Abstract
In this chapter the concept of motivation is interpreted using the unifying formalism. Different concepts of motivation in Husserl are distinguished. Changes in the “strength” of motivations are interpreted in terms of the learning rule of Chap. 3
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- 1.
Thus the motivation relation is similar to a kind of conditional probability: if I experience x and take certain actions, then y feels like it should be the natural outcome. However, Husserl is at pains to deny this in one sense: “to talk of an indication is not to presuppose a definite relation to considerations of probability” (LI 1, p. 186). I take him to mean that motivation relations do not imply actual awareness of probabilities, i.e. the kinds of explicit or “active” probability calculations one considers when gambling, solving math problems involving probabilities, or making certain kinds of decision. Motivations are always occurring; we only rarely think explicitly about probabilities.
- 2.
There are other distinctions here as well. Husserl distinguishes noetic and noematic motivation: noetically, my perception of the front of the house motivates a particular image of the side of the house; noematically this corresponds to a unity in the house itself, whereby we experience the two sides of the house as “belonging together” as parts of the same object (Ideas 2, p. 230). Husserl also considers associative cases where “A thought ‘reminds’ me of other thoughts and calls back into a memory a past lived experience” and even Freudian cases where the reason for the motivating tendency can only be brought to light by psychoanalysis (Ideas 2, p. 234).
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Yoshimi, J. (2016). Motivation. In: Husserlian Phenomenology. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26698-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26698-5_8
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