August 1, 2021

Timeliness and the Historicity of Commitment Part Two - Morality and Biography

In the last part I showed how Heidegger rejects the idea that time is a sequence of points along an axis. He argues that time, as we experience it, shapes our relation to the world and ourselves in an important way because we preserve our past and anticipate our future so that past, present, and future all influence one another.

I will now apply this framework to the phenomenon of explicitly undertaken socially embedded commitments in order to show how such commitments gain their meaning as episodes in a timelily constituted life.

Let us return to the example of promising a friend to help them move. What exactly happens when your friend calls and asks for your help? You have been friends for some time now, and it is because of this that you do not hesitate to promise your help. You are, in Heidegger’s words preserving your have-been as a friend of this person. Since this fact is also your reason to commit yourself, you are in this moment presentifying your common past as friends.1 On the other hand, you are also anticipating your future. Not only because your promise concerns a future action but also, and more importantly, because your present action of committing yourself anticipates the future of your relationship to your friend. You want to be a person who maintains meaningful relationships and is a good friend. When your friend asks for your help, you anticipate that you can be a person who maintains meaningful relationships and is a good friend by promising your help. This is not to say that your moral behavior is purely instrumental to your non-moral aim of staying friends with that person. Rather, it is in presentifying your past and future that you acknowledge the fact that promising is the morally right thing to do and later that keeping your promise is the right thing to do.

It is through preserving and anticipating that we morally commit ourselves—or, more precisely, that we acknowledge the commitments we have. We find ourselves always already socially embedded, connected in various ways to various others. So, we do not get to chose which commitments suggest themselves, because our past is always preserved. On the other hand, we get to chose which commitments we explicitly undertake and acknowledge because we undertake them in the light of our anticipated future. If you, for some reason, realize that you do not care for your friend the way you used to, you might refrain from entering the commitment of helping them or refrain from acknowledging it.

Not only are the acts of committing undertaken in the light of have-been and can-be, those also provide us with reasons for committing ourselves. As I said, the common past you have with your friend and the future you would like to have lead you to acknowledging that you have to keep your promise. But they also have led you to make the promise in the first place. Your common past and future are the reasons that made it morally right for you to commit yourself. Furthermore, in committing yourself you also anticipated the future situation in which you would have to fulfill your promise, and in acknowledging your commitment, you are preserving the situation in which you made your promise.

These considerations show us how Heidegger’s analysis of timeliness allows us to say that socially embedded moral commitments are integrated into a biography. You make the promise to your friend in the light of the fact that you have been a certain person in the past and in the light of the fact that you want to and can be a certain person in the future. It is because of the fact that there-being is timelily constituted—that past and future are always present—that there-being has a biography. The life of a person is not simply a sequence of events and reactions to those events, it is bound together by the horizon that is opened up when past and future are presentified. In this horizon, a person places their actions and thereby relates them to their past and future. It is in the light of these relations that we make sense of actions. Actions are explained in terms of both, plans which are to be actualized in the future as well as commitments (moral and non-moral) that are undertaken in the past. If I was asked why I am currently working on a PhD thesis in philosophy, I would explain that, at some point during my bachelor’s studies when philosophy was my minor subject I came to see that I was more interested in philosophy than I was in my major subject. I therefore formed the plan to get a Master’s degree in philosophy and, if possible become a Doctor of philosophy. My current situation would therefore be explained in terms of a commitment to bring about a certain future that I have undertaken in the past and with which I am still identifying. So, my present situation is held together by my past and future. It receives its meaning from them but it also gives meaning to them in the sense that my present actions are conducive to bringing about the future to which I committed myself in the past.

It is the same with moral actions: we all want to be a good person and we all have a certain conception of what this would amount to. It is because of the timeliness of our life that we can develop this conception, work towards it and see which actions are conducive to bringing it about. It is because of this that our actions, especially our moral actions are integrated into our biography and thereby become meaningful episodes rather than mere events.