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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 73 With the aid of this account of aversion, we can now discern a second reason why R3 as a terminating criterion of rationality for the Humean conception is nevertheless incapable of satisfaction. It is a well-known phenomenon that objects of desire begin to lose their luster after they are obtained. This is often attributed to fickleness, shallowness, or inconstancy of character. But actually it is instead implicit in the very structure of desire and aversion. After a desire has been satisfied, the desire or want itself disappears - and with it that which conferred psychological value on its object, leaving nothing for the object that satisfied it to satisfy, and so nothing relative to which it is valuable. A desired job, partner, lifestyle or dessert of necessity seems much less desirable after it is obtained because it stops being the object of one's want and starts being the object of one's surfeit - which is to say one's aversion. At the same time that we want the satisfaction of a desire to continue, we do not want the object of that satisfaction around after it has outlived its usefulness as a satisfaction. So to obtain the object of one's desire is thereby not only to devalue it in the act of obtaining it, but a fortiori to transform it into an object of aversion. Absent any other source of value beside desire, no object of desire can remain desirable for long after it has been obtained, because no desire can endure after it has been satisfied. The infinite proliferation of lower-order desires in the Humean self is matched only by the finitude of their duration. In this the Humean self is both a bubbling cauldron and a bottomless pit, in which countless desires endlessly form, expand, explode, and disappear. 2.3. Funnel Vision The belief-desire model of motivation defines the Humean self as future-oriented, in that the self finds expression and continuity in setting for itself, in the present, some future, extrinsic desired state of affairs that it can anticipate working to actualize over time.19 This feature of the Humean self can be regarded as the consequence of tying a dispositional analysis of traits of character to the foundational notion of a desire.20 To call a person generous or corrupt, on this analysis, is to describe a way she is disposed to act under certain circumstances. But since on the Humean conception of the self, all action is motivated by desires the agent wishes to satisfy, the concepts we invoke to describe a person's character or personality denote certain kinds of desires that person is disposed to try to satisfy under the relevant This is essentially Bernard Williams' notion of character. See his "Persons, Character and Morality," in A. O. Rorty, Ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1976). It is also consistent with Hume's own analysis of the self in Book I of the Treatise, given certain qualifications. 20 See, for example, Richard Brandt, "Traits of Character: A Conceptual Analysis," American Philosophical Quarterly 7, 1 (January 1970). 19 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
