The Will: Volume 1, Dual Aspect Theory

by Brian O'Shaughnessy

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will.

Genres: Philosophy

328 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1980

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got quite excited by the introduction to this book. It is remarkable that O'Shaughnessy starts off with all the same insights that are typically attributed to Merleau-Ponty (and the embodied cognitive science tradition that he made possible). But O'Shaughnessy writes and argues in a way totally unlike Merleau-Ponty and that contintental-philosophy and empirical-psychology inflected tradition. O'Shaughnessy is very careful about each of his definitions, and provides arguments galore to support his points. He goes through counterfactual situations to show what is necessary to key concepts he relies on, and he distinguishes between many concepts that may be lumped under the same expressions or words in our theorizing about the mind. In brief, it was breath-taking to see ideas I'm familiar with handled by such a careful thinker.

But as a whole, this was not as earth-shattering as a reading experience as O'Shaughnessy's other tome Consciousness and the World. This might be because I have background in Anscombe's philosophy of action and Merleau-Ponty's theory of the role of the body in perception, and O'Shaughnessy's claims are all pretty much consistent with theirs, and only add detail. Or, perhaps the second volume of this work will include more unanticipatable ideas; I will start that soon, so we'll see.

Let me elaborate on the insights and questions O'Shaughnessy raises in the introduction; then I will summarize his key claims and arguments found across the chapters. In the introduction, O'Shaughnessy gives a lightning quick but incisive history of Western philosophy's theorizing about consciousness, and the place of the concept of the will in that history. He points out how today we find ourselves in a "pragmatist solipsist 'small' metaphysics"; in this post-modern age we tend to assume that we are confined within our subjective worlds, which are non-identical with any other person's world. Moreover, all the contents of these subjective worlds are shaped by power, culture, and history. How did we get here? O'Shaughnessy points out that in modern and pre-modern philosophy, there was the basic assumption that there are "Absolutes" or "Ultimates" to be found in nature, and that we humans are capable of putting a finger upon those. Then, with the turn with Descartres, and particularly with romanticism of the 19th century, there was a force for an increasing emphasis put on the individual. Every person has a distinctive personality and is geared towards survival or life.

Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to emphasize the will; Nietzsche's dionysian force, and Freud's Id, are derivative of that. For Schopenhauer, life and consciousness is defined by the will, which is essentially based in feeling, affect, and action (undertaken for the struggle to survive). Freud introduced the notion of repression; culture developed the concept that this will is animalistic, primal, and dangerous, and so we have blocked it out from our awareness, out of our fear of it. The concept was developed that the ideal of life is to be healthy, to have a unified will and rationality; this replaced the previous ideals of attainment of truth or goodness, understood in absolute senses.

Sartre also took up the notion of the will. He argued that there is no absolute or essential character that defines us; instead there are continuous moments of new exertions of the will. We constantly have the capacity to take up new projects and to renew, or to newly create, meanings of our present situations and our pasts. Wittgenstein took up this thread in his theorizing about concepts and meaning. There are no absolute concepts to be found. All concepts we humans have are manufactured in our language games, which are ultimately based in our individual acts of will.

O'Shaughnessy shows that this history of philosophizing about consciousness and the will has led to a certain minimal view about the nature of the will, which largely constrains and is implicitly assumed in contemporary debates about action. We may call this a "radically interiorist volitionist conception of action." On this conception, action is composed of at least two events, one mental and the other physical. The will swoops in from some non-physical domain, and is somehow capable of an almost magic-like causation, to effect parts of the physical domain. The basic paradigm of willing, on this conception, would be our giving ourself internal commands, e.g., I shall do a jig in ten minutes. It is this conception of the will that is responsible for the seeming lack of principledness in the limits of the role of our human agency in the manufacture of truth and value. The twentieth century movement of behaviorism may be understood as a response to this obscurantist picture of the will; a perhaps natural response to this picture is to take the mind/spirit out of the picture altogether, and understand action and willing as a totally physical or material phenomenon.

O'Shaughnessy's goal is extremely ambitious. He wants to find a proper definition of the will that can dodge the temptation towards behaviorism, and also set straight this free-wheeling relativism, which follows from this radically interiorist volitionist conception of action. He addresses questions such as: What are the limits of the will? What are the direct objects that we can act upon, that we can exert our will upon, as opposed to other objects or objectives that we may be conscious of when we exert our wills? How are we to define the will - what is its relation to our received notions of the body and the mind? Is the will essentially mentalistic and capable of having trans-categorical causal transactions with the body? Or, is the will intrinsically bodily in such a way such that proper understanding of this fact can shed light on the mind-body problem, or even dissolve it?

O'Shaughnessy's basic insight is that the will ought not to be understood as essentially mental and distinguishable from the material body. Instead, the core of the will (which is also the core of the will as found in mental actions) is a bodily will, which is constituted by our feeling or awareness of our body (which gives us non-conceptual, immediate, and infallible knowledge of the location of our body relative to the external world - I'll elaborate on this below), in combination with our biologically-inherited aim at survival or vitality. Regardless of how much we tend to focus on our cognitive capacities and capacity for self-consciousness, which seem to be detached from the impulse towards vitality - nevertheless, the basic functions of our cognition still phylogenetically arose from this impulse, and so understanding cognition will require proper understanding of this impulse. The will, as O'Shaughnessy's first-gloss definition, is bound up with what we do with our bodily limbs in order to survive; the will is defined in relation to bodily action, which is necessary for survival.

This volume is split into two parts. In the first part, O'Shaughnessy focuses on addressing exactly what objects can serve as the direct objects of the bodily will. In the second part, O'Shaughnessy dives into issues that pertain to the epistemological question of how we can know about where our body parts are situated, so that it is possible to undertake action at all; this clarifies what it means exactly to take those objects (i.e., our bodily parts) as our direct objects. In chapter 1, O'Shaughnessy investigates our notion of voluntariness, as opposed to involuntariness. Willing something, by definition, is voluntary; so to understand what it means to do something voluntarily is crucial for identifying the range of objects that we can directly will. Here, he argues that it is impossible to voluntarily change our beliefs, to bring about willings or strivings to accomplish some action (i.e., to alter our desires or intentions in a certain sense), and to achieve the outcomes of actions (those which are individuated by descriptions of action that loop in phenomena that are beyond our bodily parts). This sets the stage to show exactly what we are capable of voluntarily changing, if not these seemingly intuitive candidates.

In chapter 2, O'Shaughnessy introduces his thesis that the only direct objects of the will are our bodily parts. It is impossible to will changes or movements of extra-bodily objects in the same way by which we can will changes to our bodily parts. In chapter 3, O'Shaughnessy investigates our basic ways of talking about having done something. He points out that there are two distinct senses of having done something, one of which is fundamental to the other. This fundamental sense is applicable only to movements we cause in our bodily parts. In chapter 4, O'Shaughnessy examines causation in bodily action. He shows that the type of causation that is at play here is distinct in kind than that which is at play in our causing changes or movements upon extra-bodily actions. In brief, awareness and intention is necessarily integral to the causation involved in bodily action, in a way that is not in other cases of our causing changes upon the world. This chapter shows that the received radically interiorist volitionist conception of action presumes a sort of magic-like causality that holds between body and mind; O'Shaughnessy offers a naturalistic and more coherent alternative to that.

In chapter 5, O'Shaughnessy moves into part ii, which focuses on the epistemology of the body. Is there something special about the way by which we know where our body is situated and what we are doing with it? Or, is it the same sort of knowledge as what we gain through ordinary sensory perception, such as sight or smell? This question matters insofar as it expands upon the issue of part one, namely what is the special nature of our contact with our bodies, which is the habitat of the will. Part one focused relatively more on causal aspects of this question, and part two shifts gears to the epistemological aspects; a complete picture of the will cannot be had with only one aspect or the other. O'Shaughnessy argues that we have direct epistemic contact with our bodily parts insofar as we can feel them; our nervous systems extend through these parts. In contrast, we lack such contact with any extra-bodily object which we may sensorily perceive. We cannot do without our bodily awareness, just as we cannot do without a visual field when our eyes are open; but visual perception is always mediated (e.g., by sense data, like colors), whereas proprioceptive perceptibility of our bodily parts is not mediated.

In chapter 6, O'Shaughnessy addresses the issue of what is required in order to have awareness of our bodily parts. He argues that bodily location and proprioceptive sensation are causally interdependent; we do not first have sensations, and then our brains use these to construct a region of the body at which these sensations are located. Neither do we have to start off with awareness of a region of the body in order to have a sensation that is identified at this location. Instead, according to O'Shaughnessy, the most primal kind of bodily sensation already has a general location on the body, relative to other bodily locations, built into it, as soon as we become aware of it. Unfortunately I skimmed the latter half of this chapter so I cannot recall the general argument he uses to get to this conclusion. If my memory is correct, defending this claim matters to O'Shaughnessy's overall project insofar as he wants to show that the will and action is primal to consciousness in a way that the five senses are not; so he has to disabuse us of tempting views that make proprioception and sensory perception on par with one another.

Moreover, by showing that the overall location of a bodily sensation, and that sensation itself (which discloses its location, and thereby enables knowledge of the spatial location and presence of one's body, a precondition for any action at all) are causally interdependent, O'Shaughnessy undermines the received assumption that the will is something essentially cognitive, which swoops down and can magically control the body. Instead, the will is itself material and bodily; the paradigm for understanding its functions is our moving our bodily parts (e.g., moving our legs to walk; moving our fingers to pick something up), which can happen quite spontaneously and unconsciously, rather than top-down commands we give to ourselves.

In chapters 7 and 8, O'Shaughnessy introduces and elaborates on the concept of the body-image. He argues that there are long- and short-term body images, which are preconditions for having any bodily sensation (which is intrinsically spatially located) at all; and moreover, for having any sense of spatiality of the external world at all (which is disclosed by proprioception). The body image should not be understood as some intrinsically psychological schema or image; this might be a tempting view, given phenomena such as phantom limbs, where it seems that we can have a sense of location of bodily parts, independently of the existence of those parts. O'Shaughnessy argues that sensations in phantom limbs is not bodily sensation at all, but some relic of the imagination, or some other sort of cognitive activity. In contrast, the body image is intrinsically bodily; it is based upon our material body itself, and it can be best understood in terms of the effects it has upon all our actions and moments of consciousness. The body imagine is presupposed by any spatialized bodily sensation we have, which is necessary for our sense of the spatiality of the external world. O'Shaughnessy's arguments here amount to a certain disjunctivism regarding proprioception; just as visual perception and hallucination fall under different mental kinds, proprioception and apparent bodily sensations found in the case of phantom limbs also fall under different mental kinds.

I was overall convinced by O'Shaughnessy's argument for and definition of the bodily will. He makes some questionable assumptions in his argumentation here and there (e.g., that awareness of the spatiality of one's body is equally a priori as logical laws or awareness of time, in a Kantian sense), but the claims for which he gives these arguments almost always seemed right to me (I might just be too influenced by the Merleau-Pontian tradition to be appropriately critical, however). But I'd really like to see how this concept of the bodily will can be reconciled with our ordinary concept of the will as a whole. The latter, for example, accommodates cases of what we might call mental action, cases in which we, by sheer volition, can bring about some imagining, or end an episode of imagining. We do this all the time (e.g., when we reflect upon prior experiences), and it seems to be properly voluntary, unlike the formation of beliefs. Moreover, it doesn't seem to depend upon body-awareness or bodily movement. Given the table of contents for volume ii, it's not clear that O'Shaughnessy will address this issue; but I will see when I get there.

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in embodiment and action-based theories of consciousness. Or any Schopenhauer or Kant fans; it is evident how O'Shaughnessy is inspired by Kant's system-building approach to understanding consciousness, and his theory here may be seen as an astoundingly deep exploration of Schopenhauer's insights.

[A. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read. Important for my thesis. Onward to Volume 2!