Abstract
Argument: Primitive will is the core given over to action, affect and subjectivity. Subjectivity is elaborated as the will diverts from instinctual routines bound to environmental objects through an intrinsic development to the drives. The drives partition the will into desires, needs, wants, etc. These are tributaries of drive as it distributes into the hierarchy of values in the self. The goals of a drive become the concepts of a desire. External constraints are simultaneous with the contents they elicit. Intrinsic constraints apply within the mental state and from one state to the next. Constraints alter probabilities of outcome but are not direct causes.
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Notes
There is a full discussion of the deep or core self in Brown, Self and Process, 61ff. The concept is of a core self that distributes into acts and objects. The core undergoes slow change, the surface, rapid transformation. On a prior distinction of a matrix (essential or core) self that endures and a focal or peripheral self that changes, see D. Parker, Experience and Substance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1941).
V. Bourke, Will in Western Thought (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964).
Though see W. James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890).
F. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 3, ed. R. Haldane and J. Kemp (London, 1907–1909). See B. Brewer, “Self-Location and Agency,” Mind 101 (1991): 19–34.
K. Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1970).
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911), maintained that instinct concerns actions on things while the contents of intelligence are relations. The microgenetic equivalent of this distinction is that, given an organism capable of intelligent acts, “things” become internalized as attenuated objects (preobjects) with their relations. Actions and objects withdraw to or do not individuate from their relational background.
The argument has been made that will is for an action while desire is for objects; e.g., T. Reid, Essay on the Powers of the Human Mind, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1819), 75. This distinction corresponds with the derivation of will (drive) to desire and the parallel derivation in perception from unconscious beliefs to concepts and objects in awareness.
See S. Carey and R. Gelman, eds., The Epigenesis of Mind (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991).
The hypothesis that an object is an inhibitory contrast derives from clinical observations rather than physiological research (see Brown, Life of the Mind, 257; Self and Process, 10,55), though there are points of contact with studies in Gestalt psychology.
Studies in the philosophy of time have shown a comparable distinction, e.g., J. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1927).
For references, see Life of the Mind, 183.
M. Schlick, “Causality in Everyday Life and Recent Science,” in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. H. Feigl and W. Sellars (NY: J. Earman).
A. Ayer, in Free Will, ed. G. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 19.
J. Piaget, The Mechanisms of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
J.-M. Guyau, Guyau and the Idea of Time, trans. J. Michon (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1988); originally published as La genese de l’idée de temps (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1980). J. R. Lucas, The Freedom of Will (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 62, has written, the notion of cause is based not, as Hume thought, on our observing constant conjunctions of events, but on our being able to make things happen
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888).
C. Ducasse, Truth, Knowledge and Causation (London, 1968). There are alternative views, e.g., David Bohm’s account of an implicate subtext out of which explicate order emerges (D. Bohm and B. Hiley, The Undivided Universe [London: Routledge, 1993]).
Some philosophers consider goals future states that do not yet exist and cannot explain present actions. See the critique of this view in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. Readings in the Theory of Action (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968).
According to J. Velleman, “What Happens When Someone Acts?” in Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, ed. J. Fischer and M. Ravizza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), the accepted story is that a desire and a belief jointly cause an intention which then moves the agent’s body.
See R. Hobart, “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It,” Mind 43(1934): 1–27; B. Berofsky, ed., Free Will and Determinism (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
A. Hannay, Human Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1990), 132.
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(1996). Will, Agency, and Constraint. In: Time, Will, and Mental Process. Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_5
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