B. Scot Rousse
I am Director of Research for Pluralistic Networks, Inc. I am also a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. I am animated by the perplexities of learning to be human in a technological age. I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University and my B.A. from UC Berkeley.
Supervisors: Cristina Lafont, Hubert Dreyfus, Penelope Deutscher, and Kyla Ebels-Duggan
Supervisors: Cristina Lafont, Hubert Dreyfus, Penelope Deutscher, and Kyla Ebels-Duggan
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Papers by B. Scot Rousse
nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility
of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.”
Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger,
despite not having worked out the details himself, is
also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural
time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in
which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the
stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger was
indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though
his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and
pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction,
I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that
stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer
William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a
failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the
sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential
originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive
sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature
of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained.
World-time turns out to be a co-production of
Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the
endogenous sequentiality of events in nature.
Opening sentences:
END (ENDE) 'End' can refer to an outermost limit, to the cessation of a process, or to the termination or the guiding purpose of an entity. Heidegger distinguishes the existential ending of DASEIN's BEING-IN-THE-WORLD from the occurrent ending of something such as a rain shower, a road, a painting, or a loaf of bread (SZ 244-245). Dasein's end is somehow ontologically intrinsic to it, rather than being some extrinsic point at which it gets cut off, finished, or used up. To have an end in this EXISTENTIAL sense is to have a way of being Heidegger calls "being towards the end" [Sein zum Ende] (SZ 245). To be towards the end in this manner is to exist "for the sake of" certain projects and defining commitments which remain "always outstanding," guiding my activities, structuring my world, and giving me an identity rather than being definite goals I seek to accomplish and leave behind.
Opening sentences:
Transparency is a quality Heidegger attributes to certain interpretations. If an interpretation has transparency, this means the interpreter does not take the presuppositions structuring her interpretive point of view for granted, no matter how self-evident they seem; the interpreter actively maintains a readiness to revise or reject the presuppositions initially guiding her interpretation so that new possibilities for understanding can be revealed.
A revised and expanded version of the paper appears in The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene, edited by Richard Polt and Jon Wittrock (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)
Whether or not the stratigraphers formally adopt the nomenclature, the proposal that the earth has entered a new epoch called “the Anthropocene” has touched a nerve . One unsettling part of having our ecological finitude thrust upon us with the term “Anthropocene” is that, as Nietzsche said of the death of God, we ourselves are supposed to be the collective doer responsible here, yet this is a deed which no one individual meant to do and whose implications no one fully comprehends. For the pessimists about humanity, the implications seem rather straightforward: humanity will die. Yet, as we will explore in this paper, the death that we may be facing cannot be assumed to be simply biological death or extinction. Indeed, even if we are not running headlong into a mass extinction and biological demise, we do seem to be facing an ontological death. Our ecological finitude is the harbinger of our ontological finitude. The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear, in a different context, called ontological vulnerability. Worlds die too; the ways of life they sustain can become impossible, ceasing to make sense and matter. The constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to their eventual collapse is what we mean by ontological finitude. This is what we face as presumed denizens in a dawning Anthropocene.
In Subjectivity and Selfhood, Dan Zahavi argues that an individual’s narrative self-interpretation (his personal identity) is distinct from and ontologically dependent upon a formal-phenomenological minimal selfhood. The latter is the basic first-personal, pre-reflective givenness of our experiences. I argue that Zahavi’s use of the narrative conception of selfhood to account for an individual’s personal identity is problematic because, by conceiving of personal selfhood strictly from the perspective reflective self-interpretation, he passes over an important phenomenon, namely pre-reflective self-understanding. An individual’s personal identity is first of all manifest and operative in the habits and style of his pre-reflective absorption in the world, not in the story he reflectively constructs about himself. Thus, Zahavi’s twofold distinction between minimal self-awareness and self-interpretation needs to be amended. Drawing on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt I will argue that the phenomena demand a threefold distinction in our conception of the self: self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-interpretation.
Note: I originally presented this paper at the 2009 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I also presented it at the 2008 New School for Social Research Graduate Philosophy Conference (where Dan Zahavi, whose views I critically discuss, was a keynote speaker). At the same time, Hubert Dreyfus distributed it as a reading assignment for his course on Division II of Heidegger’s Being and Time at UC Berkeley in the spring of 2008. Dreyfus posted it for download on the course website, and the paper has lived there ever since. I ended up incorporating many of the arguments presented here in my PhD thesis, Thrown Projection: An Interpretation and Defense of the Hermeneutic Conception of the Self in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Northwestern University, December 2011), but I never published the paper separately. However, given the popularity of Dreyfus’s courses around the world and the fact that he made a podcast of the lectures along with the assigned readings available to his audience, this version of my paper has taken on a life of its own. It has been frequently downloaded and circulated over the past several years and people have written to me often asking if it has been published. It has even started showing up in the references of other people’s published work. Given all of this, I decided to keep it easily accessible and to post it again on my own sites.
Frankfurt claims that we should conceive of the most basic commitments which practically orient a person in the world and define his identity (“volitional necessities”) as naturalistic facts, foundational for and located completely without the normative space of reasons. In support of this he appeals to the supposedly foundational role played in human life by the instinct for self-preservation, what Frankfurt calls the “love of living.” The claim is that in questions of practical identity there is a definite priority of the factual over the normative. Frankfurt’s naturalistic model of volitional necessity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the temporal structure of care, a misunderstanding that helps lead him to an implausible conception of the basic structures of human identity.
Heidegger advances an anti-naturalistic conception of caring, one bound up with his way of understanding how human beings relate to their own future. I argue that the existential, temporal, and normative significance that Frankfurt attributes to the naturalized “love of living” is better captured by the Heideggerian claim that human identity is defined by being “for-the-sake-of” certain projects and commitments, a way of being lived out in the way Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”
nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility
of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.”
Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger,
despite not having worked out the details himself, is
also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural
time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in
which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the
stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger was
indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though
his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and
pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction,
I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that
stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer
William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a
failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the
sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential
originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive
sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature
of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained.
World-time turns out to be a co-production of
Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the
endogenous sequentiality of events in nature.
Opening sentences:
END (ENDE) 'End' can refer to an outermost limit, to the cessation of a process, or to the termination or the guiding purpose of an entity. Heidegger distinguishes the existential ending of DASEIN's BEING-IN-THE-WORLD from the occurrent ending of something such as a rain shower, a road, a painting, or a loaf of bread (SZ 244-245). Dasein's end is somehow ontologically intrinsic to it, rather than being some extrinsic point at which it gets cut off, finished, or used up. To have an end in this EXISTENTIAL sense is to have a way of being Heidegger calls "being towards the end" [Sein zum Ende] (SZ 245). To be towards the end in this manner is to exist "for the sake of" certain projects and defining commitments which remain "always outstanding," guiding my activities, structuring my world, and giving me an identity rather than being definite goals I seek to accomplish and leave behind.
Opening sentences:
Transparency is a quality Heidegger attributes to certain interpretations. If an interpretation has transparency, this means the interpreter does not take the presuppositions structuring her interpretive point of view for granted, no matter how self-evident they seem; the interpreter actively maintains a readiness to revise or reject the presuppositions initially guiding her interpretation so that new possibilities for understanding can be revealed.
A revised and expanded version of the paper appears in The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene, edited by Richard Polt and Jon Wittrock (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)
Whether or not the stratigraphers formally adopt the nomenclature, the proposal that the earth has entered a new epoch called “the Anthropocene” has touched a nerve . One unsettling part of having our ecological finitude thrust upon us with the term “Anthropocene” is that, as Nietzsche said of the death of God, we ourselves are supposed to be the collective doer responsible here, yet this is a deed which no one individual meant to do and whose implications no one fully comprehends. For the pessimists about humanity, the implications seem rather straightforward: humanity will die. Yet, as we will explore in this paper, the death that we may be facing cannot be assumed to be simply biological death or extinction. Indeed, even if we are not running headlong into a mass extinction and biological demise, we do seem to be facing an ontological death. Our ecological finitude is the harbinger of our ontological finitude. The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear, in a different context, called ontological vulnerability. Worlds die too; the ways of life they sustain can become impossible, ceasing to make sense and matter. The constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to their eventual collapse is what we mean by ontological finitude. This is what we face as presumed denizens in a dawning Anthropocene.
In Subjectivity and Selfhood, Dan Zahavi argues that an individual’s narrative self-interpretation (his personal identity) is distinct from and ontologically dependent upon a formal-phenomenological minimal selfhood. The latter is the basic first-personal, pre-reflective givenness of our experiences. I argue that Zahavi’s use of the narrative conception of selfhood to account for an individual’s personal identity is problematic because, by conceiving of personal selfhood strictly from the perspective reflective self-interpretation, he passes over an important phenomenon, namely pre-reflective self-understanding. An individual’s personal identity is first of all manifest and operative in the habits and style of his pre-reflective absorption in the world, not in the story he reflectively constructs about himself. Thus, Zahavi’s twofold distinction between minimal self-awareness and self-interpretation needs to be amended. Drawing on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt I will argue that the phenomena demand a threefold distinction in our conception of the self: self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-interpretation.
Note: I originally presented this paper at the 2009 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I also presented it at the 2008 New School for Social Research Graduate Philosophy Conference (where Dan Zahavi, whose views I critically discuss, was a keynote speaker). At the same time, Hubert Dreyfus distributed it as a reading assignment for his course on Division II of Heidegger’s Being and Time at UC Berkeley in the spring of 2008. Dreyfus posted it for download on the course website, and the paper has lived there ever since. I ended up incorporating many of the arguments presented here in my PhD thesis, Thrown Projection: An Interpretation and Defense of the Hermeneutic Conception of the Self in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Northwestern University, December 2011), but I never published the paper separately. However, given the popularity of Dreyfus’s courses around the world and the fact that he made a podcast of the lectures along with the assigned readings available to his audience, this version of my paper has taken on a life of its own. It has been frequently downloaded and circulated over the past several years and people have written to me often asking if it has been published. It has even started showing up in the references of other people’s published work. Given all of this, I decided to keep it easily accessible and to post it again on my own sites.
Frankfurt claims that we should conceive of the most basic commitments which practically orient a person in the world and define his identity (“volitional necessities”) as naturalistic facts, foundational for and located completely without the normative space of reasons. In support of this he appeals to the supposedly foundational role played in human life by the instinct for self-preservation, what Frankfurt calls the “love of living.” The claim is that in questions of practical identity there is a definite priority of the factual over the normative. Frankfurt’s naturalistic model of volitional necessity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the temporal structure of care, a misunderstanding that helps lead him to an implausible conception of the basic structures of human identity.
Heidegger advances an anti-naturalistic conception of caring, one bound up with his way of understanding how human beings relate to their own future. I argue that the existential, temporal, and normative significance that Frankfurt attributes to the naturalized “love of living” is better captured by the Heideggerian claim that human identity is defined by being “for-the-sake-of” certain projects and commitments, a way of being lived out in the way Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”