Abstract

This paper outlines a path toward a normativity-first account of reason: the claim that reason and reason-giving is phenomenologically grounded in commitment, the experience of being the addressee of a normative claim that transforms the factic givens of one’s situation into potentially justifying (or normative) reasons. The experience of being the addressee of such a claim is the theme of second-person phenomenology. The paper begins by defending a metaphysically “neutral” version of phenomenological method under the title “methodological atheism”: the refusal to adopt any entity or science as an authoritative ground for philosophy. The normative ground of reason is then demonstrated by contrasting central elements of Stephen Darwall’s “second-person standpoint,” in which normative reasons presuppose symmetrical authority between addresser and addressee, with Emmanuel Levinas’s version of second-person phenomenology, in which there is an asymmetrical authority relation between the addresser and addressee. Arguing that Levinas’s account breaches the methodological atheism of phenomenology, the paper concludes by examining Heidegger’s account of conscience and commitment, which shows that the addressee’s responsiveness to the normative is phenomenologically prior to identifying any addresser of the call, and so prior to Darwall-style “recognitional” accounts of normative reasons as well as to Levinasian “metaphysical” accounts.