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

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments xv Preface xvii The Project of an Existential Theory of Personhood Part I: The Idea of Willing as Projective Motivation 1 Introduction 3 1. The Heroic Will 3 2. The Existential Theory of Striving Will as Projective Motivation 8 3. An Outline of the Main Argument 10 3.1. The Defense of Thesis One by Articulation of the Existential Conception of Willing 12 3.2. The Negative Defense of Thesis Two by the Critique of Psychological Eudaimonism 14 3.3. The Positive Defense of Thesis Two: Case Studies in Projective Motivation 16 4. The Limits of This Analysis 20 4.1. Autonomy and Motivation Theory 21 4.2. Action Theory and Psychology 21 4.3. Emotion and Volition 22 4.4. Value Theory 23 4.5. The Historical Examples 23 5. A Reader’s Guide: Ways through the Text 24 2 The Heroic Will in Eastern and Western Perspectives 28 1. The Paradigmatically ‘‘Eastern’’ Attitude toward Will and Willfulness 29 vii viii Contents 1.1. Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist Examples 29 1.2. Greek Examples 32 1.3. Augustine and Luther 35 2. The Paradigmatically ‘‘Western’’ Attitude 37 2.1. Baconian Hope 37 2.2. Will to Power as a Corrupt Species of Striving Will 39 3. The Continental Inversion 42 4. Contemporary Moral Psychology as Corrective 44 3 From Action Theory to Projective Motivation 47 1. The Decline of the Will 47 1.1. Freud and Hobbes 48 1.2. Locke, Hume, and the Cambridge Platonists 49 1.3. William James 52 1.4. Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein 54 2. Kane’s Three Senses of ‘‘Will’’ 56 3. Four Basic Concepts of the Will 60 3.1. The Minimalist Concept 60 3.2. The Volitionalist Concept 62 3.3. The Decision-as-Agency Concept 69 3.4. The Existential Concept of Striving Will 79 4 The Erosiac Structure of Desire in Plato and Aristotle 86 1. Toward an Existential Theory of Motivation 86 1.1. The Transmission Principle: A Problem in the Theory of Motivation 86 1.2. The Existential Core Argument 90 2. Plato’s Erosiac Model of Motivation 92 2.1. Introduction to Orexis 92 2.2. Three Types of Desire in the Republic 97 2.3. The Lack Model in the Symposium 101 2.4. Diotima and Aquinas: Formal Egoism, Intended Goods, and By-Products 106 3. From Plato’s Middle Soul to Aristotle’s Intellectual Appetite 111 3.1. Thumos as Indeterminate Motive-Power 112 3.2. Williams on Homer’s Moral Psychology 116 3.3. Aristotle’s Generalization of the Middle Soul 118 5 Aristotelian Desires and the Problems of Egoism 122 1. Aristotle and the Typology of Erosiac Desire 122 1.1. Aristotle’s Psychology of Animal Motivation in the De anima 122 Contents ix 1.2. The Distinction between D2 and D3 Desires 126 1.3. D2 and D3 Desiderative States in Aristotle 135 1.4. D2 and D3 States in MacIntyre’s Moral Psychology 140 2. Formal and Material Egoism 142 2.1. Formal Egoism and Satisfaction 143 2.2. Material Egoism: Feinberg’s Analysis Expanded 149 2.3. The Paradox of Hedonism and the Paradox of Material Egoism 159 2.4. Targetable and Nontargetable By-Product Goods: Elster’s Analysis 163 Part II: The Existential Critique of Eudaimonism 6 Psychological Eudaimonism: A Reading of Aristotle 171 1. The Highest or Complete Good in Aristotle’s Eudaimonism 172 1.1. Toward a Uniquely Ultimate End: Three Criteria for the Highest Good 172 1.2. ‘‘Most Complete’’ as a Nonholistically Inclusive Relation 177 1.3. Self-Sufficiency as a Maximally Comprehensive or Holistically Inclusive Relation 180 2. Excursus: Maximal Inclusivism, Virtue Inclusivism, and Dominant-End Models 187 3. The A-Eudaimonist System: An Idealized Aristotelian Model 195 7 The Paradox of Eudaimonism: An Existential Critique 201 1. Elements of the Pure Motive of Virtue 202 2. Annas and Kraut on the Motive of Virtue in Friendship 206 3. The Paradox of Eudaimonism: Desiring Eudaimonia as a By-Product of Virtue 211 4. Why the Paradox Cannot Be Solved by Denying that Eudaimonia Motivates Virtue 214 5. Magnanimity as Aristotle’s Answer to the Paradox 218 6. Why the Paradox Cannot Be Solved by Second-Order Desire Subsuming First-Order Desire 222 7. The Existential Solution: Pure Motives as Projects of the Striving Will 227 x Contents 8. The Paradox as One of Several Related Objections to...