Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, and Happiness

9. Divine and Human Creativity: From Plato to Levinas

9 Divine and Human Creativity: From Plato to Levinas Overview. This chapter describes the emergence of a new concept of motivation from Neoplatonic speculations on why the divine principle generates the physical universe. The first half of the chapter is generally accessible and potentially useful in a philosophy of religion course. The later sections on Arendt and Levinas will be most relevant for those with some background in these philosophers but can also serve as interpretative introductions to some of their main themes. The last section, which is slightly more technical, completes the description of projective motivation in the terms of contemporary action theory, picking up where chapter 3 left off. 1. Thick and Thin Concepts of Motivation In previous chapters, I have repeatedly suggested that an existential conception of striving will implies a kind of human motivation that (a) contrasts with erosiac desire, and (b) violates the Transmission principle (TP), since it arises only within what Pink calls volitional agency, that is, the activities in which intentions, plans, or purposes are set by the agent. Although decision is the paradigm of such activity, forming and executing intentions is not the only function of volitional agency. However, as I note in chapter 4, contemporary theories of motivation in analytic philosophy are usually committed to TP, and they usually ignore the phenomenology of motivation as a subjective experience of the agent, conceiving it abstractly as whatever state plays certain formal roles in explaining or rationalizing intention and action. I call this the thin sense of ‘‘desire.’’ For example, in a recent work on value theory, Robert Audi treats experienceable intrinsic value as motivating because it can be the ‘‘the object of 287 288 Will as Commitment and Resolve desires and intentions . . . the experience of hearing a sonata can be precisely what I want to hear, and hence, in prospect, can motivate me to act.’’1 This sounds as if the prospect of an aesthetic good moves the agent as in a D3 desire, but the description is too ambiguous to be certain. It could also be that the agent projects the goal of learning a certain style of music and ‘‘wants’’ to hear the sonata as a means to that goal. Both these kinds of motive have the ‘‘world-to-mind direction of fit’’ of practical attitudes;2 so that it is not enough to distinguish between them. This problem goes back at least to F. H. Bradley’s attempt to define volition as ‘‘the alteration of existence so as to agree with the idea.’’3 Note that this definition applies to any ‘‘practical relation’’ or pro-attitude motivating intentional action. But Bradley fails to see that not all pro-attitudes are autonomous, and hence when the world is changed in accordance with an idea, it does not necessarily follow that this ‘‘realises for me my inmost being which before was ideal.’’4 This approach identifies the self with all of its motives. The ubiquitous use of ‘‘desire’’ in the thin sense thus makes it harder to state adequately the existentialist’s thesis that the will includes a projective capacity. For the thesis that we can motivate ourselves in ‘‘non-desiderative’’ ways to make sense, it has to be made relative to a thick account of ‘‘desire,’’ such as the erosiac analysis in the eudaimonist tradition. This is not to deny that, as Pink says, ‘‘there surely is . . . a sense of ‘desire’ that applies whenever we are motivated to act’’;5 for we could define ‘‘desire’’ in a maximally formal or abstract fashion as ‘‘any state in which an agent is motivated to pursue some goal or end.’’ Similarly, we could conceive ‘‘teleology’’ in a minimally thin sense merely as any psychological state in which an agent ‘‘conceiv[es] of the future as including a state of affairs which is an end to be produced, where this end is provided in the propositional content of a belief or desire.’’6 For example, Alfred Mele defines ‘‘wanting’’ this way: ‘‘to want to A is to have some motivation to A, the content of which features a representation of the agent’s (current or prospective) A-ing.’’ As Mele says, this does not differentiate among types of motives, such as ‘‘appetitive versus nonappetitive wants.’’7 In fact, it says nothing at all about how the motivation is experienced or what kind of representation of the object is involved. In this thin sense, it is vacuously true that all...