Abstract
This chapter argues that nothing truly binds us in the absence of our ability to bind ourselves to ourselves, an ability which Crowell, following Heidegger, calls “commitment” (Bindung) or “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit). There is something paradoxical about commitment, however. As Joseph Rouse puts it: A “self-determined commitment could have only the semblance of authority,” since, “as Kierkegaard trenchantly noted, the authority that a commitment could secure through self-determination […] is like the authority of a monarch in a country where revolution is legitimate.” This paradox has led philosophers to seek the ground of bindingness in some authoritative entity: natural law, social convention, human rights, ideal consensus, the moral law, God. But, as Heidegger notes in what amounts to a motto for the present chapter: “We orient ourselves toward beings, and yet are never able to say what it is about beings that binds us.” This does not mean that we cannot say what binds us; rather, it means that what binds us does not belong to the order of beings but to being—specifically, what it means to be a self. Being bound by beings presupposes the capacity to bind oneself to oneself. This sounds very much like a version of Rouse’s paradox, and in order to show why it is not, Crowell’s argument is divided into three sections: (1) a review of some ways of being bound, together with some consideration of whether we are really bound in any of these ways; (2) an argument, based on Heidegger’s phenomenology of commitment, that we are indeed bound in these ways, but only if self-binding is possible; and (3) a concluding sketch of Heidegger’s answer to Rouse’s paradox.
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Notes
- 1.
Rouse’s own view is more complicated: “What needs to be understood is not how we can commit ourselves to something […], but how something already at stake in our situation can have a hold on or over us” (2002, 247). The complication lies in the fact that “what is at stake” belongs to the order of meaning (being), not beings.
- 2.
The hyphen’s mode of “binding and separating” parallels Heideggers account of the logical “copula” and informs his ontological grounding of reason in care. Interpreting Aristotle, Heidegger argues that the “is” of an assertion (logos apophantikos) binds and separates only because it rests on a more primordial phenomenon of “agreement” which Heidegger calls nous and identifies with understanding something as something. In Heidegger’s own terms—which we shall explore below—this understanding is “comportment,” and an essential element of comportment is commitment, or self-binding. Commitment is thus a necessary condition even for logical “binding” (Heidegger 1995, 304–333).
- 3.
In the film, the prisoners help one another to break their chains. This brings certain “second-person” considerations into play, which will be discussed below.
- 4.
This objection, central to Hegel’s criticism of Kant, is extensively explored in Slavens (2017).
- 5.
This is the crux of the disagreement between Rouse and Haugeland. The latter’s “mistake” is to conceive “practical and discursive normativity in terms of commitments undertaken by subjects that would confer normative authority upon otherwise anormative objects.” For Rouse, this leads Haugeland’s philosophy of science into a “problematic voluntarism,” together with a “problematic scientism” (Rouse 2002, 235, 257). A partial response to Rouse can be found in Crowell (2017).
- 6.
Heidegger’s term for this sort of possibility is Seinkönnen, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “potentiality-for-being” (Heidegger 1962, 119). We might also translate it as “ability to be.” Heidegger’s technical term for it is “understanding” (Verstehen), and he explains it as follows: We “sometimes use the expression ‘understanding something,’ ‘being a match for it,’ ‘being competent to do something.’ In understanding, as an existentiale [i.e., a category of Dasein’s being], that which we have such competence over is not a ‘what,’ but being as existing.” This is what a practical identity is: “Dasein is not something present-at-hand which possesses its competence for something by way of an extra; it is primarily being-possible. Dasein is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility” (Heidegger 1962, 183). The point is that acting for the sake of some “possibility for being” is a skill, and as such, norm-sensitive.
- 7.
- 8.
Why isn’t this simply another “metaphysical” definition, “simply the truth”? This is a complicated question, and it turns on Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy as itself a kind of practical identity whose meaning is at issue. This means that all philosophical assertions must be understood as “formal indications” (not simply “truths”) that serve to put those who consider them in a position to assess the phenomenological evidence for themselves. On formal indication see Crowell (2001, Chap. 7). We cannot develop this issue in detail, but the point is that Heidegger is offering a better description of our selfhood than the one attained through the description, “rational animal,” and his description does not entail valuing one’s rational animality as a practical identity, though it does not rule it out either.
- 9.
Heidegger’s notion of death as a “possibility” (“nicht-mehr-dasein-könnens”) includes the sense of an “ability-to-be” we introduced earlier. Death is not something that “happens” to Dasein; it is a way to be (Blattner 1994).
- 10.
For a fuller treatment of the themes introduced in the present discussion see Crowell (2013, Chaps. 8 and 9).
- 11.
In these passages, Maquarrie and Robinson translate Grund and its variations with “basis.” I have altered this to “ground.”
- 12.
As I mentioned earlier, Rouse ultimately grounds this normativity in what is at stake in the practice in which we are engaged together, and not in the commitment of the participants. Apart from disagreeing with his criticisms of existential commitment, I find Rouse’s general account (and within it, his account of the “normativity of nature”) quite compelling.
- 13.
Authenticity differs from autonomy in the way that “transparency” with regard to my responsibility for normative force differs from “respect” for my power to bring my behavior under the form of law.
- 14.
This brings Heidegger into unexpected proximity to Habermas’s notion of “discourse ethics.” For some discussion see Crowell (2013, Chap. 10).
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Crowell, S. (2022). Commitment: What Is Self-Binding, and How Is It Possible?. In: Fernández, P.A., García Martínez, A.N., Torralba, J.M. (eds) Ways of Being Bound: Perspectives from post-Kantian Philosophy and Relational Sociology. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11469-4_3
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