Abstract
We are not texts. Our histories are not narratives. Life is not literature.
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Refereces
Tim van Gelder and Robert Port, “It’s About Time: An Overview of The Dynamical Approach to Cognition,” in Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, ed. Tim van Gelder and Robert Port (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995).
There is much more to Heidegger’s distinction, prominently his assertion that such explicit comprehension of a phenomenon takes places only when our prethematic understanding has broken down, hit felt difficulty. I will not rely on this thesis in my investigation.
For an exposition of these themes, see my Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge, 1999), as well as my “Existence and Self-Understanding in Being and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenology Research 56 (1996), 97–110.
But not universal, as can be seen by the continued resistance to it offered by, among others, transcendentalists (Kantians, Husserlians) and Hegelians.
Jose Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays toward a Philosophy of History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1961).
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988).
Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
Allen Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2.
Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 18.
Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John Barnett Brough, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
This is really an inadequate term, because it does not suggest the active, effectual character of the protention inherent in action. Heidegger’s German term is plausibly as faulty as the English translation.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §§15–18, 69a.
Can, Time, Narrative, and History, 52.
In the passage above from Time, Narrative, and History, 52.
Heidegger’s move here is related to, and surely derived from, Aristotle’s distinction between action in order to become something and action in order to be or maintain being something. Carr pointed this out to me in correspondence. It is also related to James P. Carse’s distinction between finite and infinite games. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Free Press, 1986).
Carr also looks back to Heidegger to help him with some of the issues I shall be taking on (in his Chapter 3 on the coherence of life). But Carr understands Heidegger’s arguments differently than I. He turns Heidegger into something of a Diltheyan — which is not so terribly implausible, as may be seen by looking at Charles Guignon’s interpretation of Heidegger in his Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983). I have disagreed strongly with this approach in my work on Heidegger.
There is a clear sense in which even such intrinsic standards can become obsolete, if for instance they no longer fit the social context in which they make sense. For example, the standards constitutive of being a milk man have been rendered otiose by social change.
Professorial goals might cease to attract a burn-out precisely because the intrinsic standards cease to have a hold on her.
Wilhelm Dilthey, DerAufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).
I shall not here assess whether such retrospective imposition is valuable or not. I only aim to call it what it is: retrospective imposition.
An earlier version of this paper was read at the symposium from which the current anthology is composed. I want to thank Lester Embree, John Brough, and the other participants in the symposium for their helpful comments, as well as David Carr, whose reply, in correspondence, to the earlier version of this paper proved extremely valuable in revising it.
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Blattner, W.D. (2000). Life Is Not Literature. In: Brough, J.B., Embree, L. (eds) The Many Faces of Time. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9411-0_10
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