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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 80 to its terminating criterion of rationality, namely the highest-order desire for wholeness and sufficiency. In the event that this object of highest-order desire were unattainable, feelings of dejection, deprivation, and/or anxiety would be a permanent character trait of a Humean self. But we have just seen in Subsection 2.2, above, that this object of desire is unattainable, because it automatically generates supplementary, lower-order desires for the continuance and protection of the satisfaction of this one that in turn proliferate without limit - thus insuring that feelings of dejection, deprivation, anxiety; discontent, inferiority, insecurity, and craving are, indeed, permanent character traits of the Humean self. Now let us consider some of the more practical implications of this psychological conception. An agent who is attached, in the sense just defined, to the objects of his desires as replenishments of his variously perceived insufficiencies will experience any failure to satisfy them as increasing his insufficiency. For in failing to satisfy the lower-order desire, he is simultaneously exacerbating his failure to satisfy the highest-order one, and thereby generating further lowerorder ones. Each failure of desire-satisfaction thus ramifies throughout the structure of the Humean self, and further expands the range and depth of its sense of privation. And so with every such failure, the felt insufficiency, sense of inferiority, and so the negative self-evaluation of the self from the perspective of its envisioned future increases. But the persisting unattainability of R3 as an object of desire is identical to the persisting inability to close the gap between one's self and one's fundamental self-conception, i.e. to live up to the ideal that guides and motivates one's actions. Relative to that ideal, the Humean self experiences itself not only as insufficient, but therefore as deficient. Hence every thwarted attempt to satisfy its lower-order desires intensifies its self-dislike to the point of self-hatred. In this way the motivation to succeed in satisfying some desire or other, any desire, so as to restore selfesteem intensifies and escalates as a bulwark against a downwardly spiraling self-hatred. The quest for desire-gratification intensifies as an antidote not only to privation and insufficiency but to self-hatred for the Humean self, and its need for external infusions of esteem increases correspondingly. By self-hatred, I will mean the belief - with its concomitant feelings of revulsion, shame and despair - that one is inferior, to varying degrees, to everything and everyone external to oneself. Thus self-hatred is the subjective expressive counterpart of the Humean self to its representation of the external world as consisting in an abundance of resources for replenishing its felt insufficiencies and restoring itself to wholeness. A self-hating agent perceives himself as inferior to external others who, because they are other than himself, by definition have what he lacks. He perceives himself as inferior to external nonhuman things that, because he sees them as potential resources for desire- © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
