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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 291 consciously adopt that end before she can have it - and so before that end can be a reason for her action, whether or not she then recognizes it as such. But the internalist would reply that she cannot adopt that end - i.e. to get to Chicago despite the airline strike - until she knows about the airline strike on 15 May. Once she knows about the airline strike, she deliberately adopts the end of getting to Chicago despite it. But once she does that, she recognizes it as a reason to arrange alternative land transportation. So there is a reason, in this case, if and only if she has a reason; and she has a reason when and only when she consciously adopts it. So despite claims Nagel makes elsewhere (55), internalism, even of a not-obviously-Humean variety, does locate her reason for action within a particular temporal domain, i.e. between the time she learns of the pending airline strike and the time it occurs. Timeless reasons, on Nagel's account, are not timeless strictly speaking. Rather, they obtain within a specific temporal domain of a temporally restricted self, unified throughout that restricted time. These two solutions thus reopen the Kantian dilemma, i.e. the conflict between the Kantian rationalist's requirement that reasons be universal, objective and necessary, and the internalist's that they be motivationally effective for a spatiotemporally localized and contingent agent. What Nagel needs here is a way of retaining the (relative) timelessness of the reason itself consistently with the agent's epistemically limited access to it. He should accept the strong externalist's solution and simply add that a reason itself can be (relatively) timeless even though the agent's epistemological access to it is dated. Nagel suggests but does not develop something like this possibility when he avers that although the conditions which confer a reason on an event have been conceded not to be timeless, the value which that reason embodies is still timeless, and can transmit its influence from future to past, once it is clear that the reason will be present (55; italics added).10 2.6. Motivational Content and the Extraordinary Interpretation A tenseless statement expresses the sense of an assertion that may be made at different times and in different tenses; it expresses "what is asserted in common by past, present, and future [tensed] statements about the same circumstance or state of affairs" (61). It thereby expresses the standpoint of temporal neutrality that regards each stage of the speaker's life as equally real and equally a part of that person's life. We have seen that this conception of oneself as temporally extended then may be invoked as a criterion of adequacy for reasons for action: Elsewhere I argue that a distinction between the dictates of reason themselves as abstract objects and particular instances of reasoning in accordance with them is also part of Kant's solution to the question of how universal and necessary reason can cause particular act-tokens that conform to its moral prescriptions. 10 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
