Conceptualized and Unconceptualized Desire in Aristotle

Conceptualized and Unconceptualized Desire in Aristotle THOMAS M. TUOZZO 1. INTRODUCTION FOR ARISTOTL~, desire is a special sort of cognition. In this essay I shall be concerned to explicate and defend this claim, presenting first a discussion of the different kinds of predicative cognition Aristotle recognizes, and then showing how desire differs from other sorts of predicative cognition. I shall further be concerned to show how a fundamental difference between the two main kinds of Aristotelian cognition, sense-perception and thought,' grounds the distinction between the two main kinds of Aristotelian desire, epithum~a (appetite) and bou~s/s (wish).' This distinction is of crucial importance to many topics in Aristode's ethics and moral psychology, on which the account given here, if correct, should cast considerable light. Therefore by way of confirmation of my account I shall turn briefly at the end of this essay to two such topics: weakness of will and moral education. It will be useful, before we proceed to the main task, to contrast Aristotle's views on the nature of desire with a general view of desire shared by many ' Phantas/a is in some sense an adjunct to either of these; hence its division into phantas/a a/s~ and/0g/st/k/(DA 433b29). Compare Dorothea Frede, "The Cognitive Roleof Phantasm in Aristotle" in M. Nussbaum and A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's "De Anima~ (Oxford, 199~), s79-95: "Phantas/a... does not have a faculty of its own but is 'parasitic' on senseperception " (~8x). I cannot agree, however, with the argument of Michael Wedin, M/nd and Ima~/n Ar/stoae(NewHaven, 1988) that "imagination is not a genuine faculty in the sense that there is no complete act that counts as imagining something" (55). DA 427bx6-2o (reading phamas/a at b17) seems a decisive refutation of such a view, Wedin's remarks (74-75) to the contrary notwithstanding. 9I reserve for another occasiondiscussion of thumos, the third type of desire that sometimes appears in Aristotle's typology of desire. Like epithumia, thumos is shared by animals, and so need involve only sense-perception and phantas/a. [525] 526 JOURNAL OF THE HIsToRY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:4 OCTOBER 1994 contemporary philosophers of mind, and which has, inevitably, influenced the interpretation of Aristode. According to this view a mental state such as desire or belief can be analyzed into two componentsS: its content, which corresponds to the object clause in sentences such as "John believes that it is raining ," "Mary desires that it stop raining"; and another element which corresponds to the psychological verb in such sentences. The manifold ways this analysis of mental states as "propositional attitudes" can be developed~ have an important feature in common: desires derive their distinctive characteristic of being able to motivate action not from their proposidonal content, but from the element which corresponds to the psychological verb in sentences attributing desire. Thus there is no essential difference in propositional content between different sorts of propositional attitude. To quote a recent writer: "[W]hile the belief and the desire that p have the same propositional content and represent the same state of affairs, there is a difference in the way it is represented in the two states of mind. In belief it is represented as obtaining, whereas in desire, it is represented as a state of affairs the obtaining of which would be good."s Aristotle's view of desire differs fundamentally from the propositional-attitude account outlined above. It is true that Aristotle holds that desires and beliefs have what may be called propositional content. Yet what distinguishes desire from belief is not an element disdnct from this proposidonal content. Rather, there is a difference in the content itself. Aristotelian mental states, I shall argue, are mental predications; a desire is such a mental predication with a specific sort of mental predicate, viz., one with intrinsically motivating force. Thus, unlike in the contemporary theory, for Aristotle beliefs and desires will not have the same propositional contents. 6 sMany theorists do not suppose that this analysis reveals ontological constituents of mental states, but rather reveals, e.g., the logical features of these states (cf...