What do you think?
The Will: Volume 2, A Dual Aspect Theory
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.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
391 pages, Hardcover
First published November 20, 1980
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December 26, 2022
After reading Volume 1 and feeling a bit disinterested, I'm surprised by how engaging this second volume is. Unfortunately, the most extraordinary claims, and arguments for them, in this volume cannot be fully appreciated without reading the previous volume. But it is certainly worth it. I want to first summarize O'Shaughnessy's views. Second, I want to reflect on his general methodology and philosophical disposition a bit, and think through how powerful but also potentially dangerous these features of O'Shaughnessy's thought is. Finally, I'll mention questions his work has raised for me.
Or, before getting into this, O'Shaughnessy can be quite jazzy in his descriptions (inspires me to someday be a bit more indulgent in my verb choice, at least, in philosophical writing!) Couldn't help but share these top hits:
"As a perversion of the natural order, even as akin in ways to the phenomenon of incest!, almost indeed a sort of Oedipus Complex for Action... Then as the fulfilment of incestuous wishes has a tendency to lead to madness, so the unholy encroachment here contemplated tends likewise to call forth its own punishing ‘furies’. These will become apparent only as the chapter approaches its conclusion" (the context is he's discussing how other philosophers mistake the logical order between perception and physical action)
"Thankfully, something real inhabits the vast terrain separating the omnipotent point consciousness (a God without a kingdom!) from the rigid and impotently fated being (a pawn at the mercy of the World): the first being the manic, the second the depressive, posture."
"Suppose a pin-headed dinosaur twiddles a toe that is at the far end of its 50-foot body. What is the ontological status of the single event, toe movement, that takes place 50 feet from its tiny brain?"
"The very last causal representative of thought before ψ ∼ Ψ and ∼ψ ∼ Ψ physical items become the bearers of meaning. In short, a messenger from on high, a Mercury, or Hermes, or Archangel Gabriel figure, whereby the mind stamps its image on the face of the globe."
That aside, in Volume 2, O'Shaughnessy focuses on examining bodily willing as a psychological phenomenon (in contrast, in Volume 1, he mostly focused on defining physical/bodily action, in such a way that it is something that can be explained by something like willing at all). In the first part of this volume, he defines willing in terms of intention, volition, and the like. In the second part, he explores how his definition of the will entails that the mind and body are identical to one another in this particular situation, and how this naturally leads to a certain dual-aspect theory (i.e., a theory that resolves the mind-body problem by saying that the mind and body are two aspects of a single physical substance) - but his version of this theory is significantly different from all others.
In chapter 9 (Volume 1 left us off at chapter 8), O'Shaughnessy argues that there is a distinctive kind of knowledge that we have of our willing a bodily action; this kind of knowledge differs from ordinary knowledge, which is observation-based, or derived from perceptual experience. This was a claim made by Anscombe, and it is delightful to see it treated in such detail and forcefulness here. The basics of his argument starts off with the fact that a certain type of situation can happen: We may will or try to do something - under seemingly ordinary circumstances so that it doesn't even arise to us that it is possible for our attempt to be unsuccessful - and only later discover that we have not done what we had willed to do. For example, it is conceivable that someone may will to raise their arm, as usual, and only after a couple of seconds realizes that their arm hasn't been raised. So we may know of our willings independently of perception; if such knowledge depended upon perception, the action that expresses the willing must first materialize (in other words, we must first succeed), and then we may perceive or observe it. (I am interested in how this special kind of knowledge that holds for our willings seems to also hold for other phenomena - I'll discuss that a bit below). When we act, we see the objects upon which we act as embodying value relative to the purposes of our action; in contrast when we merely observe objects, our hopes, needs, lacks, etc. might all play a role in determining what value the object has for us. (There are very interesting connections to be made between O'Shaughnessy's discussion here, and Heidegger's division between presence-to-hand and readiness-at-hand! People interested in the Heidegger might find O'Shaughnessy's discussion valuable; he goes more in-depth, in defining what this distinction is at all than Heidegger ever does.)
An upshot of his argument is that it paves the road for seeing that dualism is false; we don't need to know of the physical world by peering out from a mind behind the skull, but there is a particular sector of the physical world, namely our bodies, which stands in such a close relation to our mind (which O'Shaughnessy will show is a relation of logical and causal co-entailment) that this cannot be made sense of if dualism were true.
In chapter 10, O'Shaughnessy defines intention (the concept we use when we say "I intend to do A" or "I mean to do A"). He argues that all actions are necessarily intentional, even absent-minded ones. There is an intuitive difference between having one's leg reflexively jerk from a hit, and taking a walk without attending to what one is doing. The spectrum of the degree to which we are self-aware, when undertaking an intentional action, may be understood in terms of the fact that the intention behind an action may vary in how many determinations it possesses, in its description. Contrast, for example, "I walked around" and "I walked at a fast pace and made my heart rate quicken." There's always something of which we are aware whenever we undertake an action, in contrast to involuntary and reflexive bodily phenomena.
In chapter 11, O'Shaughnessy examines the concept of volition, which he shows is identical with trying, willing, striving, and the like. There is a position in philosophy of action called "volitionism" which holds that what makes an action an action, rather than a mere physical movement, is precisely that there is the presence of a "volition" behind an action. The volition is intrinsically volitional; there are no other entities upon which it depends that explains how it can contribute the volitional character to the act which it supports. There is an opposing position which O'Shaughnessy dubs "intentional extroversion" (started by Donald Davidson), which holds that the volitional character of action is to be explained by the presence of an intention, desire, and belief behind the action. None of these psychological entities are intrinsically volitional. O'Shaughnessy proposes to understand intention afresh, so that it is intrinsically volitional, and nevertheless doesn't introduce mind/body dualism.
In chapter 12, O'Shaughnessy explains what he means by his "dual-aspect theory"; he explains how, metaphysically, it is possible for physical action to be psychological, and necessarily so. I skimmed his arguments for this position; it was quite technical, and I was feeling lazy. In chapter 13, he defines action. He explains that the intention that is necessary to action displays the characteristic of the "accordion effect" (first discussed by Anscombe): there are various inter-nesting descriptions one could give of what one intended, which differ with respect to how immediate and instrumental a certain description of an intention is. He examines edge cases of action to show that intention is necessary to action.
In chapter 14, O'Shaughnessy differentiates between the psychological and the mental; bodily willing (and the bodily actions, which he later shows stands in a co-entailment relation to willing) need only be properly psychological. All animals have psychologicality. Only the self-conscious have mentality. A pain in one's leg, for example, is psychological, whereas a thought about something is mental. These are significantly distinct categories, and by understanding them, we may resolve the seeming paradoxcality of the intuition that bodily willing is both physical and mental. In chapter 15, O'Shaughnessy explores the ontological status of physical action and defends that it is a psychological phenomenon, but not mental (and the same holds for the bodily will). He shows that any seemingly properly mental state (e.g., an imagining) has psychological and mental aspects; it must engage the body in some way (e.g., activate some minimal affect) and also has components (e.g., intentional properties) that may be characterized without reference to the body. (This part was confusing, and I may be wrong about this interpretation).
In chapter 16, he puts this definition of physical action to use for developing his dual-aspect theory. Most dual-aspect theories hold that mind and body are distinct in some way and arise from the physical. In contrast, O'Shaughnessy's theory develops from an analysis of a psychological event of trying, which need not depend upon physicalism. It implies a certain special sort of physicalism which is applicable only to the phenomenon of bodily willing/action (it does not necessarily extend to the rest of the universe).
In chapters 17, 18, and 19, he examines the causal antecedents of intention, which he then shows to stand in a relation of co-entailment with both bodily willing and bodily action. These necessary antecedents include desire and belief (other causal antecedents to intention, which are not necessary, include decision and choosing). In chapter 17, O'Shaughnessy argues that the causal relations between belief, desire, and intention are immediately and necessarily evident to us; this "perspicuousness" doesn't hold for most cases where mental causation is involved. Moreover, the rationale of an intention, or how it is reasonable, is likewise perspicuous. What makes this perspicuousness of intention possible? O'Shaughnessy unfortunately doesn't address this (I have thoughts about it, which I will mention below).
O'Shaughnessy, in chapter 17, moreover tackles the question: What sort of an entity is intention anyways? He argues that it is not a mere concatenation of belief and desire. Desire, roughly put, is like a force, which compels us towards the object towards which it is directed; and belief is a cognitive commitment to that something is the case. Intention is not the same as either of these, but it is preceded by both, and moreover, functions to synthesize them. Intention is like an engine through which desire and belief may be put, so that they may serve the function of governing and regulating action. So intention is an irreducible psychological kind, which may be characterized by appeal to its necessary causal antecedents and effects, which may be captured by the description above. Intentions morph over the course of an action, given that unfolding events may draw up or change one's desires and beliefs, which are implemented in intention.
In chapter 20, O'Shaughnessy wraps things up by arranging the claims he's established in previous chapters for the argument that physical action is necessarily both a physical and psychological phenomenon; it is necessarily accompanied (and moreover, caused by, and has its rationale provided by) bodily willing and intention.
Okie dokie, now that my summary is done, I will think about O'Shaughnessy's style of doing philosophy. This book (and his later book Consciousness and the World) are absolutely remarkable achievements. A way to characterize them is that O'Shaughnessy starts off with the ideas found in classic philosophical texts (Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Kant's First Critique), and massively expands upon them, adding new level upon level of detail and insight. All along the way (or this expansion is driven by) his introducing new conceptual distinctions, for the sake of refining our receive terminology regarding the mind. He argues for these distinctions often by examining the language itself and pointing out the language games from which these concepts are derived; among other traditional philosophical 'tools'.
At first, I am blown away by such achievement. It seems that O'Shaughnessy continuously makes further discoveries, uncovering the hidden facts about the nature of the mind, and moreover, does this in a very rigorous, convincing fashion. But I have some lurking worries. What if, by adding detail to these traditional concepts (e.g., intention, will, consciousness, desire, body), he in fact invents or manufactures new concepts to add to them, concepts which do not reflect anything in reality, but that seem to insofar as they are coherent under the context of his arguments?
I am not very worried at the end of the day. He takes up Wittgensteinian insights in his conceptual analyses, and often argues for his revisions of traditional concepts by examining on-the-ground cases. But it's striking that O'Shaughnessy spends lots of time arguing for premises that seem pretty intuitive, and then just proceeds by brute assertion on the front of controversial premises. Moreover, I could see the illusoriness of the tightness of his argumentation particularly in chapter 17. There, I think if he were familiar with contemporary psychological theories of emotion, he could not give the analysis of intention and action that he does. Lacking the concept of emotion, there are various explanatory gaps which he takes intention to fill; so the way he has expanded/revised the concept of intention might 'inflate' this entity with properties that don't exist in reality. Of course, every thinker is going to be limited, so this is no shortcoming of O'Shaughnessy. Perhaps it's better to aim to be detailed/analytic, and to mess up some of the details, then to let oneself be vague/obscure, and get fewer claims wrong. But surely there's a balance to be struck here, and I am left curious about how to determine and achieve that.
Okie dokie, that aside, now I'd like to mention some of my thoughts in response to this book. O'Shaughnessy takes bodily action to be the foundation of all consciousness; in Volume 1, he argues that perception (the source of almost all knowledge) exists only insofar as bodily action exists, and the contents of perception are to be explained by the actions which we intend. I wonder whether this is strictly correct. I've had the intuition that emotion/affect might be most explanatorily primitive; or at least it is at the same level as O'Shaughnessy's intention, wiling, and bodily action. My intuition has been that emotion is essentially evaluative of its object, but in a way that is non-cognitive. For example, when I am surprised at waking up to a sudden cold dip in weather, my surprise is indicative of a non-cognitive, pre-reflective, reflexive/automatic assessment of an element of my situation; namely, this is the assessment that what I had believed in is not the case. Fear involves the assessment that some element is threatening; gratitude that some element satisfies certain needs in a way that is not necessarily expected or deserved; and so on.
I've been thinking about emotion (i.e., this non-cognitive assessment, this automatic way by which objects in our environments show up with meanings) as the basis of our ascription of intentions, beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes to ourselves and each other. It is a mental activity to articulate a non-cognitive assessment, a meaning an object shows up to us with, in propositional terms; this involves genuine creativity (e.g., there is a range of interpretations that could be equally appropriate and that get realized as authentic). I've been relying on a metaphor of "sculpting"; as we articulate/express our emotions, the meanings of things that envelop us becomes increasingly determinate and detailed.
I was most fascinated by O'Shaughnessy's chapter 17, where he discusses intention. At various points in that chapter, he explicitly describes intention as dynamically unfolding; an indeterminate intention can be revised or updated so it has more detail. He describes intention as having the power to make more determinate beliefs and desires. Moreover, there were points at which I believed we can solve puzzling phenomena he gets at by appeal to emotion. For example, O'Shaughnessy does not offer an explanation of the perspicuousness of intention (e.g., that it is self-evident what caused and what is the rationale of any intention). This can be explained by emotion: emotion involves content that is an assessment, and is desire- or value-driven, but which is non-cognitive and possesses features that makes it possible to express this content in the form of propositional beliefs and desires.
So an intention seems to be perspicuous because, as a propositional state, it results from the interpretation of a prior affect, which contained all the starting material that can be interpreted in terms of belief and desire. In other words, the appearance of distinct psychological kinds that stand in causal relation and that provide one another a rationale is a result of our theorizing about our experience; but such atomistic kinds might not exist as such in the first place. (Of course there are distinguishable functions of the mind, but perhaps the way by which they are individuated in nature or reality is not clear-cut and atomistic).
O'Shaughnessy, however, offers many details about the structure and function of intention, which I've never considered as possibly holding of emotion. I'd like to think about how, if his claims about intention are true, what might be inferred about emotion as to explain these, on the assumption that intention is an articulated/matured form of emotion.
As a whole, I hands-down recommend O'Shaughnessy. I think his Consciousness and the World covers more ground and is more earth-shaking than this book; but that is an unfair standard to use. I take that later work of his to be on par with (or even surpassing) Being and Time, The World as Will and Representation, and other seminal post-Kantian works. So this book, The Will is definitely worth reading; anyone who is enticed by Anscombe, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, or Schopenhauer will find this work brilliant and magnificent. It provides an underlying systematic and detailed framework for understanding the key insights of those famous philosophers.
Or, before getting into this, O'Shaughnessy can be quite jazzy in his descriptions (inspires me to someday be a bit more indulgent in my verb choice, at least, in philosophical writing!) Couldn't help but share these top hits:
"As a perversion of the natural order, even as akin in ways to the phenomenon of incest!, almost indeed a sort of Oedipus Complex for Action... Then as the fulfilment of incestuous wishes has a tendency to lead to madness, so the unholy encroachment here contemplated tends likewise to call forth its own punishing ‘furies’. These will become apparent only as the chapter approaches its conclusion" (the context is he's discussing how other philosophers mistake the logical order between perception and physical action)
"Thankfully, something real inhabits the vast terrain separating the omnipotent point consciousness (a God without a kingdom!) from the rigid and impotently fated being (a pawn at the mercy of the World): the first being the manic, the second the depressive, posture."
"Suppose a pin-headed dinosaur twiddles a toe that is at the far end of its 50-foot body. What is the ontological status of the single event, toe movement, that takes place 50 feet from its tiny brain?"
"The very last causal representative of thought before ψ ∼ Ψ and ∼ψ ∼ Ψ physical items become the bearers of meaning. In short, a messenger from on high, a Mercury, or Hermes, or Archangel Gabriel figure, whereby the mind stamps its image on the face of the globe."
That aside, in Volume 2, O'Shaughnessy focuses on examining bodily willing as a psychological phenomenon (in contrast, in Volume 1, he mostly focused on defining physical/bodily action, in such a way that it is something that can be explained by something like willing at all). In the first part of this volume, he defines willing in terms of intention, volition, and the like. In the second part, he explores how his definition of the will entails that the mind and body are identical to one another in this particular situation, and how this naturally leads to a certain dual-aspect theory (i.e., a theory that resolves the mind-body problem by saying that the mind and body are two aspects of a single physical substance) - but his version of this theory is significantly different from all others.
In chapter 9 (Volume 1 left us off at chapter 8), O'Shaughnessy argues that there is a distinctive kind of knowledge that we have of our willing a bodily action; this kind of knowledge differs from ordinary knowledge, which is observation-based, or derived from perceptual experience. This was a claim made by Anscombe, and it is delightful to see it treated in such detail and forcefulness here. The basics of his argument starts off with the fact that a certain type of situation can happen: We may will or try to do something - under seemingly ordinary circumstances so that it doesn't even arise to us that it is possible for our attempt to be unsuccessful - and only later discover that we have not done what we had willed to do. For example, it is conceivable that someone may will to raise their arm, as usual, and only after a couple of seconds realizes that their arm hasn't been raised. So we may know of our willings independently of perception; if such knowledge depended upon perception, the action that expresses the willing must first materialize (in other words, we must first succeed), and then we may perceive or observe it. (I am interested in how this special kind of knowledge that holds for our willings seems to also hold for other phenomena - I'll discuss that a bit below). When we act, we see the objects upon which we act as embodying value relative to the purposes of our action; in contrast when we merely observe objects, our hopes, needs, lacks, etc. might all play a role in determining what value the object has for us. (There are very interesting connections to be made between O'Shaughnessy's discussion here, and Heidegger's division between presence-to-hand and readiness-at-hand! People interested in the Heidegger might find O'Shaughnessy's discussion valuable; he goes more in-depth, in defining what this distinction is at all than Heidegger ever does.)
An upshot of his argument is that it paves the road for seeing that dualism is false; we don't need to know of the physical world by peering out from a mind behind the skull, but there is a particular sector of the physical world, namely our bodies, which stands in such a close relation to our mind (which O'Shaughnessy will show is a relation of logical and causal co-entailment) that this cannot be made sense of if dualism were true.
In chapter 10, O'Shaughnessy defines intention (the concept we use when we say "I intend to do A" or "I mean to do A"). He argues that all actions are necessarily intentional, even absent-minded ones. There is an intuitive difference between having one's leg reflexively jerk from a hit, and taking a walk without attending to what one is doing. The spectrum of the degree to which we are self-aware, when undertaking an intentional action, may be understood in terms of the fact that the intention behind an action may vary in how many determinations it possesses, in its description. Contrast, for example, "I walked around" and "I walked at a fast pace and made my heart rate quicken." There's always something of which we are aware whenever we undertake an action, in contrast to involuntary and reflexive bodily phenomena.
In chapter 11, O'Shaughnessy examines the concept of volition, which he shows is identical with trying, willing, striving, and the like. There is a position in philosophy of action called "volitionism" which holds that what makes an action an action, rather than a mere physical movement, is precisely that there is the presence of a "volition" behind an action. The volition is intrinsically volitional; there are no other entities upon which it depends that explains how it can contribute the volitional character to the act which it supports. There is an opposing position which O'Shaughnessy dubs "intentional extroversion" (started by Donald Davidson), which holds that the volitional character of action is to be explained by the presence of an intention, desire, and belief behind the action. None of these psychological entities are intrinsically volitional. O'Shaughnessy proposes to understand intention afresh, so that it is intrinsically volitional, and nevertheless doesn't introduce mind/body dualism.
In chapter 12, O'Shaughnessy explains what he means by his "dual-aspect theory"; he explains how, metaphysically, it is possible for physical action to be psychological, and necessarily so. I skimmed his arguments for this position; it was quite technical, and I was feeling lazy. In chapter 13, he defines action. He explains that the intention that is necessary to action displays the characteristic of the "accordion effect" (first discussed by Anscombe): there are various inter-nesting descriptions one could give of what one intended, which differ with respect to how immediate and instrumental a certain description of an intention is. He examines edge cases of action to show that intention is necessary to action.
In chapter 14, O'Shaughnessy differentiates between the psychological and the mental; bodily willing (and the bodily actions, which he later shows stands in a co-entailment relation to willing) need only be properly psychological. All animals have psychologicality. Only the self-conscious have mentality. A pain in one's leg, for example, is psychological, whereas a thought about something is mental. These are significantly distinct categories, and by understanding them, we may resolve the seeming paradoxcality of the intuition that bodily willing is both physical and mental. In chapter 15, O'Shaughnessy explores the ontological status of physical action and defends that it is a psychological phenomenon, but not mental (and the same holds for the bodily will). He shows that any seemingly properly mental state (e.g., an imagining) has psychological and mental aspects; it must engage the body in some way (e.g., activate some minimal affect) and also has components (e.g., intentional properties) that may be characterized without reference to the body. (This part was confusing, and I may be wrong about this interpretation).
In chapter 16, he puts this definition of physical action to use for developing his dual-aspect theory. Most dual-aspect theories hold that mind and body are distinct in some way and arise from the physical. In contrast, O'Shaughnessy's theory develops from an analysis of a psychological event of trying, which need not depend upon physicalism. It implies a certain special sort of physicalism which is applicable only to the phenomenon of bodily willing/action (it does not necessarily extend to the rest of the universe).
In chapters 17, 18, and 19, he examines the causal antecedents of intention, which he then shows to stand in a relation of co-entailment with both bodily willing and bodily action. These necessary antecedents include desire and belief (other causal antecedents to intention, which are not necessary, include decision and choosing). In chapter 17, O'Shaughnessy argues that the causal relations between belief, desire, and intention are immediately and necessarily evident to us; this "perspicuousness" doesn't hold for most cases where mental causation is involved. Moreover, the rationale of an intention, or how it is reasonable, is likewise perspicuous. What makes this perspicuousness of intention possible? O'Shaughnessy unfortunately doesn't address this (I have thoughts about it, which I will mention below).
O'Shaughnessy, in chapter 17, moreover tackles the question: What sort of an entity is intention anyways? He argues that it is not a mere concatenation of belief and desire. Desire, roughly put, is like a force, which compels us towards the object towards which it is directed; and belief is a cognitive commitment to that something is the case. Intention is not the same as either of these, but it is preceded by both, and moreover, functions to synthesize them. Intention is like an engine through which desire and belief may be put, so that they may serve the function of governing and regulating action. So intention is an irreducible psychological kind, which may be characterized by appeal to its necessary causal antecedents and effects, which may be captured by the description above. Intentions morph over the course of an action, given that unfolding events may draw up or change one's desires and beliefs, which are implemented in intention.
In chapter 20, O'Shaughnessy wraps things up by arranging the claims he's established in previous chapters for the argument that physical action is necessarily both a physical and psychological phenomenon; it is necessarily accompanied (and moreover, caused by, and has its rationale provided by) bodily willing and intention.
Okie dokie, now that my summary is done, I will think about O'Shaughnessy's style of doing philosophy. This book (and his later book Consciousness and the World) are absolutely remarkable achievements. A way to characterize them is that O'Shaughnessy starts off with the ideas found in classic philosophical texts (Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Kant's First Critique), and massively expands upon them, adding new level upon level of detail and insight. All along the way (or this expansion is driven by) his introducing new conceptual distinctions, for the sake of refining our receive terminology regarding the mind. He argues for these distinctions often by examining the language itself and pointing out the language games from which these concepts are derived; among other traditional philosophical 'tools'.
At first, I am blown away by such achievement. It seems that O'Shaughnessy continuously makes further discoveries, uncovering the hidden facts about the nature of the mind, and moreover, does this in a very rigorous, convincing fashion. But I have some lurking worries. What if, by adding detail to these traditional concepts (e.g., intention, will, consciousness, desire, body), he in fact invents or manufactures new concepts to add to them, concepts which do not reflect anything in reality, but that seem to insofar as they are coherent under the context of his arguments?
I am not very worried at the end of the day. He takes up Wittgensteinian insights in his conceptual analyses, and often argues for his revisions of traditional concepts by examining on-the-ground cases. But it's striking that O'Shaughnessy spends lots of time arguing for premises that seem pretty intuitive, and then just proceeds by brute assertion on the front of controversial premises. Moreover, I could see the illusoriness of the tightness of his argumentation particularly in chapter 17. There, I think if he were familiar with contemporary psychological theories of emotion, he could not give the analysis of intention and action that he does. Lacking the concept of emotion, there are various explanatory gaps which he takes intention to fill; so the way he has expanded/revised the concept of intention might 'inflate' this entity with properties that don't exist in reality. Of course, every thinker is going to be limited, so this is no shortcoming of O'Shaughnessy. Perhaps it's better to aim to be detailed/analytic, and to mess up some of the details, then to let oneself be vague/obscure, and get fewer claims wrong. But surely there's a balance to be struck here, and I am left curious about how to determine and achieve that.
Okie dokie, that aside, now I'd like to mention some of my thoughts in response to this book. O'Shaughnessy takes bodily action to be the foundation of all consciousness; in Volume 1, he argues that perception (the source of almost all knowledge) exists only insofar as bodily action exists, and the contents of perception are to be explained by the actions which we intend. I wonder whether this is strictly correct. I've had the intuition that emotion/affect might be most explanatorily primitive; or at least it is at the same level as O'Shaughnessy's intention, wiling, and bodily action. My intuition has been that emotion is essentially evaluative of its object, but in a way that is non-cognitive. For example, when I am surprised at waking up to a sudden cold dip in weather, my surprise is indicative of a non-cognitive, pre-reflective, reflexive/automatic assessment of an element of my situation; namely, this is the assessment that what I had believed in is not the case. Fear involves the assessment that some element is threatening; gratitude that some element satisfies certain needs in a way that is not necessarily expected or deserved; and so on.
I've been thinking about emotion (i.e., this non-cognitive assessment, this automatic way by which objects in our environments show up with meanings) as the basis of our ascription of intentions, beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes to ourselves and each other. It is a mental activity to articulate a non-cognitive assessment, a meaning an object shows up to us with, in propositional terms; this involves genuine creativity (e.g., there is a range of interpretations that could be equally appropriate and that get realized as authentic). I've been relying on a metaphor of "sculpting"; as we articulate/express our emotions, the meanings of things that envelop us becomes increasingly determinate and detailed.
I was most fascinated by O'Shaughnessy's chapter 17, where he discusses intention. At various points in that chapter, he explicitly describes intention as dynamically unfolding; an indeterminate intention can be revised or updated so it has more detail. He describes intention as having the power to make more determinate beliefs and desires. Moreover, there were points at which I believed we can solve puzzling phenomena he gets at by appeal to emotion. For example, O'Shaughnessy does not offer an explanation of the perspicuousness of intention (e.g., that it is self-evident what caused and what is the rationale of any intention). This can be explained by emotion: emotion involves content that is an assessment, and is desire- or value-driven, but which is non-cognitive and possesses features that makes it possible to express this content in the form of propositional beliefs and desires.
So an intention seems to be perspicuous because, as a propositional state, it results from the interpretation of a prior affect, which contained all the starting material that can be interpreted in terms of belief and desire. In other words, the appearance of distinct psychological kinds that stand in causal relation and that provide one another a rationale is a result of our theorizing about our experience; but such atomistic kinds might not exist as such in the first place. (Of course there are distinguishable functions of the mind, but perhaps the way by which they are individuated in nature or reality is not clear-cut and atomistic).
O'Shaughnessy, however, offers many details about the structure and function of intention, which I've never considered as possibly holding of emotion. I'd like to think about how, if his claims about intention are true, what might be inferred about emotion as to explain these, on the assumption that intention is an articulated/matured form of emotion.
As a whole, I hands-down recommend O'Shaughnessy. I think his Consciousness and the World covers more ground and is more earth-shaking than this book; but that is an unfair standard to use. I take that later work of his to be on par with (or even surpassing) Being and Time, The World as Will and Representation, and other seminal post-Kantian works. So this book, The Will is definitely worth reading; anyone who is enticed by Anscombe, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, or Schopenhauer will find this work brilliant and magnificent. It provides an underlying systematic and detailed framework for understanding the key insights of those famous philosophers.
June 11, 2025
Volume 2 was so much more fun compared to Volume 1. Recommend sticking through it, despite the length of the two volumes, for both the profundity as well as the fun of the theory.
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