30.8.2007
1) Projects, and the ability of projecting, are firmly rooted in
the present, and assume directly some sense of future states of affairs.
(They assume also, but more indirectly, an idea of past events and facts that
are already made.) There is an implicit employment of temporal self-locating
in the formulation of projects, and this is also (somewhat transformed)
carried through the execution of a project.
In addition, there must be some evaluative capacity (something in the
projected future state of affairs must have importance, that is, some
positive or negative value, or else it would not suffice to generate the
motivational energy that is needed for devising and executing the actions
that make up a project); there has probably also to be a general background
knowledge that constrains the space of possibilities to a subspace which is,
more or less, realistically in the reach of one's actions. But for current
purposes, I'm not interested in these evaluative and selective components of
one's ability to formulate projects; I'd like to focus on the temporal
aspect.
2) There is a class of attitudes towards one's past actions that
is usually called regret: the wish to have had decided differently at some
earlier moment, which would have (or so one supposes) led to a state of
affairs different from, and preferred over, the actual, present one. Not all
forms of regret are about one's own past actions; what I'm referring to is
specifically what Bernard Williams calls 'agent-regret'[1]; this particular
sort of regret is about what one has done (including involuntary actions).
Agent-regret requires an ability to locate oneself both in the present and
in a different situation at a different time, namely a past time, similar
to the ability required for making projects. However, the situation is a
little more complex here. For projecting, an understanding of two situations
is needed: the current one, and a possible (and desired) future one. When
regretting a past action, in addition to an understanding of the current
situation and the past situation which led to taking that action, there is
need for understanding a situation that would have been the current state
if that action hadn't been taken - an alternative present situation, one that
had been possible at that past time, but has not become the actual
present. In some cases, such a constellation involving three (or more)
situations may also play a role for projecting (that is, some present
situation P when an agent can take an action leading to an outcome
X, or choose not to act, which results in outcome Y), but that
is not necessarily so (one can just ponder an action leading to X
because situation X seems desirable, without comparing it explicitly
with Y, that is, one can directly compare the present state of affairs
with some desired future state of affairs without considering other possible
future courses of events). This is not so with regrets about the past - they
always require to see the past action in the light of the actual and
some possible present situation.
And there is more. If you are regretting an earlier action, that is often
because there was something else that has happened (or that has come to
your awareness), something that you didn't include in your deliberation.
This may be an effect of the very action that you regret, but could also be
some completely unrelated event - important is that you wouldn't have acted
the way you did if you had known about it. Now that you do know, you're having
regrets. Again, you may count in events of this sort when you are designing
projects (they are often called 'risks' for the project), but not
necessarily. But for having regrets about a past decision, something must
have changed (else you would not come to a different judgment).
3) If the capacity for projecting and for regretting one's own
actions require a sense of one's temporal location, in some sense like the
one sketched above, there is an interesting connection to make for the
relationship between action, time and reality. Both are ways of evaluating
actions in the light of their possible (or expected) outcomes, in relation
to the present situation, and as such they implicitly contrast situations at
different times. Moreover, both are contrasting some perceivedly problematic
present situation with a different situation that is seen as
preferable (and again, is at a different time). Both assume a self-locating
element, and this self-location is in respect to both temporal location and
to what actually holds or is merely possible. I have
previously
suggested to regard this self-locating as a central component for a notion
of reality. But before I can get deeper into discussing this, I'd like to
say something more about the element of evaluation that I have mentioned
above.
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[1] Bernard Williams, "Moral Luck", in: Moral Luck.
Philosophical Papers 1973-1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1981, 20-39.
