Abstract
This chapter questions the widespread assumption of motivational determinacy—an assumption shared by philosophers as otherwise different from each other as Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, as well as by their contemporary followers. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception, and using moments from a couple of Alice Munro’s short stories for illustration, the chapter argues that since it is the phenomenal world that solicits, or elicits, or otherwise motivates, much of what we do, say, think, and feel—including much that may be found morally significant; and since we play an active role in how we perceive things, and therefore in the ‘constitution’ of the phenomenal world, so that not just judgment, but perception itself is already active or, as Kant would say, ‘spontaneous’; it follows that our motivation is more or less indeterminate as well—more so, the more what we do, say, think, or feel is ‘personal’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, or creative.
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Notes
- 1.
Reid Albecker has drawn my attention to the fact that Michael Polley is actually quoting here from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.
- 2.
The indeterminacy I will appeal to and try to bring out is to be distinguished, importantly, from the indeterminacy of ‘translation’ or ‘interpretation’, or of ‘reference’, made famous by Quine and Davidson. The latter sort of indeterminacy is arrived at as the conclusion of an argument that begins with certain—at the very least contestable—theoretical presuppositions about linguistic meaning and understanding. The former—though hard to see clearly, especially when we theorize—is meant to be pre-theoretically familiar to us as human perceivers and agents. Another significant difference is that the latter sort of indeterminacy is, essentially, cognitive, whereas the former sort of indeterminacy is, essentially, perceptual and (in a sense later explicated) pre-cognitive.
- 3.
As I point out in various places below, one contemporary philosopher that could have replaced Davidson in almost every respect pertinent to the argument of this paper is Nomy Arpaly.
- 4.
Talbot Brewer, ‘Maxims and Virtues’ (hereafter ‘MV’), Philosophical Review 111 (2002): 539–72.
- 5.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (hereafter ‘GR’), Revised Edition, ed. and tr. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Prussian Academy page number 422, fn. 9.
- 6.
John Rawls, ‘Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy’, in John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 7.
See also Brewer’s more recent The Retrieval of Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 282.
- 8.
Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
- 9.
In ‘Maxims and Virtues’, Brewer regards that assumption as a ‘truism’ (MV, 550). In The Retrieval of Ethics he acknowledges that some free actions do not proceed from desires, since clearly we sometime act against our desires (The Retrieval of Ethics, 35). But perhaps the idea is that when we act against our desires, our action is not ‘unreflective’, and therefore less problematically seen as attached to a maxim.
- 10.
For an early articulation of the idea that virtue should be understood as a ‘[perceptual] sensitivity that fully accounts for… [the agent’s] actions’, see John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 52.
- 11.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 283, fn. 93.
- 12.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 13.
- 13.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 29.
- 14.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 19.
- 15.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 34.
- 16.
Brewer acknowledges that an appeal to desire to explain something someone has done would not always be apt, for clearly we sometimes do things we have no desire to do; and then he says that ‘what is essential to any rational explanation of an action is that it reveal how the action was lit up for the agent as good or worthwhile, and desires are not the only sorts of appearances of goodness, even if they are the most common ones’ (The Retrieval of Ethics, 35).
- 17.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 244.
- 18.
See ‘Virtue and Reason’, 50.
- 19.
Brewer does allow that we may, on occasion, be moved by an outlook that conflicts with the outlook that ‘we would affirm on reflection’ (The Retrieval of Ethics, 29).
- 20.
See Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (hereafter ‘EAE’), Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4, 72–3, and 232. Essentially the same sort of link is central to the more recent account offered by Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder in In Praise of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), cf. 62.
- 21.
Davidson ultimately despaired of being able to spell out what exactly ‘in the right way’ means here (see EAE, 79).
- 22.
In Arpaly’s work, our lack of motivational self-transparency is emphasized even more, and taken to be ‘the rule, not the exception, in life’ (Unprincipled Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30). Just like Davidson (and Brewer, and many others), however, Arpaly never doubts that there is a perspective—to which she sometimes refers as ‘God’s eye view’—from which what motivates or moves us may, in every case, be seen as clear and determinate (cf. ‘On Acting Rationally Against One’s Best Judgment’, Ethics, 110 (2000), 488 and 489–90; and ‘Unprincipled Virtue: Synopsis (Of Sorts)’, Philosophical Studies 134 (2007), 430–1). She takes it for granted, in other words, that there are, in every case, ‘the actual reasons’ from which someone has acted (or refrained from acting), and that those could in principle be determined objectively (Merit, Meaning, and Human Bondage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 17; see also Arpaly and Schroeder’s In Praise of Desire , 188).
- 23.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 19ff.
- 24.
‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
- 25.
This tendency is clear in Arpaly and Schroeder’s In Praise of Desire . Arpaly and Schroeder identify desires with states of ‘the brain’s reward system’, and take those states to be determinate and, in principle, determinable (cf. 128 and 146).
- 26.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 175.
- 27.
Cf. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology , David Carr (tr.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 161 and 217–8.
- 28.
Alice Munro, Selected Stories (New York: Random House, 1996), 205.
- 29.
Selected Stories, 205.
- 30.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 562, my emphasis.
- 31.
Selected Stories, 203.
- 32.
This is also where the understanding proposed in this paper crucially differs from that offered by Arpaly in Unprincipled Virtue and Merit, Meaning, and Human Bondage.
- 33.
Arpaly and Schroeder present a similar ‘regress of deliberations’ argument in the first chapter of In Praise of Desire . However, being committed to the traditional dichotomy between ‘reason’, on the one hand, and ‘sentiment’ or ‘desire’, on the other, and blind to the phenomenological perspective which is developed in this paper and which points us beyond that dichotomy, they take their argument to show that it must be desires—understood as states of our brain’s reward system—that ultimately ‘cause’ both our bodily acts and our thinking. They then attempt to reconcile this causal understanding of ‘motivation’ with the rational or moral assessability of our thoughts and intentional bodily acts, by attributing to brain states—problematically in my view—propositional and conceptual content (cf. In Praise of Desire , 128–30). Understood from the phenomenological perspective, by contrast, our behavior is normally motivated, precisely in the sense that it is not aptly understood as mechanically caused, and that it manifests an understanding of the phenomenal world to which we respond; but the understanding is not cognitive in the Kantian, ‘intellectualist’ sense of being expressible in true or false ‘judgments’ or ‘propositions’.
- 34.
When my children were younger, and I read them stories, I would sometimes drift in my thinking away from the text I was reading; and then I would notice that, and shift my attention back to the text, only to discover that I am already quite ahead of where I was the last time I was paying attention to what I was reading; and the only indication I would have that I had been reading aloud from the text the whole time I was drifting in thought, even though I had no idea what I had been reading, was the fact that my child didn’t complain.
- 35.
Philosophical Papers, 193.
- 36.
‘On Acting Rationally Against One’s Best Judgment’, 488–450; and ‘Unprincipled Virtue: Synopsis (Of Sorts)’, 430–1.
- 37.
Lucy Allais (2009) has argued that this insight may already be found in Kant’s work (‘Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47: 383–413). And indeed, Kant’s account of beauty is premised on the possibility of perceptual—that is, in Kant’s terms, intuitional but not (yet) conceptual—unity that is nonetheless inter-subjectively shareable. I’ll come back to this in ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’.
- 38.
In ‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, Ned Block cites more recent experimental work that supports this basic insight of Gestalt Psychology (cf. 564–5). The insight may also be found, albeit in an overly intellectualist (propositionalist) form, in Davidson’s holism.
- 39.
Selected Stories, 153–4.
- 40.
Though, as noted in ‘Aspects of Perception’, there is normally no determinate way we had been seeing things before the dawning of the aspect; the perceptual change in the dawning of an aspect, I there proposed, is normally a matter of the introduction of (greater) perceptual determinacy.
- 41.
The Retrieval of Ethics, 175.
- 42.
Taking the world as objectively known to determine the world as perceived is what Merleau-Ponty, following Gestalt psychologists, calls ‘the experience error’ (PP, 5/5). I’ll come back to this error in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’.
- 43.
Nor even sensibly a remark (as opposed to some other sort of speech-act).
- 44.
This, after all, is just what would normally be meant in calling it ‘creative’. One major problem with the rationalist and empiricist approaches that still pretty much control contemporary philosophical theorizing in the analytic tradition is that they are both committed, in effect, to denying the reality of creativity, or to explaining it away.
- 45.
Selected Stories, 177.
- 46.
Selected Stories, 180.
- 47.
Selected Stories, 181.
- 48.
Selected Stories, 181.
- 49.
Selected Stories, 181.
- 50.
Selected Stories, 182.
- 51.
Selected Stories, 182–3.
- 52.
I’d like to thank Martin Gustafsson and Bill Day for comments that prompted this last paragraph.
- 53.
David Cerbone also explores, differently from the way I do here, the affinity between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on the subject of indeterminacy (‘The Recovery of Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein’, in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, Romdenh-Romluc, K. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2017)).
- 54.
The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 263.
- 55.
I say ‘normal’, because Merleau-Ponty discusses cases of people from whose perception and behavior the creative, personal element is almost entirely missing. The case he mostly focuses on—that of Schneider, who suffered a brain injury during the First World War—bears striking similarities to cases on the more severe end of the autistic spectrum.
- 56.
I would like to thank Pascal Brixel, Dave Cerbone, James Conant, Michael Mitchell, and Francey Russell, for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Baz, A. (2020). Motivational Indeterminacy. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_7
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