Scripts, repeatable sequences of actions triggered by experienced events and aiming at a goal, were moved to the center of philosophy by Heidegger. But they long predate him, for they are basic to life itself. But where in fact do they come from? Where are they going?
There are different ways to take that question.
First, scripts are acquired by individuals, because they consist basically in bodily movements and bodies are individuated. How does an individual acquire a script? By learning (#34), but not only. Some are programmed into the human (or other animal) body: walking, eating, sex. Others are learned in early childhood (bathroom procedures, dressing). Others do not pre-exist their acquisition, but ae improvised from an encounter with something radically new (works of art). Some scripts come from other scripts, which they either modify (as driving cars modifies guiding carriages) or into which they are inserted as subscripts (as careful washing of hands was inserted into the “return home from the supermarket” script during the coronavirus pandemic).
The Kantian question of the criteria for forming a name, raised in post # 20, gains a bit more clarity from Heidegger’s notion of a script: a new word either plays its role in an old script (often, in this context, called a “language-game”), or modifies it, or designates a new script; the criteria for new words thus coincide, at least in part, with those for introducing new scripts.
What makes a new script, or word, a good one is in part how it relates to scripts already in existence. The relation may be additive, in that a new script enables socially coordinated action to achieve new goals, or more efficiently achieve old goals. A new script may also be revisionary, in that the new script makes changes in old scripts, often forcing them to cohere in a new and larger project. Hegel examines this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Right, which unites numerous social institutions and practices—scripts—into a new and a larger project of producing a sort of Kantian moral agents (see my Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant).
This kind of unification of scripts can eventually result in the structure Aristotle sets out in Nicomachean Ethics I.1 (and which, as I mentioned in #34, was Teutonified in Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world in Being and Time): all human pursuits have a single goal. For Aristotle that goal was ἐυδαιμονία, reason functioning as the ousiodic form of an individual life (often mistranslated as “happiness”). For Heidegger (as a good Teuton) it is death.
But this raises another question: in what sense is death the “goal” of life? Who seeks it?
No one; death seeks us. As have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter Seven), the fact that I am going to die shapes my life, for it means that I cannot do everything: I cannot live everywhere, marry everyone, pursue every possible career. I cannot acquire all possible scripts, and must therefore allocate my time and energy by selecting and organizing the scripts I do acquire. In doing so I act, like a Homeric hero (#32), at the behest of my mortality, which forces me to put my life into a definite shape.
Death thus dominates our lives in a way oddly similar to Aristotle’s concept of deliberation (προαίρεσις). In deliberation we reason back from our concept of ἐυδαιμονία toour present situation, and decide what we can do now to most advance our “happiness.” This process, which is the rule of reason in an individual life, selects and organizes, from all the alternatives available to the deliberator, the single best one. In that way the process of deliberation shapes the life of the person deliberating; and since it is a rational process (Aristotle calls it a syllogism), deliberation constitutes the rule of reason in a human life. Deliberating well is thus ἐυδαιμονία itself (hence the infelicity of “happiness” as a translation). It is the full realization (ἐνεργεῖα) of the human essence.
Death for Heidegger provokes similar selections and organization; it bounds and disposes thr components of my life and so of my self. But this ousiodic dominance is, here, without content: unlike Aristotelian ἐυδαιμονία,death does not provide a concrete goal to work towards but merely forces me to determine that some scripts will be included and others excluded from my life, without telling me which. It is indeed my τέλος, but it is an empty τέλος: since its nature is unknown, its commands are empty, and it rests with me to fill them in.
We can now see Heidegger’s major innovation on traditional accounts of ousia: ousiodic form, the telos of a life, is for him indeterminate, for no one knows what death is. As such, it has no characteristics of its own and is defined only by what it puts a stop to, i.e. a human life. It is an utter darkness at the end of the tunnel. Moreover, your death and my death, being both utterly featureless, are indistinguishable and so constitute a single large extinction—a single Nothing.
Yet this nothingness is active, in that it shapes the very lives it ends: “The Nothing,” Heidegger says, “nothings.” Given philosophy’s ancient commitment to ousia, it is not surprising that Heidegger’s pithiest formulation of his alternative to ousia—“the Nothing nothings—” should have drawn so much ridicule from philosophers, especially those in the English-speaking world. Their laughter showed us who they are.
Though ousiodic structure is endemic in the West, its three axes never been focused on, and the post-Aristotelian roles of ousia in structuring Western lives have never been seen clearly—which has only enhanced their dominance. In Being and Time, ousiodic structure finally receives a frontal philosophical assault; more will follow (see my Reshaping Reason, 2014).