Incoherent Intentions and the Need for Narrative

Abstract

Incoherent Intentions and the Need for Narrative Thomas Salem Manganaro (bio) By standard philosophical accounts, if someone judges it best to do something and believes him or herself free to do it, then he or she will intentionally do it. But, as Donald Davidson and other analytic philosophers have asked, how then do we account for the phenomenon classically called akrasia, in which an individual freely and knowingly acts against his or her judgment of what it is best to do?1 Modern philosophy has indeed struggled to understand how individuals freely contradict their stated intentions in their intentional actions.2 This became a distinctive explanatory problem during the Enlightenment with the rise of mechanistic and materialist models of body and mind. In the tradition of Newton, philosophers from Hobbes through Godwin understood action as a physical event that could be explained in terms of the discrete bodily or mental states that precede it—readily-identifiable reasons, desires, affects, or passions. With these operating frameworks, it became difficult to explain or even characterize how an individual’s action can fail to follow through on intentions. Yet precisely because akrasia poses problems to the dominant forms of causal explanation in this period, its appearance in Enlightenment writing tends to draw out the important role that narrative plays in investigating human agency. When akrasia surfaces in Enlightenment philosophy and literature, we indeed see the special epistemic privileges of narrative over causal explanation. [End Page 235] The second edition of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694) offers a particularly interesting meditation on akrasia. To revise the simpler theory of volition in the first edition, Locke asks how a man can pursue actions that go against his firmly-held resolutions.3 He gives a dual answer: on the one hand, he provides a mechanistic explanation—namely, man’s action can be sufficiently explained by the states of uneasiness that determine his acting against his better judgment. On the other hand, he embeds the explanation in a narrative, which expresses the contradictory qualities of human intentionality in less resolvable and more provocative ways, and which disallows Locke from giving the causal explanation that his philosophy requires. Locke’s fictional narrative focuses on a drunkard who repeatedly acts against his resolutions. He sees that his health decays, his estate wastes; discredit and diseases, and the want of all things, even of his beloved drink attends him in the course he follows: yet the returns of uneasiness to miss… the habitual thirst after his cups, at the usual time, drives him to the tavern… ‘Tis not for want of viewing the greater good; for he sees, and acknowledges it, and in the intervals of his drinking hours, will take resolutions to pursue the greater good [italics mine]; but when the uneasiness to miss his accustomed delight returns, the greater acknowledged good loses its hold, and the present uneasiness determines the will to the accustomed action.4 Locke’s use of narrative does the work of showing how a man can hold resolutions and then allow them to fail as grounds of action. Significantly, Locke does not merely describe the causal processes in the man’s brain at the time of the action; he shifts between different temporal frames—at home and in the tavern—in order to convey how akrasia can shape the course of a person’s life, and how it can reflect a problem of character rather than a momentary blip in one’s constitution. His imprecise, metaphorical phrase, “the greater acknowledged good loses its hold,” recalls famous literary examples of akrasia, from Euripides’s Medea to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and provocatively evokes the experience of constitutional breakdown. Nonetheless, the drama of the protagonist’s failure is foreclosed by the passage’s explanatory aims and by Locke’s conclusion: “the present uneasiness determines the will to the accustomed action.” Making this a story about addiction helps to justify the word “determines,” suggesting a blind physiological determinism behind the action. But by turning to a determinist model of volition, Locke directly negates the idea of acting [End Page 236] against one’s better judgment, for there is no longer free action at all. The...