| |
|
"What is it determines the will? The true and proper answer is, the mind.'
John Locke, Essay, Book II Chapter XXI, Section 29.
This section argues that the governance of all movements that are voluntary rests for Locke with the conscious mind.
Almost throughout his analysis Locke is committed to an Enlightenment view of what the significant question is: how do movements (or thoughts) get started.
This question was not unintelligible to the earlier thinkers - for example, the Scholastics, - but a kind of unproductive answer they usually gave to it was to say such and such a movement was natural to the thing concerned. Locke runs hard with the Enlightenment conviction that you should try and work out how such 'natural' movements originate in the movements of other things.
Locke's thinking about action is to be found largely in the Chapter ‘Of Power’ in the second book of the Essay.
There are some movements, and some thoughts, that are caused by the human will, and there are some that are not. Just to take those motions associated with a person's body, the circulation of their blood (11) is an example of a movement which is not caused by a person's will, while a person not under constraint or compulsion moving from one chair to another is an example of a movement that 'the will' causes(12).
He doesn't mean us to think of the will as any kind of entity alongside or part of the mind (it is not a 'substance' (16)) The will he argues is just a power: a power to cause or prevent (some) movements or thoughts: 'nothing but a power of the mind to direct the operative faculties of a man to motion or rest, as far as they depend on such direction.' (29)
In those cases when a person's willing brings about a movement (or thought), what is it that determines the outcome of the willing? That is, if willing is the exercise of a power, what is it that determines the outcome of that exercise? Locke spends some time defending the answer: desire. You desire something, and, often at least, you will it to happen. You desire to eat, and as a result of this desire, a volition takes place, the will to eat.
Unless something else prevents it, an appropriate action then occurs: eating.
To complete this account two lines have to be developed. First, what causes desires? And second, what kind of things, and under what circumstances, is an act of will prevented from causing an appropriate movement (or thought)?
To the first question, Locke develops the idea that a desire is essentially an 'uneasiness' of the mind (31), 'an uneasiness of the mind for want of some absent good'. (31) In its pure form it is pain. 'All pain of the body, of what sort soever, and disquiet of the mind, is uneasiness' and, 'desire being nothing but an uneasiness in the want of some absent good, in reference to any pain felt, ease is that absent good.' But uneasiness occurs alongside, or as a component of, other experiences besides pain, for: 'aversion, fear, anger, envy, shame, etc., have each their uneasiness too...' (39) It is this 'uneasiness', alone as it may be, or accompanying a passion (such as shame etc), which determines the will - that is, makes a person decide to do a certain thing.
Locke seeks to insist that a 'thought' without 'uneasiness' attached to it is not enough to trigger the will. The drunkard may know that getting drunk again could be disastrous for the whole of the rest of his life, but he has to be feel a modicum of actual distress about this - there has to be attached to this knowledge a measure uneasiness in his mind - if there is to be any chance of his will being affected. (35).
In fact Locke thinks that at any one time a person typically suffers from a number of uneasinesses (40). He thinks of these as having different strengths, and that the will is determined by the strongest of those that seem capable of relief. (Not, as a true Newtonian would imagine, by the resultant of a parallogram of forces - JB):
'But we being in this world beset with sundry uneasinesses... the next inquiry naturally will be, which of them has the precedency in determining the will to the next action? And to that the answer is that, ordinarily, which is the most pressing of those that are judged capable of being removed.'(40) (There is a strong hint here - actually a commitment to the view - that some kind of judgement, at least 'ordinarily', comes into play between the having of an uneasiness and the determination of the will.)
Where do these uneasinesses come from? One important source is the Creator, equipping us with feelings which guide us towards the good (our pleasure). Thus the uneasiness which is hunger guides us towards keeping ourselves nourished and alive.
'And thus we see our all-wise Maker, suitably to our constitution and frame, and knowing what it is that determines the will, has put into man the uneasiness of hunger and thirst, and other natural desires, that return at their seasons, to move and determine their wills, for the preservation of themselves, and the continuation of their species.' Essay, (34)
But growing up and being taught, and picking up bad habits, can be sources of desires too.
To those associated with the 'ordinary necessities of our lives' Locke tells us, there are to be added 'the fantastical uneasiness (as itch after honour, power, or riches, &c.) which acquired habits, by fashion, example, and education, have settled in us, and a thousand other irregular desires, which custom has made natural to us...'(45)
How are we to imagine the connection between having an uneasiness and deciding to take a particular action? Sometimes Locke seems almost unambiguously of the view that the connection is like that between one turning cog and the one meshing with it. A desire - an uneasiness - is felt and the will is forced into a certain configuration by the laws of mechanics, or mental mechanics. '...[T]hat which immediately determines the will, from time to time, to every voluntary action, is the uneasiness of desire...' (33) 'The motive for continuing in the same state or action is only the present satisfaction in it; the motive to change is always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the change of state, or upon any new action, but some uneasiness. This is the great motive that works on the mind to put it upon action, which for shortness's sake we will call determining the will...' (29)
But much of what he says is inconsistent with this. For example the point already made, that 'judgment' is, according to Locke, exercised in identifying both which of one's present uneasinesses are practically capable of removal, and of these which is the most pressing.(40) Of much greater significance for Locke's understanding of action however is the role he attributes to 'the mind' in (sometimes) intervening between uneasiness and determination of the will, in a process of review which Locke refers to as examination. The mind considers the action being 'proposed' to the will (by the current state of one's uneasinesses) and judges whether it is indeed the best choice of action. What does Locke mean by 'the best'? Simply the one that makes for the most pleasure (for the person making the judgement) in the long-term, all things considered.
The uneasinesses therefore, for Locke, influence what one decides to do: but something else - we will call it judgment - exerts influence too, an influence that in fact is capable of completely overiding the command of 'desire'.
So the important question becomes: what then determines the degree of success that 'judgment' achieves in any particular call? I have said what determines its content, as it were, which is this: The action now being considered does (or does not) make for maximum pleasure. Sometimes a judgment of this kind determines the will and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes 'desire' commands the will in spite of there being an unsupportive review. What is it that determines which of these happens?
I'm not sure there is an answer in Locke to this question. This, I fear, is where his bold new world quasi mechanical analysis and theorizing becomes exhausted and the old ideas fallen back upon. It is, after all, natural for human beings to make judgements.
The important point I want to take is happily already sufficiently clear : the governance of all movements that are voluntary rests for Locke with the conscious mind.
'This, at least, I think evident: that we find in ourselves a power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions of our minds and motions of our bodies, barely by a thought or preference of the mind ordering or, as it were, commanding, the doing or not doing such or such a particular action. This power which the mind has thus to order the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it, or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice versa, in any particular instance, is that which we call the will. The actual exercise of this power, by directing any particular action, or its forbearance, is that which we call volition or willing. The forbearance of that action, consequent to such order or command of the mind, is called voluntary. (5)
 |
Created 08:06:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
|