Counterrevolutionary Meditations

It is a commonplace of contemporary discourse, both popular and academic, that desire is an important component of personal identity, perhaps, in a way, the crucial determinant thereof. That this is the case is evident upon even the most cursory review of the philosophical literature on the nature and function of the rational faculties of the mind - in which it is often either assumed as the presupposition of further discourse, or asserted, and sometimes defended, that reason is the "slave of the passions"; that reason is, therefore, functional and instrumental in nature and operation, a tool by which we calculate the most effective manner of realizing or satisfying our desires, which are themselves givens - or upon a modest familiarity with the atmosphere of the popular culture, in which "following one's heart", "being true to oneself" and "doing what one feels" have assumed the status of maxims of personal authenticity and integrity, such that to refuse those urgings known as desires is to fail to fully realize one's humanity.

There are few spheres of life and human endeavour which have remained untouched by such notions; the tropes of this way of thinking, if thinking it may be called, have a way of appearing within the contexts of all walks of life and all moments of decision potentially fraught with the tension of momentous choice. The core idea seems to be that, faced with the necessity of choice, one must "look within oneself" to determine what it is that one truly wants; what, that is, would best conduce to the fulfillment or satisfaction of that desire or constellation of desires perceived by the subject to have the greatest weight or intensity. A related idea is that this quest for authentic personhood in desire-fulfillment concerns only momentous, life-changing, or potentially life-changing choices. The choice between having chocolate mousse for dessert and having key lime pie, for example, hardly involves matters of personal identity. The idea, then, is that the choices for which the imperative of "looking within oneself" is invoked are consequential; they are those choices by which a subject defines himself as a certain type of person, observing a certain way of life or following a certain path. They are decisions by which one embraces an identity, or a component of an identity, to the exclusion of other identities or identity-components. A person who opts to devote himself to the law excludes the possibility of simultaneous devotion to medicine, and the practice of the law becomes, at the least, a critical part of "who he is". A person who self-identifies as a homosexual excludes the possibility that he will have a way of life in which heterosexual interests are normative. And in each case, the decision taken is thought to be that one which best satisfies the desires, or the strongest desires, of the subject. Desire, then, by implication, is the core determinant of personal identity; it is the key, held by each person, to the conundrum of how one becomes what one is: one seeks to comprehend one's desires and longings, and then becomes the sort of person that said desires indicate one to be. It is a project of self-realization.

It might be observed that the foregoing conflates two seeming disparate ideas: the descriptive account of the relationship of desire and reason, and the importance of this relationship to personal identity, and the pseudo-moral imperative to work out what it is that one truly desires, to the end that one might become an authentic, fulfilled human being. There is some merit to this objection, inasmuch as it is important to achieve the highest degree of clarity possible when seeking to discriminate between differing expressions of the same fundamental idea. However, it is also the case that, to a great extent, the conflation has already been made by those who subscribe to the theory of the instrumentality of reason; on the one hand, the theory is offered as an account of rationality, while on the other, it is often employed polemically, as when it is urged upon the reluctant that, because this is "how we are", we are perpetrating moral and intellectual violence upon those whom we counsel to resist certain desires. These latter, on the other hand, are thought to be inauthentic or "self-hating" should they resist the dictates of desire as regards personal identity. Hence, in the case of homosexuality, those who counsel against the conduct on the part of those who experience the orientation (desires) would be said to be engaged in futile efforts to deny to the homosexual what, in fact, is common to all men without distinction: that desire is the origin of all we do and all we are. The confused idea seems to be that one must not resist that which one "just is", ie. is determined to be, and must not counsel others to resist that which they "just are", ie. are determined to be.

This elevation of desire to the status of the determinant of personal identity is mistaken. It is possible to approach the mistakenness of the notion from a variety of perspectives. In this notion of desire and the instrumentality of reason there are echoes of the controversies associated with various deterministic doctrines, which are said to render moral judgment problematic by eliminating the individual will or reducing it to a cipher of causes external to the consciousness of the individual. So, then, according to more deterministic versions of the view we are considering, desires simply occur as the result of any number of causes, and states of desire engender behaviour, about which it is unjustified to pass moral judgment. Nevertheless, it might be argued against this theory that it fails to do justice to our experience of volition, of the deliberation that we undertake when we are attempting to come to a decision, and errs in its understanding of the moral sense by minimizing its importance as a fundamental, primal element of human nature, by reducing it to an artifice which futilely opposes the causal factors that move us. It might be objected, further, that the denial of freedom of the will inherent in such accounts of desire and reason is rationally unjustified, even self-defeating.

These will not now serve as angles of approach to the question of the verity and adequacy of the view that desire is the motivator of behaviour and the source of personal identity. Rather, this view will be seen to be problematic on the grounds that desires neither motivate behaviour of themselves, nor provide the justification for the reasons we have for living and acting as we do. If desires do not possess these roles, it follows that our rational faculties possess a potentially significant degree of independence from desire, as commonly understood, and themselves serve, through all of their operations, as the ground of our actions, and of such decisions and actions we take to be constitutive of our identities. We act, and assume our identities, on the basis of such things as reasons and beliefs, all of which are, by their very nature, open to deliberation. Thus, a homosexual identity, as distinguished from a homosexual orientation, is not inherent to individuals who have the desire, nor is such an identity the ineluctable outcome of a process which begins with the given element of desire. The orientation may, in many cases, be given, but the identity is assumed in accordance with beliefs, for reasons, and is, therefore, willed. Desire is not identity.

In what follows, I will draw upon the analysis of desires and reasons presented by T.M. Scanlon in his work What We Owe to Each Other; needless to say, while I am indebted to his presentation of the matter, the applications of his analysis are entirely my own.

As regards the role of desire in motivating action, let us suppose that desire itself suffices to move an agent to act. But, prior to considering what this would mean, let us sketch out what is involved in the ordinary experience of a desire. Succinctly, a man experiencing the desire for homosexual relations would have a longing, of all the complexity and nuance one would expect of a sexual/romantic/erotic interest, for relations of the type, the thought that involvement in relationships of the type would fulfill or satisfy that longing, and the consideration that the pleasure, satisfaction and sense of personal completion to be found - as he expects - in such relationships counts in favour of pursuing them. Generally, then, there are, at a minimum, three elements involved in the experience of desire: the longing, urge, interest or attraction towards a certain thing or state of affairs, the belief that a certain action or class of actions would lead to a pleasant state, related to the longing, in the future, and the taking of this future pleasant state to be a reason for acting.

Let us suppose then, that desire suffices to explain how a man experiencing homosexual desires might be moved to act; the crucial element, on such a view, is simply the longing or impulse towards behaviour of a certain type. However, emphasis upon this urge to act in a certain fashion, apart from any evaluative element, reduces what is, in fact, experienced as having some degree of complexity, to a mere functional state: a man experiencing such desires does not see anything good in the actions towards which he is inclined, but is only moved to engage in them. This, quite obviously, leaves out what is most essential in the experience of desire: the tendency to perceive something good or worthwhile in the object of the desire. It is not that all desires arise from considered judgements, but that desire, by its nature, involves the perception of something as a reason. Desire, to be sure, cannot be reduced to "seeing something good about something", as it is easy enough to conceive of innumerable examples of things we have reason to see as good, yet have no desire to do. Nevertheless, desire involves, as Scanlon writes, "... having a tendency to see something as a reason." The man experiencing homosexual desires does see certain considerations as counting in favour of acting in ways that could be described as homosexual.

The specific difference between those things we have reason to do, yet no desire to do, and those things we have a desire, and also reason to do, Scanlon encapsulates in his formulation of desire in the directed-attention sense, according to which "A person has a desire in the directed-attention sense that P if the thought of P keep occurring to him or her in a favorable light, that is to say, if the person's attention is directed insistently toward considerations that present themselves as counting in favor of P." This formulation captures what is specific to what we commonly think of in connection with the idea of desire, and enables us to distinguish cases of desire from cases in which we have reason to do something which we have no real desire to do, such as bearing bad news to a friend. The notion of desire in the directed-attention sense does not reduce desire to a species of reason; it is fully compatible with the common-sense understanding that desires are "... unreflective elements in our practical thinking - that they "assail us" unbidden and that they can conflict with our considered judgment of what we have reason to do." However, a person who has a desire in this sense does have a tendency to "...think of certain considerations and a tendency to see them as reasons for acting." And while rationality entails both the ability to reach considered judgements and to hold to them, as well as the more specific ability to "....see certain considerations as reasons and to think of and see as reasons those things one has previously judged to be such", no normal person possesses perfect control over both his rational faculties and desires. It is a primal an aspect of what it is to be human to be subject to recurrent tendencies to see some consideration as a reason to act in a certain way, despite one's considered, rational judgment that it is not such as reason.

Desire, then, does not perform the work of motivation, apart from our capacity to grasp reasons. The notion of a desire as an urge fails to capture what we mean when we ordinarily refer to desires. Scanlon's notion of desire in the directed-attention sense does capture much of what we mean by referring to desires, yet it remains true that we often do things we have no desire to do, and that when we do have desires in that sense and act on them, it is the seeing of something as a reason for action that performs the work of motivation. Desire neither performs the work of motivation itself, either in the form of an urge or as an element of the reasons that move us to act, nor is even necessary for us to act. It is not, therefore, homosexual desire which moves the homosexual to the characteristic acts of that lifestyle, but the perception of some considerations as reasons for so acting, as well as his taking them to be such reasons for himself. He must not only experience desire in the directed-attention sense - seeing certain considerations as counting in favour of acting on what may be granted is his orientation - but must judge them to be reasons for so acting. To act on the relevant desire, he must, as an act of his rationality, judge the reasons implicated in the desire to be such for him. That is to say, he must not only experience the insistent recurrence (the "urge" element), in a favourable light, of the considerations that are seen to count in favour of homosexual relations (the "reasons" element), he must judge those considerations to be reasons for acting, for engaging in homosexual behaviour (the "taking" element). Scepticism regarding this point should be allayed by noting that, in the cases of a fair number of homosexuals, the phenomenon of "coming out" is often accompanied by, or at least preceded by, self-doubt, self-hatred and agonizing deliberation, in which the presence of the first two components of insistence and favourable considerations conflict with a reluctance, hesitation, or fear to actually take such indications of desire in the directed-attention sense as reasons for self-identifying as homosexual, for a plethora of well-known, well-trodden reasons, such as regard for the opinions of others and scruples against homosexual conduct. Phenomenologically, we might say, desire is insufficient to move him to action. A type of taking, or judgment, considered and willed, is necessary; and therefore, the bare fact of desire, even desire in the directed-attention sense, is insufficient as a basis of personal identity.

Suppose, though, that while desire itself is not sufficient to do the work of motivating an agent to act, desire is, nevertheless, the ground or justification of action insofar as it generates reasons for action, which themselves do the work of motivation. In contrast to the previous formulation of the relationship of desire and action, which might be termed the desire-as-efficient-cause model, the present formulation would hold that desire is the foundational state of consciousness out of which reasons for action arise, the fundamental intentional state without which action does not occur: the desire-as-formal-and-final-cause model. According to this formulation, for any desire D, an agent has a reason to perform X if X would fulfill, or promote the fulfillment of, D. One might experience a desire for, say, oranges, and this desire for oranges generates a reason to seek, and consume, oranges. Desire, then, would be the matrix of reasons for action, in the sense that reasons and actions would arise out of, and be oriented toward, desire as their completion. The development of the original desire might be taken as the formal cause which relates the material cause of the oranges to the agent; the reasons thus generated might be taken as the efficient causes; and the desire, this time with a view toward its fulfillment or completion, might be taken as the final cause.

This formulation of the matter possesses one critical advantage over the previous formulation; namely, that it accounts for the obvious and uncontroversial fact that many of our reasons do indeed have subjective conditions. However, while this does seem to grant the formulation under consideration a not inconsiderable degree of persuasive force, that appearance of strength is more apparant than actual.

It should cause us no difficulty to concede that many of our reasons do in fact have subjective conditions. This will be the case whether we are discussing such trivia as likes and dislikes in the matter of ice cream, as well as in such weighty and significant matters as responsibilities towards family and friends, as Scanlon notes. Nevertheless, the notion that desires are the source and justification of our reasons for engaging in certain activities thought to be noble and worthy, and believing them to be activities in which we ought to engage, is, to understate the counterintuitive nature of the claim, odd and deflating. If we hold that we have reasons to pursue some worthy endeavour, such as caring for and mitigating the hardships endured by the homeless and deprived, or structuring our lives around the devout observance of religious rites considered to be essential to the fulfillment of duties to God and man, we are making claims of an order radically different from those that are involved in the case of pleasures to be derived from the consumption of ice cream. (The question of the status of familial obligations is obviously more complex, involving as it does both personal ties and duties generally taken to be binding and normative without reference to subjective satisfactions. This distinction need not detain us, as it does not impinge in any way upon the development of the argument.) We are claiming that there is an "oughtness" about the activity in question, such that we would be mistaken, in error or sin, or simply wrong not to grant it. The worthiness of the activities in this class are not taken to depend in any way upon subjective satisfactions or personal affections.

As Scanlon observes, observations and reflections such as these often lead those who may embrace the standard model of the relationship of desire and reasons - which holds that desires are simply subjective, intentional states which either occur or don't, and that, when they do, provide the agent with reasons for engaging in those actions that will promote their satisfaction - to carve out exceptions for such reasons as may derive from moral and religious obligations. However, reflection upon the conditions of our own practical reasoning should lead us to the much stronger conclusion that desires seldom, if ever, provide us with reasons for action in the manner postulated by the standard model. Again, as Scanlon argues, "..none of the candidates for the role of desire has these properties."

Consider the functional state, in which an actor simply experiences an irresistable desire to perform a certain action. What is missing from such a state is any element capable of rationalizing action; there is no judgment that the action in question is good, laudable or worthy, that it will facilitate happiness or satisfaction. Nevertheless, even when we consider desires which do in fact include such judgments, we find that the desire itself has little, if any, role in the generation of reasons. Let us suppose that I am seized by the desire for a new car, and that this desire is not a mere impulse, but desire in the directed-attention sense, which does, of course, include the evaluative element of seeing some consideration as counting in favour of the purchase of that new car. Even this state, however insistent may be the promptings of desire for that new car, does not indicate that I do in fact have reasons to purchase the new car, as it may well be my judgment that the new car will afford no advantage over the old one I now drive, and that its distinguishing characteristics and amenities are either superfluous, marginal, or insufficient to outweigh the expense I would incur were I to purchase it. The bare occurrence of the state of desire-in-the-directed-attention-sense as regards the car provides no reason to purchase it; neither does the fact that the new car might meet the criteria of a reason-component associated with the desire, for example, that I might regard the styling of the new car as more pleasing, aesthetically speaking, than that of the old car. For in this case, my considered judgment after having weighed all of the relevant factors, is that I have no real need, no real reason, to purchase the car. Moreover, even should I take my preference for the styling of the new car as a reason for purchasing it, "endorsing the judgment to which the desire involves a tendency", in Scanlon's words, it is this reason - the satisfaction and pride of ownership I would feel in the car - that, if anything, justifies me in purchasing it, not the bare existential fact of the state of desire.

At this stage, it may yet be objected that, while desire provides neither the motivation nor the justification for our reasons and actions, we only have occasion to formulate the reasons we do have because he have certain desires. Desire, according to this objection, would be the condition of the possibility of the reasons that justify and motivate our actions. In the case of reasons which obviously have subjective conditions, such as the desire for ice cream to which Scanlon adverts periodically throughout the course of his argument, it does in fact seem that we have our reasons for action because we have certain desires. What, then, occurs in our practical reasoning in such cases?

What is happening in such cases are simply instances of there being subjective conditions for the reasons we may have for doing certain things. Some people find ice cream appealing, while others are at best indifferent. In the case of that desire for ice cream, it is, nevertheless, not the desire itself that either simply is a reason for seeking out a bowl of ice cream, or generates reasons for seeking out a bowl of ice cream. Reasons for seeking out ice cream are found in the prospective happiness that eating ice cream would provide, whether or not we experience the desire for ice cream in the directed-attention sense, and especially when that we take that prospect of pleasure as grounds for acting now or in the near-term future, or as one factor, among many possibilities, to be taken into consideration as we decide what to do. Regardless, therefore, of whether, in saying that we have a desire for something, we merely find it pleasurable generally, have desire for it in the directed-attention sense, or have determined that it is a factor to be considered in deliberation, it is not the desire which generates reasons for action. Desire, at most, is the stimulus to thought about reasons; about what we have reasons to want, to do, to seek, and about those reasons themselves that we have reason to embrace or repudiate.

In the end, then, an analysis of the structures of practical thinking tends to disconfirm the commonplace assumption, which is often elevated to the status of a dogma in contemporary life, that desires are the wellsprings of our actions, of our lives and identities. Desires neither spur us to action of themselves, nor provide the reasons that explain our actions, and because of these intertwined inabilities, do not constitute us as the persons we are; desires do not bequeath to us, by the randomness and inexplicability of their manifestation as features of our awareness, our identities. Our motivations, our reasons, our identities, are, rather, bound up with our perceptions and understandings of what will promote our happiness and allow us to advance projects and undertakings that we consider to be worthwhile. And the question of happiness and what tends to promote, and what tends to thwart, happiness, is a matter at once larger, and more amenable to rational analysis and discrimination, than the irrational one of desire; it is the question which opens upon the great questions of human nature - of who we are, of the differences of the human, of the purposes, and those things that promote the achievement and fulfillment of those purposes laid down in the constitution of our nature. Seen from this perspective, and in the light of the features of our practical reasoning, the appeal to desires as the basis of identity, action, and reasoning is not so much an attempt to accurately account for certain features of our lives, but an attempt to foreclose debate about our reasons and the ends we pursue, a rhetorical trope for the refusal of reason.