can hear the influence of Heidegger here in Husserl’s text—the terms Vorhandenheit, Innerlichkeit have a specifically Heideggerian resonance. The claim here is interesting—the theoretical attitude is now something that gives up the natural attitude and enters a new Innerlichkeit through transcendental self-exploration. To be precise, practical and theoretical interests are enfolded in the natural attitude, and the aim

322  Dermot Moran of transcendental phenomenology is to reverse these interests so that the underlying subjective functions become visible. Husserl continues this discussion of the manner transcendental phenomenology opens up a new insight into natural worldly life in the Crisis, where the term “functioning intentionality” makes a rare appearance. At the beginning of Crisis Section 59, Husserl gives an insight into how he will address the famous paradox of subjectivity: In psychology, the natural, naïve attitude has the result that human self-objectifications [Selbstobjektivationen] of transcendental intersubjectivity, which belong with essential necessity to the makeup of the constituted world pregiven to me and to us, inevitably have a horizon of transcendentally functioning intentionalities [Horizont von transzendental fungierenden Intentionalitäten] which are not accessible to reflection, not even psychological-scientific reflection. (1962/1970, § 59, 208; Hua VI, 212) Again, Husserl’s point is that functioning intentionality is not accessible to everyday, natural reflection; this is key for Merleau-Ponty also. For Husserl, functioning intentionality can only be uncovered through the transcendental reduction. Merleau-Ponty, then, grasps the essential point in the mature Husserl concerning the interweaving of the natural and transcendental attitudes and the need to uncover the hidden life of functioning intentionality. Ironically, Heidegger’s account of everyday Dasein in its comportment is precisely a version of this transcendental phenomenological approach. Heidegger therefore is wrong to claim, as he does in BT, that Husserl naively prioritized the theoretical standpoint (and perception as a mere neutral inspecting). Equally, on the other hand, Husserl is not correct to read Heidegger’s BT as purely an “anthropological” (in Husserl’s sense) account of everyday existence in the life-world. Heidegger’s approach to Dasein is, like Husserl’s approach to consciousness, through and through transcendental. What is missing in Heidegger, however, is precisely Husserl’s theoretical account of how one arrives at the transcendental analysis of Dasein/Bewusstsein. For Husserl, ontologies are revealed under standpoints. Art objects are made visible in the aesthetic stance. Everyday life-world ontology is made visible through the natural-personalistic attitude attuned to life-world. However, true phenomenological ontology for Husserl requires the clarification of the constitutive conditions that makes these ontologies possible and, in this regard, Husserl is aiming at something like a fundamental ontology in Heidegger’s sense—with transcendental subjectivity responsible for generating the “sense” of Being. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are not wrong to emphasize passive intentionality and functioning intentionality as the legacy of the later Husserl. But this is, as Husserl would

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 323 say, “one-sided,” since the point is not to prioritize one form of intentional correlation over another, but rather to recognize the structure of intentionalities and their correlates that go to establish the constitution of both objective world and the intersubjective unity of monads, the monadology. Husserl wants finally an ontology that is relative to attitudes (viewpoints inherent in subjectivity) and his transcendental phenomenology is meant to tease out the relations between attitudes taken from the standpoint of the “absolute attitude” of transcendental subjectivity.

Notes 1 M. Merleau-Ponty 1964. 2 Eugen Fink 1988b. 3 Merleau-Ponty finds support for this in Husserl 1952/1989. 4 Merleau-Ponty 1945/2012. 5 Moran 2015b, 107–32. 6 E. Husserl 1962/1970. 7 Heidegger 1979/1985. 8 Heidegger: “Die personalistische Einstellung und Erfahrung wird als inspectio sui, als innere Betrachtung seiner selbst als des Ich der Intentionalität, des Ich als Subjekt der cogitationes bezeiehnet” (Heidegger 1979/1985, 122; GA 20, 169). 9 See Kisiel 1995, 389ff. 10 Heidegger 1993/1962. 11 See Moran 2018. 12 Husserl 1997. 13 Husserl 1985. 14 Husserl 1986/2002. 15 Husserl 1958, 18. 16 See Husserl 2002, 258. 17 Dreyfus 1991. 18 See Moran 2000, 2015. 19 Husserl 1928. 20 “Es ergibt sich hier die Idee einer universalen Aufgabe : statt in der, natürlichen Einstellung” geradehin und sozusagen als Weltkinder in “die” Welt hineinzuleben, d.i. statt in dem latent fungierenden Bewusstseinsleben zu leben und dadurch die Welt und nur sie als unser Seinsfeld zu haben—als für uns jetzt daseiende (aus Wahrnehmung), als vergangene (aus Erinnerung), künftig kommende (aus Erwartung)—statt diese Erfahrungswelt zu beurteilen, zu bewerten, zum Felde theoretischer oder praktischer Entwürfe zu machen, versuchen wir eine universale phänomenologische Reflexion auf dieses ganze vortheoretische, theoretische und sonstige Leben” (Hua IX: 239).

References Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World a Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fink, Eugen. 1988b. VI. Cartesianische Meditation. Teil 2, Ergänzungsband. Edited by Guy van Kerckhoven. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer. Heidegger, M. 1979/1985. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Edited by Petra Jaeger Gesamtausgabe 20. Frankfurt: Klosterman; Translated by

324  Dermot Moran Theodore Kisiel, History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985. ———. 1993/1962. Sein und Zeit (1927), 17th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer; Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Husserl, E. 1985. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/07, hrsg. Ullrich Melle, Hua XXIV. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1974/1969. Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Mit ergänzenden Texten. Edited by Paul Janssen, Hua XVII. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974; Translated by Dorion Cairns, Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969. ———. 1995/2014. Ideen zu einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die Reine Phänomenologie, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl—Gesammelte Werke, Band 3–1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1995; Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 2014. ———. 1952/1989. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, hrsg. Marly Biemel, Hua IV. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952; Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Collected Works III. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. ———. 1962/1970. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, hrsg. W. Biemel, Husserliana VI. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962; Translated by David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———. 1975/2001. Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage. Edited by E. Holenstein, Husserliana [hereafter ‘Hua’] XVIII. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1975; and Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. In zwei Bänden, edited by Ursula Panzer, Husserliana XIX/ 1 and 2. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984; Translated by John N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, rev. ed. Dermot Moran, 2 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. 1931/1960. Méditations cartésiennes: introduction à la phénoménologie. Translated by G. Peiffer and E. Levinas. Paris: Almand Colin, 1931. The German text was not published until 1950 as Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, hrsg. Stephan Strasser, Husserliana I. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950; Translated by D. Cairns as Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960. ———. 1911. “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft.” Logos 1 (1911): 289–341, now collected in Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge 1911–1921, hrsg. H.R. Sepp und Thomas Nenon, Hua XXV. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1986: 3–62; Translated by Markus Brainard as “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2 (2002): 249–95.

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Projects 325 ———. 1997. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31), The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, The Amsterdam Lectures ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology’ and Husserl’s Marginal Note in Being and Time, and Kant on the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by T. Sheehan and R. E. Palmer, Collected Works VI. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1928. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. Edited by E. Stein and M. Heidegger. Halle: Niemeyer. ———. 1958. Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Edited by Walter Biemel, 2nd ed. Husserliana II. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2002. Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktionen: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935). Edited by Sebastian Luft, Husserliana XXXIV. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kisiel, Theodore. 1995. The Genesis of Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” In Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary, 159–81. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1945/2012. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945; Translated by Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Moran, D. 2018. “Husserl on Relativism.” In Relativism in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century German Philosophy, edited by Martin Kusch. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. 2000. “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality.” Inquiry 43 (1) (March): 39–65. ———. 2015b. “Everydayness, Historicity and the World of Science: Husserl’s Life-World Reconsidered.” In The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility—Formalization and the Life-World, edited by Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams, 107–32. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2015a. “Dasein as Transcendence in Heidegger and the Critique of Husserl.” In Heidegger in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Tziovanis Georgakis and Paul Ennis, 23–45. Dordrecht: Springer.

Afterword

A Philosophy of Mind Phenomenology, Normativity, and Meaning Steven Crowell

The Promised Land With his turn to transcendental phenomenology, Husserl increasingly spoke of his work in the most exalted terms. He was Moses taking the first tentative steps toward the “promised land” whose riches he would not exhaust had he the years allotted Methuselah (Husserl 1989, 429); he was the explorer of “the trackless wilderness of a new continent” (1989, 422) where “no meaningful question” is left “unanswered” (Husserl 1970a, 168); he was Saul on the way to Damascus, the discovery of phenomenology affecting him like a “religious conversion” (Husserl 1970a, 137); he was the redeemer of “the secret yearning of all modern philosophy” (Husserl 1983, 142). What could motivate such language? Though Husserl often paid tribute to Franz Brentano for reviving the Scholastic notion of intentionality, he was convinced that Brentano had not seen the promised land. As the “mark of the mental,” intentionality remained, for Brentano, a property of “psychic phenomena” and so a matter for psychology, albeit “descriptive psychology.” Incorporating psychology into philosophy required no religious conversion; the path had long since been forged by the modern way of ideas. Still, the intentionality of consciousness was the burning bush Husserl took to heart, breaking through the impasses of modern subjectivism and restoring to philosophy the whole world; one need only practice the phenomenological reduction to see it. However, this method required askesis, suspending worldly commitments. I  “put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude” and “make no use” of any science that depends on it (Husserl 1983, 61) so as to thematize the inconspicuous phenomenon of meaning, where the world and everything in it is available to us as it in truth is. This askesis characterizes all phenomenological philosophy.1 Husserl insists that phenomenology is not a “system” deriving from the head of a single “genius” (Husserl 1965, 75), but a communal practice, a “research program” in the loose sense that analytic philosophy might be considered one. What unites this program—including Heidegger, Sartre,

330  Steven Crowell Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and even Derrida—is a “reduction” from our ordinary concern with entities, beings, the “world,” to the meaning at issue in such concern. Of course, these and other practitioners interrogate both the reduction and the meaning it brings into view, and so we who take up the promise of phenomenology must assess, by our own lights, the legitimacy of such “heresies,” revisions, and revolutions. And while criticism of arguments is always in place, assessing the legitimacy of phenomenological claims finally requires Evidenz, what one can warrant for oneself in the intuitive self-givenness of the “things themselves.” As a kind of empiricism, phenomenology embraces the responsibility of first-person experience. Phenomenology’s promised land, meaning, has a normative structure. The normativity of meaning motivated Husserl’s transcendental turn— his concern not with first-order questions of truth but with second-order questions of the possibility of truth and validation (Husserl 1965, 87)— and it marks the philosophical distinctiveness of the phenomenological category of experience. As Heidegger put it in 1912, “meaning has, in the entire course of the history of philosophy, never been given its due” (Heidegger 1978, 24). The essays in the present volume point to many tantalizing philosophical questions that arise if we take seriously this “normative turn” (MacAvoy, 29) toward “unities of meaning” (Husserl 1983, 128). Here I will address a few of them by describing some central phenomenological categories in normative terms. For reasons that will appear as the argument progresses, I collect the whole enterprise under the heading “philosophy of mind,” since the emerging doctrine of categories amounts to answering the question of what mind is.

Validity, Meaning, and Ideality The universal scope of normativity became evident in 19th-century logic and epistemology, much of which derived from Hermann Lotze’s introduction of the term “validity” (Geltung, holding) to characterize Plato’s “forms.” As Emil Lask described it, Lotze’s “liberating and clarifying act” was to recognize, in addition to sensible and supersensible entities, a realm “validities,” thus distinguishing between “that which is or occurs and that which holds without having to be” (Lask 2003, 5). Entities and their properties “are,” but the categories which determine them are not entities or properties. Here Lask ties valid meaning to being in the sense of truth (on hos alethes): categories “hold” of those entities and properties, constituting the Wahrheitsgehalt of the object. Meaning in the phenomenological sense comes into view because both Husserl and Heidegger were uneasy with the idea of a “third realm,” an uneasiness that concerns the connection between normativity and meaning. For Lotze, Geltung captures the “ideality” of Plato’s otherworldly eide. Form is not an entity; its holding or being valid of entities is a

A Philosophy of Mind 331 category, an ontological kind, not further analyzable. Husserl adopted this category to distinguish the logical “content” of a proposition from both its concrete empirical utterance and its taking place in a particular conscious act of judgment. Thus Geltung became central to his critique of logical psychologism. “Holding,” or ideality, is the category to which logical content belongs. Leslie MacAvoy shows how ideal validity played a central role in both Husserl’s and the early Heidegger’s approach to meaning, yet both came to believe that their early views on meaning and validity were in need of radical revision. Why? One reason is the way Lotze’s distinction was taken up by the Baden School of neo-Kantians, which tended to equate the “what is/what holds distinction” with an “is/ought distinction” (MacAvoy, 38). Heinrich Rickert, for instance, held that cognitive validity, the truth of a proposition, is defined as what “ought to be affirmed” by the knowing subject. Truth is a “value” that entails an epistemically normative obligation. Husserl, however, argued that this “normativity-first” account of truth puts the cart before the horse. Validity cannot be analyzed in terms of a subject’s obligation to affirm what is true; a subject has the obligation to affirm what is true because it holds—or, as Walter Hopp puts it, because “there is an obtaining state of affairs that [the proposition] represents” (Hopp, 278). Heidegger agrees, but he locates this failing already in Lotze’s introduction of the term Geltung: because “Lotze does not investigate the phenomenon of truth at all,” appeal to Geltung ultimately reduces truth “to the intrinsically unimportant question about the kind of relation [viz., ‘bindingness’] that truth has to the possible comportment of [subjects]” (Heidegger 2010, 68). MacAvoy reads this as a challenge to any normative turn in phenomenology: recasting the ideality of logical meaning, its holding, in normative terms seems to bring Baden-style psychologism with it (MacAvoy, 42). If the normative turn means that phenomenology is a normative discipline, it cannot be fundamental since, on Husserl’s view, all normative disciplines presuppose a theoretical discipline that rationally grounds their prescriptions. Against Rickert and others, Husserl argued that logic is not a normative discipline. As Walter Hopp puts it, there is nothing “intrinsically normative” in the content of logic, which concerns the “ideal” or essential relations between meanings; epistemically considered, propositional truth is the obtaining of the states of affairs asserted in such propositions. To construe truth as a norm, a standard of success or failure of propositions, is to “efface the distinction between descriptive and more properly normative concepts and properties” (Hopp, 272). We should agree with all of this. If having a normative structure entails that there must be an explicit “ought” in the content, then truth is not a normative notion. It is an ideal relation between proposition and evidence. Still, this analysis of truth, which Husserl carried out in the Logical Investigations, is not a sufficient phenomenology of truth—or so the

332  Steven Crowell “transcendental” Husserl came to believe. For one thing, it depends on positing the existence of propositions and ideal relations, and, while not necessarily incorrect, such positing is bracketed by the reduction (Husserl 1983, 137–8). This complicates the relation between validity and meaning, but it also points toward a normativity that eludes Husserl’s distinction between normative and theoretical disciplines. And whatever may be said of logic, Husserl denied that phenomenology is a “theory,” an “explanatory unified theoretical whole.” Its “aim is not to explain knowledge” but to clarify (“shed light on”) the meaning (“Idea”) of its “constitutive elements and laws” (Husserl 1970b, 264–5). This distinction between explanatory theories and phenomenological clarification is central to my argument in this chapter. Problems in Husserl’s concept of ideality led Paul Natorp to object that, in relation to the Prolegomena, the descriptive psychology of the remaining six Logical Investigations is a return to psychologism. Husserl addressed this problem in his transcendental turn, and Heidegger followed him: if a platonistic analysis of truth and knowledge operates with an unclarified ontological distinction between real and ideal, is not psychologism correct in holding out against this separation, even if it neither clarifies ontologically the kind of being which belongs to the thinking of that which is thought, nor is even so much as acquainted with it as a problem? (Heidegger 1962, 259–60) The point is not that Heidegger rejects the transcendental turn in order to reinstate the “worldly” subject of psychologism. Rather, it is that what “holding” means can be clarified only through categories that go beyond psychology to include what is at issue in being a knower. Knowledge is evidential fulfillment, but the meaning at issue in knowing cannot be understood solely with reference to individual intentional acts. Husserl makes the same point: acts and Evidenz are what they are only in “a ‘monadic’ unity of consciousness, a unity that in itself has nothing at all to do with nature, with space and time or substantiality and causality, but has its thoroughly peculiar ‘forms’ ” or categories (Husserl 1965, 108). I have argued that these categories are essentially normative, but Hopp’s treatment of ideality suggests that ideal relations, which undoubtedly belong among these categories, make no reference to an “ought” (Hopp, 272). But is that the only sense in which the normative can be understood? In addressing this question, Sara Heinämaa unpacks my summary claim that “the normative is found wherever we can speak of rules, measures, standards, exemplars, ideals, concepts, and so on; wherever distinctions between better and worse, success and failure, can be made” (Crowell 2013, 2). Whether we follow von Wright’s cartography of the normative

A Philosophy of Mind 333 or develop another, phenomenology must clarify the various senses in which something can be normative. Otherwise, the term will be so vague as to be useless. The usefulness of greater precision becomes evident if we ask, What is ideality when seen transcendentally, i.e., as embedded in the intentional correlation disclosed by the reduction? As a relation between acts abstractly considered, ideality is not normative; normativity must be existence- (or behavior-) guiding. But we’ve agreed with Hopp that ideality contains no “ought” in its content. Here von Wright’s Schelerian distinction between Tunsollen (“normative ought”) and Seinsollen (“ideal ought,” ideales Sollen) can help. The former concerns what we do; the latter concerns “conditions that define ways of being” (Heinämaa, 20). In the former, sollen is properly an “ought”; in the latter, however, it is a “should,” i.e., a reference to the good. This points beyond the distinction between normative and theoretical disciplines. There are many things I must cognitively grasp if I am to fulfill a soldier’s obligation to be brave, but transcendental phenomenology highlights two additional points. First, trying to be a soldier is not a matter of knowing such things; and second, a soldier’s responsibility for being brave is not primarily owed to “fellow practitioners of the profession” but to “the ideal” (Heinämaa, 19). The ideal is what is at issue, a certain excellence that guides my trying to be a soldier. Regarding the first point, though trying to be (a soldier, a knower) is goal-oriented, the goal does not govern my trying in a “technical” way. As von Wright puts it, “It would be a mistake to think of the ideal rules as norms concerning means to ends.” To be a good soldier, one should be brave. But the qualities that determine goodness as a soldier are not “causally related to the ideal”—that is, they are not specified by the ideal in the way that “use of a ladder may be a causal prerequisite of fetching a book from a shelf.” Rather, the relation is “conceptual (logical)”; the ideal “determines a concept,” that of a good soldier (Heinämaa, 20). This sounds like Husserl’s point: a cognitive grasp of the logical content of the ideal determines the concept of a good soldier and hence what a soldier should be. But—and this is the importance of the second point—because such determinations are not fixed anywhere (as they are by technical norms), the concept of what a soldier should be is not fixed either. It is at issue. This means that conceiving ideality in the platonistic terms suggested by an analysis of acts won’t do. Because the ideal that guides what I am trying to be cannot be grounded in truth (fulfillment through Evidenz), it cannot be the topic of a purely theoretical discipline. Ideality has “a constitutive and enabling character,” but even if it can be “formulated by if-then clauses,” it is not a matter of “technical” knowledge. For the “subsequent clause would define a whole way of being,” the “very meaning of being” a soldier (Heinämaa, 23). Ideality is normative not because it involves an ought, but because

334  Steven Crowell it concerns success or failure in “being or striving” (Heinämaa, 23). And since trying to be a knower is a case of being and striving, the apparently non-normative ideality of the truth-relation categorially entails reference to the ideales Sollen that is at issue in striving for cognitive fulfillment.

Intentionality, Consciousness, and Horizons The general point is this: knowing is something we do in a way possible only for a being who can be guided by a Seinsollen or ideal norm, a “minded” being. The intentionality that informs such doing is not mere directedness (consciousness of something); it is consciousness of something as something. Because transcendental phenomenology thematizes this “as,” we confront a categorial question about intentionality. If we start from the “anticipatory structures of intending” which “can be either fulfilled or disappointed in the course of experiencing,” then it seems that “all intentionality, as analyzed by phenomenology, is normative” (Heinämaa, 9). But these anticipatory structures of intending and their possible fulfillment or disappointment are, we might imagine, found throughout the world of living beings, and not all living beings are oriented toward ideal norms, or any norms at all. It is no wonder, then, that the normative turn encounters a major test in the analysis of basic forms of intentionality such as perception. Is perceptual intentionality essentially normative? Charles Siewert’s introduction of “recognitional appearance” as a “category” of visual appearance highlights this question because it suggests that “visual appearance can be much richer in ‘significance’—in what it ‘takes things as’—than in what it correctly or incorrectly represents things to be” (Siewert, 290, 299). Such significance is not assessable for accuracy: something’s appearing to me recognizably as a hat, for instance, is “non-assertoric,” and so the sort of normative assessment which pertains to assertoric attribution does not pertain to it (Siewert, 18). The only accuracy involved concerns the “truth or falsity of further, optional judgments about the objects of appearance” (Siewert, 299). Recognitional appearance, then, is a kind of sens sauvage which precedes and enables the distinctly normative involvements of judgment, concept, and property attribution. Siewert’s identification of recognitional appearances is an important phenomenological finding. For a transcendental phenomenology concerned with the normativity in perception, however, his second category—“looking-as-activity” (Siewert, 304)—is equally important. ­ Here the normative question, invisible in a noematic approach to recognitional appearance, comes into play. Looking is something we do, and so something we can do well or badly (Siewert, 304). But such assessment is possible only in the context of the “myriad mundane tasks” that looking or attending-to “serves,” and it targets not my reasoning but

A Philosophy of Mind 335 “the proper (or inadequate) deployment of skills” of getting a better look (Siewert, 304). From the transcendental perspective, then, the significance involved in recognitional appearance can show up only in a context where perceiving is normatively structured. Recognitional appearances can be recognitional appearances only for a perceiver engaged in normatively assessable tasks, projects, and practices. It is hard to imagine something’s appearing to me recognizably as a hat were I not a creature who knew a lot about hats. Further, the intentionality of recognitional appearance will require a being who, in carrying out its projects, is sensitive to normative distinctions as normative. Whether the visual experience of creatures who lack this capacity could also be said to involve recognitional appearance remains an open question, to which we shall return. The significance in recognitional appearances involves the possibility of getting a better look because, as Husserl says, such appearances “intentionally implicate” a kind of “optimum” tied to the practicalcognitive interests of the one trying to get a better look. Because such looking is interest-guided, the optimum, or norm, will be relative to the conditions—bodily comportment, lighting, “causal” circumstances—­ ­ relevant to that interest: a look that is best for the task at hand. However, as Heinämaa notes, there is a second, “theoretical,” sense of “optimality” in Husserl—ideal optimality—untethered from such tasks and keyed to the “essence of thing-appearances as such”: the regulative idea of a “limitless possibility of enrichment” (Heinämaa, 10). But is such an ideal perceptual norm even intelligible? Ideal optimality is necessary for Husserl’s thesis that intentionality everywhere involves a telos of reason, but it is doubtful that perception entails such an ideal optimality. As Maxime Doyon points out, the latter involves the idea of “an experience of an infinite continuum of optimal appearances harmoniously connected,” which is something we can only “think” (Doyon 2018, 174, 180). But if any perception will be relative to the body-type and sense organs of the perceiver, it is far from clear that all such perceptual takes on the world can be harmonized ideally. The general point is that optimality can be assessed only by taking the phenomenological category of horizon into account. The expectations that (normatively) motivate trying to get a better look belong to the “internal” and “external” horizons of what appears. To see a tree as a tree is to perceive within an horizon of determinable “indeterminacy” (Husserl 1983, 52). The properties I can see from here are what they appear to be only if the properties that I would see were I to change position fall within a range of properties that are intentionally implied in my current perception. Such implications are not logical; they pertain to the meaning at issue in my perceiving. Were they logical—and Husserl often seems to treat them this way—then the determinable indeterminacy of my perceptual experience would entail that both internal and external horizons

336  Steven Crowell are already determined. But there are phenomenological reasons to think that the horizon—and ultimately “world”—cannot be understood in this way. In a slogan: the horizon demands a normativity-first approach to meaning rather than a reasons-first approach to normativity. Grasping the categorial relation between mind and world, “being-in-the-world,” requires a normativity-first approach. In his Wittgenstein-inspired reflection on the “background,” David Cerbone offers a deflationary account to replace the constructive one he finds in both Dreyfus and Husserl. Husserl argued that the ultimate background of any perceptual intentional act is the “world.” While given as a “never fully determinable” horizon of intentional implications (Husserl 1983, 52), world is in principle fully determinate, a rational structure whose explication, infinitely progressing, is phenomenology’s task. Dreyfus, in contrast, argued that the background bottoms out in bodily skills and practical abilities. While the background explains how intentionality is possible, we can only “light up” the background, not “spell it out” (Cerbone, 63). A deflationary account, in contrast, rejects this idea that there is something we cannot do after we have lit up the background by, e.g., explaining the way various moves in a chess game depend on all sorts of other things about chess. There is no such thing as “the” background—by extension, no such thing as “the” world—but only “a” background: shifting horizons that belong to the various practices in which we are engaged (Cerbone, 70–71). This, then, is also a deflationary conception of what phenomenology can do: it has the ethical task of being open to possible misunderstandings and a readiness to explain the local backgrounds of meaning when such misunderstanding arises (Cerbone, 76). Such explanation is not a theoretical enterprise; it is “situation-specific,” and we can never step out of such practices to provide a global account of what makes intentionality possible (Cerbone, 67, 68). This is a congenial position, but its apparent rejection of the reduction— the claim that we can never “step out” of normative space so as to explain the whole—seems to conflate the transcendental project of clarifying meaning with the mundane project of explaining some meaning by making the background explicit. There may be no explanation within a given “background” that does not already presuppose what it is trying to explain, but one can clarify the normativity at issue in various forms of intentional behavior in such a way that one is not merely offering “just more stuff about chess” (Cerbone, 75). One can, in short, eidetically determine the being who is capable of occupying such a normative space, and this is just more stuff about chess only in the sense that it is equally just more stuff about brain surgery. The distinction between the horizon and a horizon thus becomes a distinction between the category of horizon and the concrete phenomena of which it is the Wahrheitsgehalt.2

A Philosophy of Mind 337 Any intentional act has “its” horizon of intentional implications that normatively adumbrate a specific meaning tied to particular interests and circumstances, but this does not entail that “the” horizon—the world— is thoroughly determined, since “world” is a category. Categories are not found by “digging deeper” into some specific horizon to spell it out or light it up, but by phenomenological reflection on the eidetic structure of being-in-the-world. With the reduction from beings to meaning, such reflection belongs neither to the class of constructive (explanatory) approaches, which concern entities and their relations, nor to the class of deflationary approaches, which affirm the non-existence of such entities (e.g., “there is no there there”; Cerbone, 76). Transcendental phenomenology is not concerned with entities at all. This suggests how the normative turn yields an account of mind. A minded being is one who is “in” the world, i.e., able to enjoy the kind of intentional content that depends on limited normative horizons whose categorial structure is “world.” This does not mean that phenomenology must abandon the reduction and treat (for instance) natural processes as conditions on meaning. As Heidegger puts it, “nature is itself an entity which is encountered within the world” (Heidegger 1962, 92), a determinate kind; it does not possess the categorial “indeterminacy” that belongs to world. Instead, world correlates to the kind of ideality that belongs to “being and striving.” If trying to be a teacher discloses the world of teaching, such trying clarifies both the possibility of determinable indeterminacies—intentional implications that constitute the gear of teaching as determinable—and the fact that such a world is essentially indeterminate, at issue, in existing. Following Heidegger, I  have described the categoriality of being-inthe-world as “pre-intentional”—not a species of act-intentionality— and have argued that consciousness is not intrinsically intentional but becomes so only in a being capable of responding to the normative as normative. This brings me close to the later Husserl’s tendency to speak of “transcendental subjectivity” rather than “absolute consciousness,” and so to John Drummond’s Husserlian account of mind. For Drummond, mind, unlike consciousness, is not a property of certain living beings; it is an “activity” or capability—“minding”—enacted by beings who can respond to reasons as reasons. This “transcendental subjectivity” is nothing that could be called “pure” or “absolute” consciousness; it is the person—embodied, intersubjective, and ­historical (Drummond, 107–108). It might seem, then, that intrinsic ­intentionality belongs not to consciousness but to mind, and that consciousness becomes intentional only in a minded being. Nevertheless, Drummond argues that consciousness is intrinsically intentional because its categorial “form,” original temporality, is a non-objectifying directedness toward the “flow” of consciousness itself, a pre-reflective self-awareness that makes

338  Steven Crowell reflection on acts of consciousness and their noematic correlates possible (Drummond, 103–104). It is initially hard to see the difference between this and the Heideggerian view that “the being who is intentional” is determined by the categories of affectivity, understanding, and discourse, which are not intentional acts. Let us agree that consciousness has a temporal categorial form and that being conscious is a necessary condition for intentionality. If this categorial form is non-objectifying directedness, there seems little difference between it and “pre-intentional” conditions for act-intentionality. For Drummond, however, intentionality is itself a category, something “for which there are no prior conditions” (Drummond, 102). Necessarily, consciousness involves a tendency toward evidential fulfillment and so a telos of reason. Consciousness is the ground of reason, but it is also governed teleologically by reason (Drummond, 108, 113). It seems to me that the Längsintentionalität of consciousness belongs to the ground of reason but is not governed by a telos of reason. Following Heidegger, I  argue that the intentionality of reason is clarified only in the categorial structure of “care.” The being who is intentional is a being in whose “very being, that being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962, 32). As Matt Burch shows in his account of “skillful pre-reflective intentional action,” care already involves pre-reflective self-awareness, a “non-observational sense of what I am up to” that derives from my “normative sensitivity” to the situation (Burch 2018, 5, 13–14). It doesn’t matter much whether we describe the care structure as “pre-intentional” or as not being “directedness to an object” (Drummond, 104). The point is that, while care is world-involving (in the categorial sense), it does not have an act-object structure. The salient difference between Drummond’s categorial framework and Heidegger’s turns, instead, on the normative sensitivity in which both views hold to be essential to act-intentionality. Drummond’s analysis of mood provides an example. For Heidegger, moods are world-disclosing since they are ways in which things as a whole “matter” to us, and mattering is a category that “underlies emotions” which “are directed to particular entities” (Drummond, 114). For Drummond, in contrast, moods “arise from” emotions—“that is, from particular intentional experiences”: a “joyful experience gives rise to a cheerful mood” (Ibid.). Wary of so simple an etiology, Drummond agrees with Heidegger that moods “assail” us, but he argues that since emotions are “rooted” in complex intentional webs of experience, such “assailing” is not primitive, not beyond the scope of cognitive explication (Drummond, 115). Being intentionally rooted in this way means that moods belong to the telos of reason, which is normative because it is rational. Since it is founded on the evaluative intentionality of emotion, which in turn is founded on my cognitive grasp of the object’s non-axiological properties, my mood is oriented toward what is “truly” best for me and is thus

A Philosophy of Mind 339 rationally assessable. Mind as such “has as its telos getting to the truth of the matter in all the domains of reason,” and a minded being can take this telos as an ideal norm: it can try to be “self-responsible” for reasons (Drummond, 116). This means that in addition to the first-order goods of knowing, valuing, and acting, a second-order good is at issue: in fulfilling the first-order goods properly I also fulfill the second-order “good of rational agency” (Drummond 2010, 450–5). A Heideggerian account of mood can also accommodate this notion of responsibility, as Joseph Schear shows. Though I cannot make up my mood as I can make up my mind about what I believe, moods are still an “expression of agency” (Schear, 217). In making up my mind, the “why” question is relevant: in “holding oneself open to be bound by the relevant reasons,” one is reason-responsive (Schear, 222). Similarly, with moods we can ask, “What is it about your life situation such that that mood is fitting?” This means that I am “answerable” for my mood (Schear, 224). Such answerability responds to a “demand for intelligibility” (Schear, 225), but this demand, while normative, does not presuppose the rationality of moods. Here, the why-question does not ask about what “counts in favor of being in the mood”—a reason—but about “the shape or tenor of one’s situation” such that being in that mood is intelligible. The “normative force” of intelligibility is less demanding than the self-conscious responsibility that pertains to rational attitudes (Schear, 228). Intelligibility is constituted not by reason but by being an agent who is trying to be something in the situation—by commitment. We can approach the role of commitment here by noting that the normatively less demanding character of meaning does not make affective life irrational. As Matt Burch’s account of akratic action shows, such action is a “free response to the normatively relevant features of the situation that matter to me,” and so is “ecologically or existentially rational.” Even if akratic actions are not “objectively more rational than the relevant alternatives . . . they all make sense” because they are “accompanied by non-observational practical knowledge of what one is up to” (Burch 2018, 26). Such reflexive “practical knowledge,” however, requires us to recognize a category of intentional action that is neither explicit judgment nor brute desire, namely, interest. Interests are “things we care about,” those things “in which we have a stake” (Burch, 233). Unlike desires, then, interests are affectively motivational but also meaningful, they are at stake in what we do, thanks to their essential reflexivity: “to care about an interest is to care about myself” (Burch, 235). Interests motivate us affectively not because they are bare feelings but because we are agents who can be emotionally invested in them. This sort of investment does not stand alone; it depends on my being an agent who is responsive to “the normative claims my interests make on me” thanks to my care for who I am in a certain situation, a “practical identity”—like fatherhood or friendship—at which

340  Steven Crowell I can succeed or fail. It is because I am exercising a “personally inflected understanding of the . . . practices of friendship,” for instance, that the normative demands this entails “make sense to me” (Burch, 8). Interests can guide my action, be at stake in it, then, because “every interest correlates with some ability-to-be” such that my own sense of self is at stake as I  try to live up to the normative expectations associated with those interests (Burch, 238). The reflexivity of interests means that while we can “respond spontaneously to their claims” (Burch, 239)—as we do, on some accounts, to desires—those claims depend not on judgments about what is best but on a commitment to what it is that we are trying to be. Drummond’s argument, however, targets the categorial structure of this analysis. “The normativity of our everyday norms is . . . grounded in our self-responsible convictions about what is true, appropriate, and right rather than, as Crowell would have it, a self-binding anticipatory resoluteness” (Drummond, 116). To ask what the difference is between “self-responsible convictions” and “self-binding resoluteness” is to confront our central question, Is the normativity of our everyday norms anchored in rational teleology, or does our beholdenness to reason arise from our sensitivity to the normative—which requires not just responsibility for the truth but the possibility of self-binding?

Authenticity, Commitment, and Mind If transcendental phenomenology of mind concerns the conditions of possibility for meaning, then it seeks the categories that clarify the being who inhabits a space of meaning. And that being must, if meaning is normatively structured, be responsive to norms as norms. Finally, if reason is a norm, then reason must find its categorial place in an account of what norm-responsiveness is. Thus philosophy of mind is initially concerned with norm-responsiveness (“normative force,” motivation), not normative validity. Heidegger’s notion of authenticity answers to this. It is not an account of normative validity but of how norms can bind us at all. Such binding, commitment, underlies the power norms have, from the first-person perspective, to organize a way of life that matters to the one who is living it. On such a view, authenticity and inauthenticity are categorially constitutive norms of selfhood that clarify the Wahrheitsgehalt of mind; they are not prescriptions concerning what I should do or be. In Heidegger’s language, they are not particular “for-the-sake-ofs” (practical identities) but ways of inhabiting those practical identities to which I am committed and which disclose a space of meaning (on hos alethes) where things can show up as the things they in truth are. In Heidegger’s phenomenology, mind (care) is categorially determined by Verstehen (understanding) and Befindlichkeit (affectivity).3 Befindlichkeit is a condition on meaning because it is the way I undergo

A Philosophy of Mind 341 the world as mattering to me, and without such mattering there is no motivation, no normative as opposed to causal responsiveness. Verstehen, in turn, is a condition on meaning because it is a pre-reflective self-­ awareness in which I matter to myself, am committed to acting for the sake of being something at which I can succeed or fail. Heidegger thus offers a normativity-­first account of intentionality, and, like Drummond’s reasons-first version, it involves two levels: at the first (“ontic”) level, I can succeed or fail at being what I am trying to be; at the second (“ontological”) level, I can succeed or fail at being a self, at “owning” myself, measured against the norm of authenticity. This second level becomes phenomenologically evident in the breakdown of all ontic normative orientation, a categorial possibility of the care structure we may call, for brevity’s sake, “episodic Angst.” In episodic Angst, the “world can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of others” (Heidegger 1962, 232). Phenomenologically, this is “death”: because nothing matters, I can commit to nothing. The claims of being a teacher, father, or friend are recognizable, but as facts without the normative force to move me. Nevertheless, breakdown is still categorially determined as care; indeed, as “articulated” in the “call of conscience,” it reveals the irreducible normativity of selfhood: I  am “guilty,” that is, verantwortlich, responsible for “taking over being a ground” (Heidegger 1962, 329–30). This categorial responsibility is the origin of reason: whatever I commit to being, I  am responsible for taking over the factic givens of my situation in light of what I deem it best to be and do—that is, I cannot not treat them as potentially normative reasons (“my” reasons). Further, because normative reasons are essentially “intersubjective,” I am answerable to others for the choices I make. Reason is originally reason-giving, grounded in a normative orientation that is categorially basic. It might appear, however, that this categorial analysis demonstrates the normative emptiness of “what is.” The primary challenge for a normativityfirst phenomenology of mind, then, is not irrationalism, but nihilism, the “pathological condition” (Nietzsche) in which everything appears meaningless. Heidegger’s ontology is often understood nihilistically—notably, in the ever-recurring charge of decisionism: the idea that my arbitrary choice establishes the validity of the norms I choose to endorse. This view, however, fails to recognize that episodic Angst is neither authentic nor inauthentic. Breakdown is a liminal phenomenon whose structure precludes all commitment; hence, the charge of decisionism can get no grip. But Angst, like every mood, passes, and when it does, the normative force things previously had for me returns. As norms of selfhood, authenticity and inauthenticity concern how I  “own” this restoration of my normative universe. Commitment or resoluteness is how my responsibility for ground (reason) is appropriated in the meaningful world wherein I act for the sake of being something.

342  Steven Crowell It might still seem that the ungrounded character of the norms to which I  respond in (authentic) commitment entails that meaning is finally subjective. Against this, Irene McMullin convincingly argues that “absolute normative foundations are an artificial standard” (McMullin, 150). Angst does not show the illusory character of norms but their contingency, and contingency does not rob norms of normative force. For authentic Dasein they appear as “contingent graces for which we are deeply grateful” (Ibid.). Gratitude belongs to the phenomenology of authentic Dasein. This point has important implications. First, it clarifies what Heidegger means by the “readiness for anxiety” of commitment. Such readiness accepts the “latent” Angst that might collapse our world at any time, but it is equally an attunement in which the world’s “normative pluralism” matters as the horizon of an “irrevocable normative tension” (McMullin, 137). The resolute self must construct a hierarchy of practical identities— negotiate the claims of, say, friendship or fatherhood which, at any given moment, can come into conflict. Such negotiation, as Burch notes, is not usually a matter of reasoning from abstract principles; rather, “it is an imaginative process” of “hypothetically ‘trying out’ different action possibilities until we find one that seems fitting” (Burch 2018, 18). Without absolute normative foundations, my choice is an exemplary answer to the question of how I should go on, what I take to be best in the situation. As McMullin shows, however, this is not the whole picture, since the norms of trying to be are not the only ones there are.4 Normative pluralism includes not only my own first-person “idiosyncratic sense for what is best,” but also the “third-personal [.  .  .] public conventions of das Man” and my “second-person recognition of the authority of other Dasein to make distinctions between the better and the worse” (McMullin, 140). Though conventions are anonymous, they are indispensable for meaning; and though other Dasein show up only in light of my commitment, they have normative authority to call into question the “narcissistic” view that “I am free to pursue the good however I see fit” (McMullin, 142, 144). The contingency of these sources of normativity means that it remains “enigmatic” why we take them to bind us (McMullin, 141).5 But while authentic Dasein “is haunted by normative contingency,” it is not “paralyzed by it.” It “accepts the uncanniness” but experiences “unshakeable joy,” where joy is not the emotion of elation but includes “gratitude for the fact that there are sources of mattering at all” (McMullin, 147–149). The phenomenological focus on meaning prior to reason does not lead to nihilism, then, but to fröhliche Wissenschaft. Authenticity—a commitment that binds me to the norms of what I am trying to be, norms that are at issue in such trying—is a condition on meaning. This has methodological implications. For both Husserl and Heidegger, commitment to philosophy entails a reduction from entities to their being

A Philosophy of Mind 343 (Wahrheitsgehalt), a categorial distinction between transcendental subjectivity (Dasein) and the “human being.” The latter is a constituted sense, a guise in which transcendental subjectivity can “apperceive” itself as “life” and “animality”—determinations that are not eidetic features of “the being who is intentional.” The askesis of the transcendental attitude, then, yields the “paradox of human subjectivity”—namely, that a part of the world constitutes the whole world, and so also itself (Husserl 1970a, 180). I have argued that authentic trying to be clarifies how self-constitution is possible—or, as Mark Okrent puts it, that “the identity of the self . . . is a normative achievement” (Okrent, 157)—and simultaneously clarifies the constitution of “worlds,” including the world of nature at issue in scientific and cultural practices. However, both Okrent and Dermot Moran believe that this overlooks the “anti-Kantian Heideggerian view that human agents are ‘absorbed in the world’ ” (Ibid.), so that “the transcendental ultimately must be embedded in the natural and return to it” (Moran, 307). Isn’t the transcendental attitude, with its reductive askesis, always sustained by a fungierende Intentionalität where the categorial distinction between mind and nature is inappropriate (Moran, 320)? This objection points toward metaphysical issues that require a methodological solution. But first, a few words about attitudes and about what it means to call the self a normative achievement. Dermot Moran notes a certain confusion about what an attitude is. Heidegger, for instance, denied that our everyday way of being-in-the-world, the “natural attitude,” is an attitude. It would seem, then, that it cannot be “put out of play” and that no categorial distinction between transcendental subjectivity and human being can be drawn. But in what sense would this entail that the transcendental is “embedded in the natural”? For Husserl, nature can show up as “nature” only within one or the other of two relative attitudes and their respective “ruling apperceptions”: the naturalistic or the personalistic. In the first, “nature” is the theoretically determined object of the natural sciences, accessible only through intellect and mathematical substruction; in the second, “nature” has a plurality of senses that depend on the various historico-cultural surrounding worlds of persons (Husserl 1989). Thus even if the natural “attitude” cannot be bracketed because it is not a special attitude with a ruling apperception, this does not mean that the transcendental subject is “embedded” in nature in any definite sense of “nature.” A determinate meaning of “nature” is available only within normative contexts at issue in either the naturalistic or the personalistic attitude, and because these are attitudes, they can be bracketed. So there is neither a “naturalistic” nor a “cultural” reason to deny the categorial distinction between Dasein and human being. This point is challenged by Mark Okrent, who argues that any Kantian account of the self as a normative achievement encounters two

344  Steven Crowell objections. First, if the normativity of my practical identities bottoms out in episodic Angst, I have “no reason for accepting any practical identity” and so self-constitution is not normative but decisionistic (Okrent, 164). As we saw, however, this objection mistakenly assumes that the role of Angst is to supply reasons for my own (i.e., authentic) action (Okrent, 170, 172). Episodic Angst provides no reasons for choice; it is phenomenological evidence that I am a being who cannot not be responsive to reasons as reasons. The reasons themselves are found in the various normative claims to which I  respond as “absorbed” in the world, and so I  am responsible for their normative force as my reasons. Thus what Okrent calls a “second formulation” of Angst—namely, that I need not be “unmotivated” by the relevant norms because the self-distancing necessary for normative self-constitution already informs my being at issue in trying to be something—is not a different position from the first (Okrent, 170). The two formulations just mark the distinction between the methodological role of Angst and what the authentic selfhood that may eventuate from it is. This leads to Okrent’s second objection. If we do not follow Kant’s rationalism and anchor self-consciousness in self-representation, then there is no way to modify or qualify the use of “trying” that could “supply us with a way in which human selves are normative achievements in a way that is different from our animal cousins” (Okrent, 173). Why not? Let us agree that talk of nonhuman animals behaving according to “instinct” is “naïve” (Okrent, 172), and that a better (third-person) description must invoke an organism’s learning, trying to develop skills, and its “goal” of self-maintenance. But does this mean that such organisms inhabit a world where things appear as the things they in truth are? On my approach, the latter requires more than acting in accord with norms that one either does or does not fulfill; it requires acting in light of norms by which one measures oneself in a non-representational way. This non-representational acting in light of norms is phenomenologically determined as “being at issue” and “taking over being a ground,” but Okrent prefers to interpret Heidegger’s transcendental categories pragmatically. For Okrent, Heidegger’s commitment to phenomenology yields an “inconsistent triad” between “pragmatism, transcendental philosophy, and phenomenology,” and since “phenomenology is such a dubious method anyway,” we should drop it (Okrent 2003, 137). However, this entails a massive reconstruction of Heidegger’s texts, and a more elegant choice would be to drop the pragmatism. There are pragmatic elements in Heidegger’s thought, but as Joseph Rouse suggests, a pragmatic reading cannot do justice to the contribution made by the categorial account of first-person experience in Divison II of Being and Time (Rouse, 199–201). Transcendental pragmatism obscures the methodological problem of our access to the intentionality of nonhuman animals—a problem Husserl and Heidegger took seriously.

A Philosophy of Mind 345

Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology: Naturalism, Metaphysics, and Theology This again forces us to confront the scope of a normative-categorial philosophy of mind. If the latter—as ontically neutral “reflection”— distinguishes between entities and the meaning through which entities are given, can it say nothing about entities in intentio recta? Must it not at least have “metaphysical implications” (Zahavi, 50)? Today this question constitutes the horizon of transcendental phenomenology, so I will conclude by considering it under three closely related headings: naturalism, metaphysics, and theology. Both Husserl and Heidegger sought a path from transcendental phenomenology to “metaphysics,” which they understood in a remarkably similar way. Both held that reflection on meaning either demanded (Heidegger) or entailed (Husserl) a metaphysical account of entities which was neither transcendental (regional ontologies) nor empirical-scientific. What might such a metaphysical account of entities be? Turning first to Husserl, Dan Zahavi lists three senses in which “metaphysics” can be understood: a question concerning the “basic ‘stuff’ of reality”; an inquiry into “ultimate” existential questions—facticity, immortality, the existence of God; and the question of the possible “­mind-dependence” of reality (Zahavi, 51). Zahavi believes that the third sense was most important to Husserl. He also acknowledges that Husserl was concerned with the second sense, which is closely tied to his telos of reason and to what threatens it: “the irrationality of the transcendental fact” (Zahavi, 52). He denies that Husserl had much interest in the first sense, though it most directly concerns the move from reductive askesis to a metaphysical account of entities and is essential for addressing issues raised by the second sense. Indeed, it is hard to read Husserl’s late reflections on “monadological” idealism as other than a robust ontic account of transcendental subjectivity, one that somehow competes with “objectivist” assumptions about the “basic ‘stuff’ of reality.”6 Heidegger attempted something similar. In Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, for instance, he first defends the metaphysical “neutrality” of Being and Time, the categorial elucidation of Dasein “prior to every factual concretion” (Heidegger 1984, 136). But since “neutral Dasein is never what exists,” he proposes that fundamental ontology must “turn back” to the “metaphysical ontic in which it implicitly always remains” in order to determine Dasein’s place in “nature” (Heidegger 1984, 135, 158, 156). With this, the category “world” becomes das Seiende im Ganzen, and the category “care” becomes an ontic feature of the human being: the Dasein im Menschen. Elsewhere I have discussed the motivations for, and consequences of, Heidegger’s brief flirtation with a phenomenological metaphysics (Crowell 2018). The lesson is that there is no methodological basis for such a

346  Steven Crowell move. Phenomenological neutrality encompasses all the problems of philosophy, including “all so-called metaphysical questions, insofar as they have possible sense in the first place” (Husserl 1989, 408). In his outline of “radical naturalism,” however, Rouse argues that this approach treats “transcendental constitution” in an unacceptably “autonomous” way that floats free “from empirical realization” (Rouse, 208, 206) and so should be replaced by an evolutionary account of our normative capacities as biological beings. A similar point is made in Satne and Ainbinder’s proposal for a “relaxed naturalism,” which makes sense of human normative capacities “as natural and placed in a natural world in a continuum along with the intentional, normative capacities of other animals” (Satne and Ainbinder, 180). Since both forms of naturalism target my claim that “efforts to ground normativity in contingent features of life reverse the appropriate order of explanation” (Rouse, 206), we are returned to methodological questions. The disputed point is well put by Rouse. For both Husserl and Heidegger, “though human life has indeed contingently evolved from other forms of animal life,” biological life is “only intelligible within a transcendentally constituted space of meaning and reasons” (Ibid.). Thus philosophical talk of “life” must start from our own normatively constituted experience and apply the term privatively to organisms which, we have reason to believe, lack the categorial capacities we find in ourselves. But if, as Rouse argues, the “contingent evolution of human forms of life is . . . integral to their normativity,” then only by rejecting methodological askesis can we “reconcile[] our animality and ‘the Dasein in us’ ” (Rouse, 197, 207). Put otherwise, if we cannot explain how our own capacities “emerge and develop from more basic capacities we share with other animals and young children,” we “end up with a new version of the gap between first and second nature” found in McDowell (Satne and Ainbinder, 182, 186). But does the methodological gap between transcendental phenomenology and empirical science preclude a naturalistic account of how our normative capacities emerge? The answer turns on the distinction between the explanatory project of science and the clarificatory project of philosophy. “Emergence” is to explain how “the norms that govern rationality, the very norms that can be first-personally endorsed, [can] actually inform the behavior of contingent, factual and concrete subjects” (Satne and Ainbinder, 186). This presupposes that the clarificatory work of establishing what normativity is has been done, and it concerns norm-responsiveness, the way “norms have a grip on  .  .  . intentional agents.” To avoid mystification, such responsiveness must be embedded in “nature,” and this is where Husserl’s genetic phenomenology comes in (Satne and Ainbinder, 182, 186). My objection to this is methodological: genetic phenomenology must employ a construction that transcends the kind of Evidenz to which

A Philosophy of Mind 347 transcendental phenomenology is committed (Welton 2000). This does not mean that genetic phenomenology is impossible; it just means that it cannot overcome any gap that is already there in transcendental phenomenology. In short, while genetic phenomenology is phenomenology, it is not phenomenological philosophy. Genetic phenomenology is a practice that has a great deal to contribute to the interdisciplinary project of explaining normative uptake and the emergence of norms, and within that project, the suggestion that we recognize a plurality of forms of “intentionality” correlated to a plurality of “forms of life” makes good sense (Satne and Ainbinder, 188). Genetic phenomenology is an essential tool for approaching the “emergence problem” ontogenetically and phylogenetically. What it cannot do is solve the “characterization problem,” since “in describing other forms of life, there is no alternative” to endorsing a kind of privative strategy whereby we “start from our own experience” (Satne and Ainbinder, 191). A methodological gap remains, but it entails no mystification of our normative capacities. Rouse pursues a different objection, but it too concerns how our norm-responsiveness is to be explained. Whereas transcendental phenomenology reflects on the necessary conditions for meaning as “evidenced” in phenomenological reflection, Rouse is concerned with “how these alleged necessities become manifest in nature and history as authoritative over actual, contingent forms of life” (Rouse, 206). There is no obvious incompatibility between these two pursuits, but a problem arises when we ask whether this “evidence” or manifestness is itself “a necessary structure” or rather “a material-historical contingency” (Ibid.). Rouse opts for the second, since the first appears to treat “the supposedly ‘transcendentally’ necessary conditions for meaning” in an “impossible, unsituated way” (Rouse, 210). Such necessity cannot be explained phenomenologically but only with reference to a “human way of life” with its contingent evolution. Because this explanation of normativity presupposes “ontic” (contingent) facts, it is, for transcendental phenomenology, a metaphysical thesis. A metaphysically neutral alternative would recall that the “contingency” of the necessary is already a feature of the phenomenological a priori, which differs from Kant on just this point. Phenomenological categories are not necessary “for all possible experience”; they are conditionally necessary categories of empirically contingent (descriptive) types of experience: if there is such an experience, then these and those categories must hold (Tugendhat 1970, 163–5, 181). Despite this contingency, such categories are necessary; they are not dependent on the empirical history of how a given type of experience emerged—though of course there is such a history—nor are they tied to particular “articulations” of this situation in terms of “life,” “nature,” or “animality,” constituted senses that already presuppose the necessity in question. An explanation of the manifestness of categorial normativity will require ontic (naturalistic, genetic)

348  Steven Crowell considerations, but these do not enhance the clarification of what those categories are. Despite their cursory character, these replies will have suggested the sense in which I am indeed guilty of a “dualism” between “nature and normativity” (Rouse, 207), but this dualism is methodological, not metaphysical. Phenomenology is metaphysically neutral. Just this, however, is challenged by Dan Zahavi, who argues that metaphysics, far from being excluded by the reduction, “follows directly from it” (Zahavi, 52). What worries Zahavi is an interpretation of transcendental phenomenology in which reflection on the constitution of meaning might entail nothing about the “real being” of things. If the “significance and appearance” that phenomenology investigates “is the significance and appearance of the real world,” transcendental phenomenology “can no longer claim metaphysical neutrality” (Zahavi, 59). Because Zahavi and I agree on so much, it is not easy to locate precisely where we differ, beyond his preference for using the term “metaphysics” to describe the implications of the reduction. If “metaphysics” means that the “true being” of things becomes accessible through the reduction (Zahavi, 53), my objection is merely terminological. Further, when Zahavi acknowledges that phenomenology says nothing about the “factual” (“empirically” established) reality of things, but concerns “what it means for an object to be real and when we are justified in judging that it is” (Zahavi, 57), this sounds like the kind of transcendental idealism I endorse, which incorporates empirical realism. Finally, I agree that “an object meeting the strong condition of ultimate, intersubjective confirmation” cannot fail to be real (Zahavi, 56), though no object ever does meet such conditions. So what is left to debate? According to Zahavi, a metaphysically neutral interpretation of transcendental phenomenology holds that only “what it means for something to be real, rather than reality itself, . . . is constituted by and correlated with consciousness” and so invites thing-in-itself skepticism (Zahavi, 50). However, transcendental phenomenology itself shows that “there is no longer any ontological distinction between the constituted validity and significance of an object and its reality and being,” and so, presumably, the reality and being of things is constituted by mind (Zahavi, 55). To avoid this conclusion, a metaphysically neutral position would have to be metaphysically deflationary (Zahavi, 51). But our earlier discussion of the “background” showed that there is nothing deflationary about transcendental phenomenology. Reductive askesis denies nothing of what shows itself. The issue, then, is whether “reality is mind-independent” (Zahavi, 52). Zahavi defends a correlationism compatible with methodological neutrality. The latter holds that “reality itself” is constituted by mind, but this is a transcendental, not a metaphysical, statement and does not entail that everything depends on consciousness. Mind-independence belongs

A Philosophy of Mind 349 to the sense in which reality is given, and a metaphysically neutral understanding of the reduction will not lose sight of this. But Zahavi believes that this deeply rooted conviction of the natural attitude conceals the real state of affairs. Since I am not sure I understand Zahavi’s own stance on the dependence question, I will approach the issue indirectly. Zahavi is right to worry that a metaphysical interpretation of correlation finds it difficult to “stop the slide toward a metaphysics of life, of the flesh, or of the event”—which lies “well beyond transcendental phenomenology” (Zahavi, 58). This slide has provoked various “realistic” rejections of phenomenology, since it seems to entail that there were no things prior to the emergence of conscious beings. Empirically this is false, and it is also false on Zahavi’s interpretation of transcendental phenomenology. But why? Dinosaurs do not metaphysically depend on consciousness, not even on transcendental consciousness, if that means (as Husserl sometimes argues) that the existence of such things requires an “actual” consciousness capable of constituting them (Husserl 2003, 53–61, 112–19). On that view, dinosaurs proleptically existed only because an actual consciousness eventually emerged in whose normative horizon they could be given as nodes of intentional implications. On a metaphysically neutral interpretation, in contrast, dinosaurs mind-independently existed back then, but their reality (categorial structure) is accessible only now, through normative contexts like science which exploit chains of intentional implications that allow dinosaurs to show up as the things they in truth were. This is all the “metaphysics” we need, and all the metaphysics we are going to get if we adhere to the reductive askesis that allows our judgments to track phenomenological Evidenz. Failing that, debates about realism and idealism or mind-dependence yield antinomy—here, between a correlationist metaphysics of flesh and an anti-correlationist “speculative” realism. Antinomy is also the figure which best describes the third horizon of transcendental phenomenology, the “theological turn,” in which phenomenology abandons reductive askesis to posit a prior condition of correlation, variously called “event,” Erscheinung als solches, “givenness,” “phenomenality,” or “revelation.” Inga Römer and Martin Kavka show where this is motivated in the texts; and, while both criticize banal theologizing, they also question methodological askesis. For Römer, the Levinasian phenomenology of the “face” eludes correlationist ontology and so opens onto something like a non-­ontotheological notion of the “divine” (Römer, 124). Kavka, in turn, argues that if categorial intuition is grounded in the “voice of being,” a phenomenological “theology” that exceeds what Husserl called “authentic thinking” is possible (Kavka, 91). Such challenges require that a transcendental account of normativity reflect on the categories of second-person phenomenology (Crowell 2016a).

350  Steven Crowell Here the Levinas of Totality and Infinity is an important touchstone, since he explicitly defends a normativity-first approach to meaning. Further, he claims that his analyses “owe everything to the phenomenological method” (Levinas 1969, 28). However, tracing out the “horizons” of meaning leads one “beyond” categorial ontology toward a “metaphysical” experience of the Other’s interdictory claim on my freedom, “a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung,” a “revelation” (Levinas 1969, 51, 73). For this reason (among others), Levinas can refer to the face of the Other in religious terms. However, Levinas also holds that “it is our relations with men  .  .  . that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of” (Levinas 1969, 79), suggesting that what is figured as divine is something already evident in our dealings with each other, and that what “divinity” means derives from the categoriality of those encounters. Römer seems to agree, though with a twist: “There is no God beyond ethical significance” but “the ‘divine’ ” is a miracle, the “miraculous fact” that “one human being can have” an “ethical sense” for “another human being” (Römer, 126). The “claim of the Other” just “happens” (Römer, 133); it neither depends on Dasein’s freedom, nor is it necessary. Because it is possible not to hear the call, the space of meaning (and reason) it enables is threatened by nihilism (Römer, 134). Second-person phenomenology—a reflection on how I  experience myself as the addressee of a normative demand—can avoid appeal to miracles, since it focuses on the “you-accusative.” For it, the normative authority of the addresser cannot be analyzed in terms of symmetry or reciprocity, since I cannot switch places with the addresser without losing my categorial status as addressee. Here Levinasian “asymmetry” is preserved on purely transcendental grounds; there is no theological turn, nor any “metaphysical” need to abandon the askesis of the reduction. Being an addressee (and also an addresser) is a categorial possibility of the first-person. Second-person phenomenology already informs Heidegger’s account of the call of conscience. When Heidegger says that the call “comes from me and yet from beyond me” (Heidegger 1962, 320), the “from me” means that the call categorially belongs to the first-person, “I-myself.” The “from beyond me,” in turn, signifies that the first-person here is the you-accusative, an addressee: the call addresses me in a way that “exceeds” all my plans and projects, and so exceeds my (normatively achieved) “self.” Though Heidegger says that the caller is “Dasein itself,” this exegetical point is irrelevant. Second-person phenomenology is concerned only with what it is to be an addressee, so it can leave the identity of the caller open. Römer, however, objects that this entails “a certain ethical self-conceit” (Römer, 130). By leaving the identity of the caller open, conscience effaces the Other, and so it seems that phenomenology must admit a metaphysical

A Philosophy of Mind 351 condition, the revelation of the Other. To this I  can make only a brief reply: Levinas encounters the same problem. Levinas makes two claims. First, the face “is neither seen nor touched”; it differs from “all our sensible experience” (Levinas 1969, 194, 187). Thus it is not directly tied to the appearance of the human beings whom I  meet every day. Second, “the Other cannot present himself as Other outside of my conscience” (Levinas 1969, 232). Together, these claims entail that the identity of the addresser is no less enigmatic than in Heidegger. For second-person phenomenology, the call belongs to the categorial constitution of a being whose own being is at issue. Of course, Heidegger’s “call” differs from Levinas’s, since it does not involve the interdictory character that Levinas holds—rightly—to be necessary for calling my freedom into question. But perhaps conscience is not the site where such interdiction takes place. As McMullin shows, second-person authority is negotiated not in Angst, but in my recovery of normative claims in the everyday world. Here nihilism can indeed get a grip: I can refuse to recognize the claims for the “graces” they are. Still, my categorial answerability for reasons (including ethical reasons) is not “selfconceit” but “desire for goodness” (Levinas), an orientation toward measure “beyond being.” Such a normative “beyond” does not require that secondperson phenomenology be augmented by metaphysics. Martin Kavka, though, suggests that categorial intuition may not be as unhintergehbar as I take it to be. If categorial intuition, too, is a second-­ person phenomenon grounded in the “voice of being,” then reductive askesis would be self-assertion (Kavka, 91). The true picture would require a “theological” turn: the Being whose voice underwrites categorial intuition is not the “being of beings,” the topic of categorial phenomenology, but “Being itself,” which calls, grants, gives. Though the names of Being are fungible—that is, negotiated only in the specific normative horizons of various theological traditions (Kavka, 95)—second-person phenomenology must avow Being as its unscheinbar ground, thus breaking with the reduction. What sort of reply is possible here? Suppose we translate das Unscheinbare as the inconspicuous, rather than as the inapparent. As with the “face,” what is inconspicuous does not appear as entities do, but it does appear—for instance, in “my conscience” (Levinas). Thus it can be brought to categorial intuition. For second-person phenomenology, the inconspicuous or “uncanny” is measure itself, ideality, which is no entity but is at issue in existing. I  am the addressee of a claim whose phenomenology precludes me from identifying the addresser, whether as myself or as God, or indeed as “Being itself”—which, after all, is intelligible only in the normative horizon of Heidegger’s story about overcoming metaphysics. Of course, Heidegger and Levinas attribute more to the inconspicuous than I am willing to do, but that’s irrelevant: a normativityfirst transcendental phenomenology of conscience can acknowledge das

352  Steven Crowell Unscheinbare without “metaphysically” breaching the askesis from beings to meaning. We are finite creatures, and so meaning is finite. We can grasp the world as it is, though never as a whole; and if there is anything beyond that, it is a matter for faith, not philosophy. A phenomenology of faith is certainly possible, but transcendental phenomenology cannot be said to be exceeded by something that escapes it and yet grounds it, such that a “theological”—or “naturalistic” or “speculative” or “metaphysical”— turn is required. One who nevertheless wishes to make such a turn must show why it does not end in antinomy, the “euthanasia of pure reason” (Kant 1998, 460). Take your pick: deus sive natura; mereological universalism or nihilism; “neutral monism”; panpsychism; flesh, life, desire. In the face of antinomy, the askesis of transcendental phenomenology is not egoism but modesty, not a “theory of everything” but a clarification of what matters. Its claim on our “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility” (Husserl) is irrevocable if we are committed to having evidence for what we say. Just this defines the normative turn from entities to meaning, the promised land, “the secret yearning of all modern philosophy.”

Notes 1 The “categorial” approach to meaning as “being in the sense of truth” (on hos alethes), which frames this chapter, is defended in Crowell (2001). See also Crowell (2016b). 2 These distinctions are illustrated in Jack Marsh’s reflections on “erotic inception,” which move from the description of “a” world (the “weekend”) toward “the meaning structures that make this, and other culturally mediated descriptions, [of such a world] possible” (Marsh, 262–264). Of course, such meaning structures (i.e., categories) do not explain erotic inception; if successful, they clarify what is at issue in it, and so they too are contestable, but only by appeal to the Evidenz of phenomenological reflection. 3 Here we leave undiscussed a third category, Rede, but see Crowell (2013, 214–36). 4 On exemplarity, see Crowell (2017). What if my decision is akratic? Can it still be considered exemplary of what I  hold to be the best way to go on? This is a challenging question, but Burch makes two relevant points. First, akrasia cannot be the rule, since this would render all or most action pathological (Burch 2018, 23). Second, “since the self-world constellation that my [existential abilities] are sensitive to is extremely complex”—a complexity nicely illustrated by Jack Marsh’s description of the normative turmoil found in erotic ­relationships—exemplarity cannot be a feature of isolated choices alone. It requires the “two-level” consideration of selfhood outlined above: on the “ontic” level of trying to be something, we may at one time “detect” certain “normatively relevant features of the situation” and “weigh” them in one way, while at a later time we detect different ones or weigh them differently (Burch 2018, 23). On the “ontological” level of authenticity, however, such detecting and weighing is measured by the “transparency” with which I take responsibility for the normative force of those normatively relevant features. Burch argues that “feelings of guilt and/or shame” are “intrinsically related” to akratic actions, that akratic actors see their action “as anchored in a flaw”

A Philosophy of Mind 353 or failure (Burch, 245). If that is so, then the question of exemplarity reduces to the question of whether an authentic action can be accompanied by a sense of existential failure. 5 Drummond’s appeal to a telos of reason would clarify this, but if we find the idea questionable, the “enigma” of normative binding tempts one toward the metaphysical issues I discuss later. 6 A. D. Smith (2003) offers a detailed reading along these lines.

References Burch, Matthew. 2018. “Making Sense of Akrasia.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17(5): 939–71. doi:10.1007/s11097-018-9568-9 Crowell, Steven Galt. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016a. “Second-Person Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, 70–89. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016b. “What Is It to Think?” In Phenomenology of Thinking, edited by Thiemo Breyer and Christopher Gutland, 183–206. New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Exemplary Necessity: Heidegger, Pragmatism, and Reason.” In Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology, edited by Ondřej Švec and Jakub Čapek, 242–56. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. “The Middle Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphysics.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 229–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doyon, Maxime. 2018. “Husserl on Perceptual Optimality.” Husserl Studies 34 (2): 171–89. Drummond, John. 2010. “Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia.” In Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, edited by Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens, 441–60. New York: Springer. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1978. “Neuere Forschungen über Logik.” In Frühe Schriften, edited by Wilhelm-Friedrich von Herrmann, 17–43. Gesamtausgabe Band 1. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translated by Michael Heim. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1965. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Translated by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1970a. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Northwestern: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1970b. Logical Investigations, Vol. I. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

354  Steven Crowell ———. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2003. Transzendentaler Idealismus. Edited by Robin D. Rollinger and Rochus Sowa, Husserliana XXXVI. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lask, Emil. 2003. Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre. In Sämtliche Werke, Zweiter Band, 1–246. Jena: Dietrich Schegelmann Reprintverlag. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Okrent, Mark. 2003. “Heidegger in America, or How Transcendental Philosophy Becomes Pragmatic.” In From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, edited by Jeff Malpas, 122–38. London: Routledge. Smith, A. D. 2003. Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London: Routledge. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1970. Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Berlin: DeGruyter. Welton, Donn. 2000. The Other Husserl. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Index

action 4, 12 – 16, 21 – 4, 29, 73 – 4, 85, 89 – 90, 94, 108, 110 – 11, 113, 116, 122, 127 – 8, 133, 138 – 40, 143, 159, 162 – 3, 165 – 6, 168, 170, 173, 174, 178 – 9, 192n7, 196, 205, 227 – 8, 223 – 39, 338 – 44 agency 3 – 4, 88, 105 – 6, 111, 113, 137 – 40, 169, 204, 223 – 39, 338 – 39 akrasia 244 – 8, 339, 352 – 3n4 Allais, Lucy 58 Allison, Henry 58 Aristotle 81, 104, 126, 172, 181, 311 Audi, Robert 272

ethics 1, 10, 52, 68, 76, 83, 95n7, 116, 120, 122, 125 – 7, 131, 275 – 6, 279 – 80, 336, 350 – 1; see also morality

Blattner, William 152n7, 152n12, 199, 212n10 Byrne, Alex 290, 298

Hartman, Nicolai 12, 25n4 Haugeland, John 94, 174, 176, 182 – 4, 188 – 9, 195 – 6, 218 – 20, 226 Heidegger, Martin 1, 3, 5, 23, 29 – 30, 32 – 4, 36 – 7, 40 – 2, 48 – 9, 56, 62 – 3, 71, 80 – 2, 84 – 94, 95n7, 101 – 2, 111, 115, 120, 129 – 30, 135n14, 137 – 42, 146 – 9, 157, 163 – 4, 168 – 9, 171, 173n1, 179, 183, 191, 193, 195 – 204, 220, 225 – 6, 228, 234 – 5, 237, 307 – 23, 329 – 32, 337 – 45, 350 – 1; on abilities-to-be 137 – 8, 141, 167, 198, 237 – 48; on as-structure 34, 41 – 3; on anxiety 90, 137, 143, 145 – 53, 170, 196, 199 – 200, 204, 209; on authenticity 110, 137 – 49, 200, 212n10, 340 – 4, 352 – 3; on being-in-the-world 32, 157, 336 – 7, 343; on the ‘call of conscience’ 90, 129, 131, 146 – 7, 152, 196 – 200, 204, 341 – 2, 350 – 1; on care 3, 23 – 4, 143 – 9, 233 – 6, 245 – 8, 338 – 41; on circumspection 30, 32, 167, 312 – 13; on decisionism 140, 144 – 5; on fore-structures 42 – 4; on for-the-sake-of-which

commitment 3, 94, 109, 111 – 13, 173, 177 – 8, 190 – 1, 198, 200, 211n8, 217, 235, 245, 247 – 8, 271, 278, 285 – 6, 339 – 44 Crowell, Steven Galt 1 – 2, 5, 23, 29 – 37, 40 – 1, 47 – 50, 53 – 5, 57 – 9, 80 – 9, 91 – 4, 95n2, 101 – 6, 108 – 9, 110 – 11, 114 – 15, 120, 127, 129 – 34, 135n11, 138 – 9, 143, 154n7, 157, 163, 167, 169 – 70, 173, 174, 176 – 88, 190 – 1, 192n2, 196 – 210, 217, 237, 249n3, 271 – 2, 282 – 6 Descartes, René 158 – 61, 168, 310 Doyon, Maxime 335 Dreyfus, Hubert 54, 62 – 4, 69 – 71, 75 – 8, 198, 218, 220, 316 – 18, 336 emotion 4, 111 – 12, 114 – 15, 217, 229, 235 – 6, 239 – 40, 246 – 7, 338 – 42

Fink, Eugen 54 – 5, 307 – 8 Franck, Didier 125 Frankfurt, Harry 234 – 5, 239 – 40 Freeman, Laura 251, 253 God 10, 15, 24, 52, 80, 83 – 4, 86 – 90, 93 – 5, 122, 125 – 6, 345, 350 – 1 grammar 13 – 15

356 Index 43, 198, 200 – 1; on ready-to-hand 30, 35, 37, 42 – 3, 312, 316; on responsibility 137, 139, 140, 146, 149, 199, 201, 204 – 5, 217; on world 30, 195 – 204 hermeneutic(s) 24, 32, 41 – 2, 45n19 Hieronymi, Pamela 221 Husserl, Edmund 1 – 2, 9 – 10, 24 – 5, 25n7, 29 – 31, 33 – 4, 37 – 8, 47 – 59, 75 – 6, 80 – 4, 88 – 9, 95n2, 101 – 5, 108, 110 – 12, 114 – 15, 176, 180, 182, 186 – 7, 192n5, 277 – 84, 302, 307 – 23, 329 – 37, 342 – 9; on absolute consciousness 103 – 4, 313 – 14, 318 – 20, 323, 327, 342; on categorial intuition 51, 80 – 4, 280 – 4; on constitution 31, 50, 52, 104, 307, 314; on epoché 47 – 8, 50 – 3, 57, 309; on evidence 110, 113, 116, 272 – 4, 279 – 84, 330 – 3, 338, 346 – 50, 352; on intentional correlation 34, 235, 271, 333, 348 – 9; on intentional implications 179, 335 – 7, 349; on life-world 308 – 9, 312 – 15, 319 – 22; on logical laws 38 – 40, 277, 283 – 5; on natural attitude 48 – 9, 53, 307 – 21, 343 – 4; on noema 34, 54 – 5, 280; on optimality in perception 10 – 11, 22, 335, 353; on principle of all principles 280 – 4; on psychologism 30, 32, 37 – 40, 277, 311 – 12, 331 – 3; on transcendental attitude 307 – 8, 312 – 14; on transcendental idealism 47, 50, 57 – 9, 311, 345, 348 – 9 intentionality 3 – 4, 9, 21 – 2, 25n5, 31 – 2, 34, 48, 83, 101 – 5, 107 – 8, 110 – 12, 114 – 15, 159 – 60, 174, 176 – 7, 179 – 80, 182 – 4, 186 – 91, 192n6, 195 – 7, 200, 271 – 3, 285, 302, 307, 310, 316 – 20, 322 intention-shift 186, 240 – 4, 246 – 8 interest(s) 9 – 10, 83, 89, 107, 122 – 3, 189, 233 – 48, 335, 337, 339 – 40, 345 intersubjectivity 56 – 7, 83, 106 – 8, 111 – 12, 312, 323, 337, 341, 348 Janicaud, Dominique 80 – 1 judgment 11, 24, 38 – 40, 74 – 6, 103, 110 – 11, 113, 162, 166, 219 – 21, 223, 232, 277, 282 – 3, 293 – 304

Kant, Immanuel 3, 23, 47, 50, 58, 120 – 4, 126 – 7, 132, 132 – 3, 134n1, 157, 160 – 7, 169 – 70, 173, 176, 180, 196, 200, 275, 302, 311, 313, 344, 347, 352 Korsgaard, Christine 3, 44n5, 111, 120, 126 – 33, 157, 163 – 6, 169 – 72, 197, 204 – 5 Lask, Emil 31, 48, 330 Levinas, Emmanuel 1, 3, 80, 88, 93 – 4, 120 – 7, 131 – 4; on the face 10, 22 – 3, 83, 92, 123 – 4, 126, 134, 142 – 5, 349 – 52 Locke, John 160 Lotze, Hermann 37, 330 Marion, Jean-Luc 83, 89, 91 – 3 Matherne, Samantha 302 McDowell, John 174 – 82, 185 – 8, 190 – 1, 192n1 McManus, Denis 69, 77n2, 77n4, 143 – 4 Merleau-Ponty 1, 195, 307 – 8, 315 – 20, 322 metaphysics 47 – 9, 51 – 4, 58, 101, 183, 191, 345 – 53 mood 4, 84, 109, 114 – 15, 129, 137, 143, 145 – 52, 152n12, 170 – 1, 207, 217 – 28, 235 – 6, 239 – 40, 246 – 7, 338 – 41 morality 10, 18 – 19, 22 – 23, 24, 25n4, 95n6, 101 – 17, 121, 123 – 4, 127 – 9, 132 – 4, 279; see also ethics naturalism 3 – 4, 5, 33 – 4, 175, 186, 189, 192, 201 – 5, 210 – 11, 212n11, 311 – 13, 318, 333, 337, 345 – 6, 348 neo-Kantianism 29, 32, 37 – 41, 48, 201, 206, 331 normativity 84 – 5, 93, 95, 101 – 2, 105, 111, 116, 120 – 34, 157 – 8, 161 – 73, 164, 174 – 6, 179, 182 – 3; acting in light of norms 36, 196 – 7, 201, 204 – 7, 341 – 4; authority and 15 – 16; claims/demands/ expectations 3, 10, 22 – 3, 36, 86, 140 – 5, 199 – 200, 235 – 8; constitutive norms 12 – 14, 19 – 20, 36, 182; conventions/customs and 17 – 18; epistemic 4 – 5, 179, 272 – 82, 302 – 4, 330 – 1; force 37, 41, 339 – 45; games and 13 – 15, 18; hypothetical norms 16; ideals

Index  357 and 20 – 2, 24; normative plurality 140 – 5, 188 – 90; normative reflexivity 236 – 8; perceptual 5, 9 – 10, 22, 176, 279, 282 – 3, 293 – 304, 334 – 6; prescriptive norms 12 – 13, 15, 19, 33, 39; responsiveness to norms 36; sources of 3, 37 – 40, 120, 124, 126, 140 – 5; technical norms 16 – 17, 20, 23; teleology and 9, 22, 205 – 6, 335, 338 – 40, 345, 353n5 ontology 11, 30, 41, 43, 50, 54 – 6, 121 – 2, 138 – 9, 199, 204, 206, 209, 283, 307 – 9, 311, 316, 322 – 3, 341, 345, 349 – 50 phenomenological reduction 47 – 8, 50 – 2, 55, 57, 307, 311, 314, 318, 322, 332 – 7, 342, 348 – 51 practical identity 3, 35, 111, 114, 127 – 30, 137, 141, 164 – 72, 205, 211n4, 237, 249n7 practices 35 – 7, 62, 71, 76 – 7, 102, 108 – 10, 112 – 14, 116, 138, 140, 153n7, 184, 192n7, 195 – 6, 200 – 1, 208 – 10, 236 – 41, 335 – 6, 340, 343 reason 51, 84 – 6, 89, 93 – 4, 108, 110, 113, 116, 120 – 34, 158 – 60, 174 – 9, 181 – 2, 185, 187, 188, 190 – 2n1, 196 – 201, 204 – 7, 222 – 3, 227 – 8, 239 – 40, 337 – 41 recognitional appearances 290, 292 – 302, 334 – 6 responsibility 3 – 4, 10, 20, 94, 110 – 13, 116, 130, 137, 139 – 40, 143, 146, 149, 151, 157, 171, 173, 183, 186, 188, 189 – 90, 192n9,

199 – 205, 217, 225, 330, 339 – 41, 344, 346 – 7, 352 – 3 Ryle, Gilbert 218, 220 Sartre, Jean-Paul 83, 93, 120 satisfaction conditions 9, 101 – 2, 177 – 8 Scheler, Max 12, 20, 25n4, 120 Schuback, Marcia Sá Cavalcante 251, 253 – 4, 265n2 Sellars, Wilfrid 31, 174 – 5, 177 – 8, 189 Siegal, Susanna 290, 298 – 9, 302 – 5 skill(s) 35 – 6, 62, 109, 195 – 6, 208, 237, 239, 243, 304, 335 – 6, 338 space of meaning 2 – 3, 29 – 33, 47 – 9, 84 – 5, 174 – 6, 340, 346, 350 Tengelyi, László 125 transcendental categories 31 – 2, 50, 81 – 2, 121, 162, 271, 309, 330, 332, 337 – 40, 344, 347 – 9, 352n1, 352n2 truth 3, 23, 40, 45, 48, 80, 90, 94, 110 – 11, 113, 116, 174, 183, 190, 272, 274 – 9, 282, 286, 329 – 34, 339 – 40, 344, 349 validity 29, 32, 36 – 41, 43 – 4, 80, 132 – 4, 330 – 4, 340 – 1, 348 values and valuing 12, 108, 112 – 14, 120, 127 – 8, 165, 189, 338 – 9 von Wright, Georg Henrik 11 – 23 Waldenfels, Bernhard 125 Welton, Donn 82 Willard, Dallas 281 – 2, 285 Withy, Katherine 199 – 200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 25n3, 31, 62 – 78, 128, 166 – 7, 170, 173, 191, 195, 336