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

Preface

Preface The Project of an Existential Theory of Personhood The Issue Although it remains popular among educated readers of the general public, enthusiasm for the existentialist approach to personhood has been declining in academic philosophical literature since the late 1970s. In analytic philosophy , metaphysical writings on personal identity over time have dismissed existentialist contributions on the complex temporality of selfhood as obfuscation . Likewise, mainstream metaphysical authors have a new semantics for possibility, necessity, and essential properties; as a result, they have dif- ficulty in making sense of the existentialist claim that for persons, ‘‘existence precedes essence,’’ unless this is read just as a rather confusing way of saying that we enjoy some sort of libertarian freedom. Few grasp that the existentialist objection to ‘‘personal essences’’ is a rejection of theories such as Molinism, Leibnizian monads, Kantian noumenal character, and Aristotelian teleology, all of which the existentialist views as inaccurate forms of determinism about human choice and motivation. Moreover, since the development of contemporary modal logic, debates about the metaphysics of free will have been rewritten in a language relative to which older existentialist writings on freedom may seem outdated. Debates on whether moral responsibility for particular actions and omissions requires any sort of libertarian freedom, as existentialists commonly held, have also become much more complex since Harry Frankfurt’s 1969 presentation of putative counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities . Yet these debates hardly ever touch on the crucial question for existentialists: namely, what kind of freedom is required for responsibility for our own personality, character, and overall direction in life? This crucial question is addressed today only indirectly, as part of the theory of autonomy . Among neo-Kantians, compatibilist theories of autonomy have gained xvii xviii Preface popularity, while their neo-Aristotelian critics often regard existentialism as the last gasp of enlightenment individuality. Iris Murdoch accuses existentialism of reducing the person to a bare point of freedom; Alasdair MacIntyre describes the existential self as an isolated, solipsistic, ghostly, and arbitrary free will. And this critique is fair against Sartre’s model of the ‘‘for-itself’’ of consciousness, which ignores both social and natural constraints on the development of our identities and becomes what Michael Sandel calls a totally unencumbered self ‘‘dispossessed’’ of its ends.1 Developments in feminist ethics and recent Continental philosophy have reinforced this criticism, arguing that persons are essentially social beings who can understand themselves or even develop a ‘‘self’’ only in terms of their relations to others, including shared values, norms, and relationships of ‘‘care’’ that define the sphere of activities in which they conduct their lives. In pragmatism and some forms of radical hermeneutics, the notion of personhood itself is treated simply as a social convention or device we require as an underpinning for our moral and legal language games or as a convenient metaphysical fiction needed to maintain our shared ‘‘public conception’’ of justice.2 In other deconstructive accounts, subjectivity remains , but not as a property of ‘‘the self’’ and only as an ineffable ‘‘freedom ’’ that relates to the world but not to itself.3 Thus, in analytic and Continental moral psychology, existentialism has become passé. It is also widely regarded as having little relevance for contemporary philosophy of mind, which in recent decades has focused on whether the intentionality of mental states is something more than the tendency to produce various kinds of behavior and whether the sentience that computers would have to enjoy to count as conscious beings is irreducible to physical properties of brain states. This debate is today largely about whether any form of nonreductive physicalism will work, giving us mental states that are conceptually distinct from brain states but without having to tolerate any nonphysical level of reality (other than sets). The few writers on mind (such as Daniel Dennett and Owen Flanagan) who extend their analysis of consciousness to a conception of will and freedom generally advocate a naturalistic account of these phenomena, ignoring classical existentialist objections against such reductionism. But here, as elsewhere, the existential tradition is ignored only at one’s peril. Sartre’s most central point about human consciousness, deriving from ideas going back through Husserl and Fichte to Kant, is that it involves prereflective awareness of itself as subject of intentional states rather than as an object. Yet this insight and its implications for models of selfawareness seem to be virtually unknown in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of mind. Leading authors in this tradition, from Paul Churchland to William Lycan to...