Table Of Content

The Many Futures of a Decision ii ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis, Michael Mack Simultaneity and Delay, Jay Lampert The Ethics of Time, John Panteleimon Manoussakis Enduring Time, Lisa Baraitser The Many Futures of a Decision JAY LAMPERT iv BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Jay Lampert, 2018 Jay Lampert has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Iulia Shevchenko / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third- party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4778-5 PB: 978-1-3500-4779-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4780-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-4781-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Introduction: What is the temporal reference of a decision? 1 1 Sartre: Decisions and the unbound future 21 2 Husserl: Decisions and temporal overlap 53 3 Heidegger: The original decision to decide 85 4 Kierkegaard: Decisionism in religion. Infinite futures 105 5 Schmitt: Decisionism in politics. Sovereign moments. Habermas: Steering procedures and the term limits of a decision 125 6 Decision theory: Seriality effects on decision 155 7 Branching futures: Tense logic and multiple worlds 197 8 Hegel: Morality without decision. Derrida: Indecision Theory 225 9 Deleuze: Decision in the empty future. The virtual decision = X 251 Afterword 291 Notes 295 Bibliography 317 Index 329 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Duquesne University for generous research support for this project, including the President’s Research Award in 2016. Jim Swindal (dean of arts), Ron Polansky (chair of philosophy), and all the faculty members and graduate students of the philosophy department have been excellent supporters and colleagues since I arrived at Duquesne in 2014. I would also like to thank the University of Guelph for generous sabbatical support in 2012– 2013, when I was beginning this project. I thank my colleagues at the University of Guelph for many extremely helpful discussions of early versions of this project, particularly Karen Houle and John Russon, and also Jim Vernon at York University. I thank all my brilliant colleagues at Duquesne as well as the amazing graduate students at both Guelph and Duquesne for their contributions to my intellectual life. I presented several pieces of this project at conferences over the last few years. I would like to thank Costas Boundas for organizing the Deleuze conference in Athens in 2015, where I presented part of Chapter 9; as well as Henry Somers-H all for organizing a panel at SPEP in Atlanta in 2015, and the Lisbon Deleuze conference in 2013, where I presented other parts of Chapter 9. An early version of some of the Deleuze material in this book was published as “Deleuze’s ‘Power of Decision,’ Kant’s = X, and Husserl’s Noema,” in At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post- Kantian Thought, edited by Craig Lundy and Daniela Voss. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, 272– 292. A different version of my SPEP paper on Deleuze will be published in Deleuze Studies in 2018. I also thank Jim Devin for organizing the Ontario- Quebec Hegel Organization meeting in Toronto in 2016, where I presented part of Chapter 8. I also thank Vedran Grahovac for organizing the Husserl Conference in Guelph in 2013, where I presented part of Chapter 2. newgenprepdf ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii I thank Jeff Mitscherling and Nicholas de Warren for disagreeing with me about Husserl; Jennifer Bates for disagreeing with me about Fichte and Hegel; Fred Evans for disagreeing with me about Derrida; and Dan Smith, Craig Lundy, Dan Selcer, and Sasa Stankovic for disagreeing with me about Deleuze. The topics I am working on in this project are vast, and I take responsibility for all the pathways that I did not follow. Thank you Hector. Thank you Jennifer. viii Introduction: What is the temporal reference of a decision? When we make simple decisions, like the decision to wake up at 8:00 a.m. the next morning, we presuppose a simple linear model of the future. But when we make open-e nded decisions, like the decision to get more involved in politics, which we might carry out in many different ways at many different times, we presuppose a more complex model of the future. We project a variety of possible futures. We can carry out the decision along many different pathways at once, which may converge or diverge at different points in time. Of course, not all possibilities for carrying out the decision can be articulated in advance, but this incomplete determinacy of the decision is generally understood at the time the decision is made, so its indeterminacy with regard to the future is part of the decision’s determinacy. There are certainly times when we make decisions without having foreseen all the consequences, and times when we feel bad about that upon later reflection. Sometimes we find ourselves doing something, and only retroactively attribute to ourselves an act of decision. Zizek assigns the “act of freedom” to “the time of the subject [that] is never ‘present’—t he subject never ‘is’, it only ‘will have been’: we never are free, it is only afterwards that we discover how we have been free.”1