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Linguistic Level
How do we do that?
At the end of the first part of our journey, a question may be raised
concerning the relationship between analytic philosophy and
phenomenology. Are we able to make sense of these procedures
of datation, localization, and name assignments without
trespassing the boundaries of linguistic analysis? Are we not
compelled to inquire about the kind of being which allows this
twofold way of identification as objective person and self-
designating subject? The very notion of a singular perspective
has unavoidable ontological connotations. What is this singular
perspectival position if not that of my own body? Now
embodiment, i.e., the very fact thatI am this body, i.e., a
something in the world, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part
of a broader ontological structure;I mean my belonging-to what
Husserl called Lebenswelt and Heidegger In-der-Welt-sein. And
we have here a certain preunderstanding of what it means to
belong in a corporeal way to the world. This preunderstanding
was already implied in the paradoxes of the ascription of
predicates to this special entity that we call a person. What we
understand in this preunderstanding is the primitive fact that my
body as a body among other bodies is a mere fragment of the
objective experience of the world, and that my body as mine
shares the status of the ego as the limit reference-point of the
world.
210 New aporias appear at this point: How to give an account of the
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double status of psychical predicates as, on the one hand,
keeping the same meaning whether self- or other-ascribable,
therefore as floating entities indifferent to actual ascriptions, and,
on the other hand, as actually ascribed to someone who owns
them? Another aporia: What kind of relation is there between
ascription and moral imputation? Does one ascribe to someone
in the same way a judge rules that something belongs legally to
somebody? But does not legal and moral imputation presuppose
the confidence that an agent has that he or she is the author of his
or her acts? And do not this confidence and this assurance-
when conceptualized-bring us back to the third cosmological
antinomy of Kant’s Dialectic of Pure Reason, which opposes the
Thesis according to which we are able to initiate actual
beginnings in the course of the world and the Antithesis which
requires an infinite regressus in the open series of causes?
As concerns the mixed models, such as Von Wright’s in
Explanation and Understanding, they rightly require a tight
connection between practical syllogisms and systemic
concatenations in order to make sense of the familiar notion of
initiative as the intentional intervention of self-reflecting agents
in the course of events. But this very connection between
teleological and causal segments of action seems to call once
more for another kind of discourse than that of analytical
philosophy. A phenomenology of the &dquo;I can,&dquo; following Merleau-
Ponty, seems to be required in order to make sense of the
belonging of the agent to the world considered itself as a practical
field, with paths and obstacles. Is not the preunderstanding of our
own belonging to the world as a practical field previous to the
distinction between a semantics of action as events and a
pragmatics of self-designating agents? Once more, what makes
the phenomenology of the &dquo;I can&dquo; more fundamental than
linguistic analysis, whether semantical or pragmatical, is its close
affinity with an ontology of the proper body, i.e., of a body which
is also my body and which, thanks to this twofold allegiance,
constitutes the connecting link between an agency which is ours
and a system of events which occurs in the world. Once more, too,
I agree that the phenomenology of the &dquo;I can&dquo; and the pertaining
ontology of the proper body and of the world as practical field
cannot be discursively articulated without the help of a semantics
and a pragmatics of our discourse related to actions and agents,
even at the price of the aporias which puzzled Kant,
Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty.
Ethical Level
In the third and last part of my paper,I show how the moral
dimension of imputation may be grafted onto the previous
211 characterizations of persons as selves. Moral imputation
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consists in a kind of judgment, saying that humans are
responsible for the proximate consequences of their deeds and
for that reason may be praised or blamed.3Such a judgment relies
on the previous descriptions of the agent as the owner and author
of his or her action and, beyond this, on the identification of the
person as a basic particular and of the self as implied in the self-
designation of the speaking subject. In this sense, both the
linguistic and the practical aspects of selfhood are presupposed
by the notion of moral imputation and responsibility. But new
components are brought forth by this notion. Some are mere
expansions of the previous category of action, some require a
specific treatment.
As an expansion of the previous category of action,I want to
introduce three features whose ethical bearing is at least implicit.
We have first to consider the hierarchical structure of such
complex actions as those which deserve to be called practices:
technical skills, jobs, arts, games, etc. Compared to simple
gestures, practices consist in chains of action displaying relations
of coordination and, above all, of subordination; thanks to the
structure of &dquo;embedment&dquo; proceeding from the latter, practices
may in turn be included in plans of life, ordering professional life,
family life, leisure, social, and political activities.
To this &dquo;logical&dquo; structure of practices and plans of life we add the
&dquo;historical&dquo; character that practices and plans of life owe to their
belonging to the unity of a life unfolding from birth to death. We
may call this second trait of complex actions historical, not only
because the unfolding of a unique life has temporal dimension,
but also because this temporality is brought to language in a
narrative form; in this sense, we may speak of the narrative unity
of a life. Narrativity constitutes in this way an immanent structure
of action. As H. Arendt has it, it is in stories that the &dquo;who of action&dquo;
can be said, i.e., has to be told. Historical narratives, in the sense
of historiography and fictional narratives, are grafted onto this
immanent narrativity which equates a human life with one or many
&dquo;life-stories.&dquo;
Once more,I confess that this is not the place for a complete
justification of the concept of obligation. We must leave
unanalyzed the complex relationships between a teleological and
a deontological foundation of morality. What is, rather, relevant to
our topic is to disentangle and make explicit the new feature of
selfhood corresponding to the deontological stage of morality. If
self-esteem was the subjective correlative to the ethical
evaluation of actions, then respect is the subjective correlative of
moral obligation. But whereas self-esteem might imply only me,
me alone, respect is directly structured as a dialogical category in
the same way that interaction implied conflict; there is no self-
respect without respect forthe other. We should even have to say
that if I esteem myself,I respect myself as someone else, as
another. It is the other in myself thatI respect. Conscience is the
witness of this internalization of otherness in self-respect. Notice
that respect does not abolish self-esteem but includes it; this may
be the key to a correct interpretation of the strange commandment
to love my neighbor as myself; this commandment interprets self-
esteem and respect for the other in terms of one another.
At the end of this too quick a journey,I make two final remarks:
First, the successive stages of our inquiry should not be dealt with
in a serial way but in a cumulative way; the ethical dimensions are
grafted onto the practical ones in the same way as the practical
ones are grafted onto the linguistic dimensions. We must be
capable of describing persons as basic particulars and selves as
self-designating subjects of discourse in order to be able to
characterize actions as intentionally-brought-forth events, and
214 agents as the owners and authors of their actions; and we must
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understand what agency means in order to apply to actions a
moral judgment of imputation and to call persons responsible
selves. Such is the inner connectedness of the system of
presuppositions which structures one of the possible
philosophical discourses about human beings.
Second, the elaboration of this system of presuppositions should
be assigned to philosophy, not to science, to the extent that it has
to do with the conditions of the possibility of any empirical science
concerning humans, not with facts pertaining to these sciences.
Such notions as basic particulars, self-reference, agency,
imputation, and responsibility may be held as transcendental
conditions the so-called human sciences. Philosophy, in this
of
sense, is a long footnote at the bottom of this declaration, uttered
with fear and trembling: &dquo;Nous voici, nous les humains, nous les
mortels!&dquo;
Université de Paris
ENDNOTES
*
This paper was presented at the World Congress of Philosophy,
Brighton, August 1988.
1.I shall use the inclusive language "humans" instead of "men," which
is suspect to many of us.
215
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