Identification and Quasi-Desires

Abstract

Although the standard objections to Harry Frankfurt's early hierarchical analysis of identification and its variants are well known, more recent work on identification has yet to be subjected to the same degree of scrutiny. To remedy this I develop in this paper objections to Frankfurt's most recent analysis of identification as satisfaction that he first outlined in his paper ‘The Faintest Passion’. With such objections in place I show that they demonstrate that Frankfurt's analysis fails because it is based on the attitudes that the person whose identification with his desires is in question adopts towards them. I then develop a new (objective and cognitive) analysis that avoids the difficulties that Frankfurt's subjective approach is prey to. I conclude by considering and rebutting some preliminary objections to this new analysis.     

Choice, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities

Is choice necessary for moral responsibility? And does choice imply alternative possibilities of some significant sort? This paper will relate these questions to the argument initiated by Harry Frankfurt that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility, and to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's extension of that argument in terms of guidance control in a causally determined world. I argue that attending to Frankfurt's core conceptual distinction between the circumstances that make an action unavoidable and those that bring it about that the action is performed – a distinction emphasised in his recent restatement – provides a new route into an analysis of Frankfurt's argument by showing how it depends on a person's ‘decision to act’ involving the exercise of choice. The implicit reliance of Frankfurt's argument on this notion of choice, however, undermines his claim that the example of the counterfactual intervener strengthens the compatibilist case by providing a counter-example to the principle of alternative possibilities. I also argue that Frankfurt's reliance on the exercise of choice for moral responsibility is also evident in the Fischer/Ravizza argument, and that a close analysis of both arguments shows that such exercise of choice is not available if causal determinism is true.     

Frankfurt's Argument against Alternative Possibilities: Looking Beyond the Examples 1

Harry Frankfurt dramatically shaped the debates over freedom and responsibility by arguing that the sort of freedom germane to responsibility does not involve the freedom to do otherwise. His argument turns upon an example meant to disprove the Principle of Alternative Possibilities:

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AGENCY,AUTONOMY, AND SOCIAL INTELLIGIBILITY

Popular Frankfurt‐style theories of autonomy hold that (i) autonomy is motivation in action by psychological attitudes that have ‘authority’ to constitute the agent's perspective, and (ii) attitudes have this authority in virtue of their formal role in the individual's psychological system, rather than their substantive content. I pose a challenge to such ‘psychologistic’ views, taking Frankfurt's and Bratman's theories as my targets. I argue that motivation by attitudes that play the roles picked out by psychologistic theories is compatible with radically unintelligible behavior. Because of this, psychologistic views are committed to classifying certain agents as ‘autonomous’ whom we intuitively find to be dysfunctional. I then argue that a necessary condition for autonomy is that an agent's behavior is intelligible in a particular way: autonomy necessarily involves acting from a subjective practical perspective that is, in principle, minimally comprehensible to others – not simply in a causal sense, but in a substantive, socio‐cultural sense.     

Autonomy,and Then

Abstract

Among the numerous conceptions of autonomy, three are particularly important: Kant's notion of humans' being subject, and subject only, to moral laws they gave themselves, Frankfurt's idea of persons' willing and acting deriving from the essential character of their wills, and the popular conception of persons' being master over whether others do or do not certain things to them. Kant's moral conception of autonomy, it is argued, is untenable because the moral character of a law and its self-givenness are incompatible. Frankfurt's idea suffers from the fact that we cannot give substance to talk of the essential character of one's will. The third conception is practically irrelevant: there is no principle requiring people to be master over what others do to them. Thus autonomy may have to be dropped from our self-conception. To some this will appear a grave loss. In fact it is not.     

Autonomy and the Authority of Personal Commitments: From Internal Coherence to Social Normativity

Abstract

It has been argued – most prominently in Harry Frankfurt's recent work – that the normative authority of personal commitments derives not from their intrinsic worth but from the way in which one's will is invested in what one cares about. In this essay, I argue that even if this approach is construed broadly and supplemented in various ways, its intrasubjective character leaves it ill-prepared to explain the normative grip of commitments in cases of purported self-betrayal. As an alternative, I sketch a view that focuses on intersubjective constraints of intelligibility built into social practices and on the pragmatics of how those norms are contested in an ongoing fashion.     

Caring,final ends and sports

In this essay I argue that sports at their best qualify as final ends, that is, as ends whose value is such that they ground not only the practices whose ends they are, but everything else we do as human agents. The argument I provide to support my thesis is derived from Harry Frankfurt's provocative work on the importance of the things we care about, more specifically, on his claim that it is by virtue of caring about things and practices, really caring about them – even loving them – we are able to regard and treat them as final ends. Sports, I claim, are paradigmatic examples of practices cared about and loved in these deep ways, and as such deserve to be considered, rather than dismissed because of their supposed triviality, as one of those ends around which a life most worth living can be legitimately forged.     

Frankfurt versus Frankfurt: a new anti-causalist dawn

There is an important anomaly to the causalist/compatibilist paradigm in the philosophy of action and free will. This anomaly, which to my knowledge has gone unnoticed so far, can be found in the philosophy of Harry Frankfurt. Two of his most important contributions to the field – his influential counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities and his ‘guidance’ view of action – are incompatible. Frankfurt's counterexample to the Principle works only if we do not understand action as Frankfurt does in his guidance account. If, on the other hand, we understand agency in terms of the agent's guidance, then his counterexample to the Principle fails because, then, counterfactual scenarios of Frankfurt-type counterexamples are such that what happens does not count as the relevant agent's action. So Frankfurt-type counterexamples do not show that the agent could not have avoided acting as she did: so they fail to offer a scenario in which the agent is intuitively responsible even though she could not have avoided acting as she did. Therefore, Frankfurt-type counterexamples do not challenge the Principle, according to which ‘a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise’. The importance of this inconsistency goes far beyond the issue of coherence within Frankfurt's philosophy. I shall argue that this inconsistency represents an important anomaly within the causalist/compatibilist framework; so that we should start to seriously consider having to move on from the established paradigm.     

Alterity in Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas: From Ambiguity to Ambivalence

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held.     

Resisting the Logic of Ambivalence: Bad Faith as Subversive,Anticolonial Practice

This article critiques Homi Bhabha's proposal that mimicry, as a transgressive performance of ambivalence, disrupts the colonial violence of the stereotype, and as such, generates emancipatory conditions for postcolonial subjects. I am critical of this naming of mimicry as enabling a possible liberation from colonial violence not only because it fails to address the loss of belonging that significantly marks the experience of being so violated, but also because it seems to intensify this loss in the hybridity and fragmentation that it celebrates. Through the work of María Lugones and Mariana Ortega, I propose a reimagined sense of Sartrean bad faith as one that corrects for this failure. This account of bad faith—as subversive, anticolonial practice—legitimizes my longing for a stability made impossible by the violent ambivalence that pervades both the colonial and postcolonial condition. Lugones's accounts of multiplicity and ontological plurality, as well as Ortega's conception of hometactics, help me argue that this reimagined conception of bad faith ought to be considered productive when it comes to existential strategies that pursue the possibility of free black life.     

Précis of Justice,Luck, and Knowledge*

Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (JLK) contributes to recent developments in two areas, moral responsibility and distributive justice. Prominent luck‐neutralizing approaches to distributive justice, exemplified in work by Cohen and by Roemer, argue that justice requires equal distribution of goods for which people aren't responsible. Such views of justice haven't focused attention on responsibility itself. Meanwhile, responsibility has been illuminat‐ingly articulated in work including, and influenced by, Frankfurt's seminal essays. My book brings these separate lines of work, on justice and on responsibility, into contact, examining how the new articulation of responsibility constrains the roles responsibility can play in distributive justice. Part I focuses on responsibility and its inverse correlate, luck; Part II assesses responsibility‐based approaches to justice in light of preceding arguments about responsibility. (See JLK, 4–5 on responsibility, reactive attitudes, and accountability.)     

Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard,MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative

As part of the widespread turn to narrative in contemporary philosophy, several commentators have recently attempted to sign Kierkegaard up for the narrative cause, most notably in John Davenport and Anthony Rudd's recent collection Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue. I argue that the aesthetic and ethical existence‐spheres in Either/Or cannot adequately be distinguished in terms of the MacIntyre‐inspired notion of ‘narrative unity’. Judge William's argument for the ethical life contains far more in the way of substantive normative content than can be encapsulated by the idea of ‘narrative unity’, and the related idea that narratives confer intelligibility will not enable us to distinguish Kierkegaardian aesthetes from Kierkegaardian ethicists. ‘MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians’ also take insufficient notice of further problems with MacIntyre's talk of ‘narrative unity’, such as his failure to distinguish between literary narratives and the ‘enacted dramatic narratives’ of which he claims our lives consist; the lack of clarity in the idea of a ‘whole life’; and the threat of self‐deception. Finally, against the connections that have been drawn between Kierkegaardian choice and Harry Frankfurt's work on volitional identification, I show something of the dangers involved in putting too much stress on unity and wholeheartedness.     

Reflection on the relationship between psychoanalysis and christianity

Coming to terms with Freud's ideas and attitudes toward religion is prerequisite to any consideration of the compatibility between psychoanalysis and Christianity. In a previous essay and in this one I have attempted to sort out Freud's ambivalence and ambiguity in the area and to point out their relevance to the issue at hand. In this paper I survey and criticize the opinions of a number of writers, as well as putting forward some of my own. I emphasize that the compatibility question is one of value, rather than of fact, and that one's answer to it depends largely on one's conception of psychoanalysis itself. The issue is not clear-cut. Some aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice appear more reconcilable with Christian theology, ethics, and spirituality than others. A few psychoanalytic tenets seem in direct contradiction to religious ones. I close with an historical-sociological point that I believe has some bearing on the matter.     

On Being Wholeheartedly Ambivalent: Indecisive Will,Unity of the Self,and Integration by Narration

In this paper, I want to discuss the relation between ambivalence and the unity of the self. I will raise the question whether a person can be both ambivalent about his own will and nevertheless be wholehearted. Since Harry Frankfurt’s theory is my main point of reference, I briefly introduce his account of the will and the reasons for his opposition towards ambivalence in the first section. In the second section, I analyse different interpretations of ambivalence. In the third section, I provide a narrative account of a diachronic integration of the self that allows for the integration of volitional ambivalence. Finally, I scrutinise different meanings of the unity of the self, since disintegration, not ambivalence, seems to be bad for us. I conclude that persons can indeed be wholeheartedly ambivalent.     

In Defense of Ambivalence and Alienation

In this paper, I argue against certain dogmas about ambivalence and alienation. Authors such as Harry Frankfurt and Christine Korsgaard demand a unity of persons that excludes ambivalence. Other philosophers such as David Velleman have criticized this demand as overblown, yet these critics, too, demand a personal unity that excludes an extreme form of ambivalence (“radical ambivalence”). I defend radical ambivalence by arguing that, to be true to oneself, one sometimes needs to be radically ambivalent. Certain dogmas about alienation are even more entrenched. Allen Wood’s entry on “alienation” in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy begins as follows: “A psychological or social evil, characterized by one or another type of harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation, which sunders things that belong together.” I think that it is not true that self-alienation is necessarily “harmful.” I argue that radical ambivalence is a form of self-alienation. Thus, because faithfulness to oneself sometimes requires radical ambivalence, to be true to oneself, one sometimes needs to be alienated from oneself.     

Slavoj Žižek,the Death Drive,and Zombies: A Theological Account

In this article, I discuss the question of the hybridity of the religious and the secular through the example of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj ?i?ek and his psychoanalytically inspired notion of the undead. The undead is ?i?ek's rendering of the Freudian death drive, and as the undead is instantiated in the popular culture cliché of the zombies, we need to look no further than to George A. Romero's classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead from 1968. Thus, this article proceeds in three steps: first, I trace the concept of the death drive from Freud to ?i?ek, supplemented, for their theological importance, by two contemporary philosophers, Jonathan Lear and Eric Santner. Second, I discuss the zombie in contemporary popular culture, with a focus on Romero's movies, and whether such cinematic representations can function as a kind of cultural critique. In conclusion, I return to the question of theology by showing what ?i?ek means by theology and contrasting as well as comparing his philosophy to Augustine's anthropology. Despite ?i?ek's atheistic confession and his dismissal of all pre‐modern philosophy and theology, I show that Augustine's anthropology is structurally similar to ?i?ek's, thus suggesting that the relationship is more complex than ?i?ek allows. Both are united in rejecting any superficial and transparent understanding of self, and become, consequently, an example of the ambiguous relationship between religion and secularity in contemporary times.     

IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

In this paper, I focus on the term ‘immanence’ in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression. I argue that Beauvoir's use of Hegel's master?slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi‐Strauss's reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies “woman” is constructed as “absolutely other.” I show that there is an ambiguous logic of abjection at work in Beauvoir's account that explains why men are the only examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir.     

Ambivalence and Male Religious Experience: An Autobiographical Study

I argue that what are typically identified as “calls from God” to an office of sacred power are filled with various degrees and types of ambivalence. This ambivalence becomes manifest (or not) to the person experiencing a call at various points in their lifespan and it exists for a number of reasons. I seek to unveil the psychodynamics responsible for these feelings of ambivalence. I argue that the awareness of feelings of ambivalence can be correlated with the degree of one’s happiness—specifically in one’s sexual and mental health; this point is marshaled throughout the essay by autobiographical examples of men who experienced some type of divine calling. In addition to psychoanalytic resources, I apply postmodern autobiographical criticism to this autobiographical study; my autobiographical notes are written in italics.