Having a History

Having established that there is a non-absurd interpretation of talk about “essentially self-conscious” entities, we can go on to specify that these will be the entities we will say have a history and not just a past, where “history” refers to progressive changes in the entity’s self-constituting normative stance, attitude, identification, commitment. (Once again, “self-constituting” implies no magic bootstrapping from nothing, just that what the self-conscious entity takes to be the case contributes to its constitution; and “entity” is just an anaphoric reference to a previous mention.)

Brandom does not use second-nature talk, so he speaks of these entities as having a history instead of a nature. In a general context, I find it helpful to speak of second-natured things as having second nature as well as first nature; and of second nature as the sort of thing that intrinsically has a history, whereas a composite of first and second nature derivatively has a history.

This creates a nuancial difference in the identity of the entities Brandom and I respectively may be mentioning in this sort of context — his entities that have a history seem to be entirely constituted by what I am calling second nature, which would be a nonempirical normative status, whereas mine at least could also be the larger wholes that include a first-nature empirical “me” with factual characteristics as well as a transcendental “I” indexing second-nature commitments in a unity of apperception.

An entity that has a history and no first nature would be just whatever entity we associate with the second-nature commitments in question, whereas an entity that has a history and a first nature would be associated with both a “historical” second nature and an “unhistorical” first nature. In any given case, I think it is important to be clear which of these is at issue.

My preferred variant — based on a strong concern to avoid implicit too-easy identification of empirical and transcendental subjectivity — imposes or brings to light additional burdens on the normative monism I have attributed to Brandom, which would aim to explain everything that needs to be preserved about the empirical, in terms of the transcendental. I believe this can be resolved in principle with a bit of added bookkeeping. (See also One, Many; Individuation; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

Also, “history” is said in many ways. Aside from the transcendental-only sense discussed above, there is another in which I would want to say that nature too has a history (think of things like historical geology, evolution, and ecological succession); and that non-Whiggish history of human culture also has its place. See Aristotelian Matter; Historiography; Archaeology of Knowledge.)