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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 89 he is in fact instrumentalizing his relationships with us to serve an agenda to which we are not privy. But we can see that Dick himself may not be impervious to these concerns. He may wonder, for example, whether his stated moral object of desire is what is really structuring his responses and behavior instrumentally, or whether it may not in fact be merely a valued side-effect of his narcissism, or his desire for attention or power. For given the premise that it is an object of desire to which all the other components of his self are instrumental, it remains an open question which of the available, conjoined ones is really doing the structural and motivational work; or whether it is among the available, conjoined ones that he should even seek an answer. But Dick's deeper concern is an unease at the very availability of his thoughts and responses for instrumentally rational scrutiny. Here the worry is not just the obscurity of the overriding object of desire as such; but rather that the explicit desire from the perspective of which he introspects, whatever it is, preselects which thoughts and responses are available for such scrutiny, and thereby obscures the yet more basic intrinsic desires that are more thoroughly in need of reform. The distance afforded by the intrinsic object of desire to which Dick is apparently committed makes the true explanation of his behavior seem equally remote and inaccessible. His unease is a consequence of the truisms into which the desire model of motivation inevitably degenerates, namely: You can only know about yourself what you desire to know; and: What you desire to know about yourself is never what you truly need to know. Dick's worry that he may be overlooking the elements in his personality that are truly responsible for his moral and social sterility are a natural consequence of his suspicion that it is precisely the self he desires to reform that is engendering that very desire instrumentally, as a kind of lip-service to moral self-improvement that makes genuine improvement impossible. Thus our suspicion of his insincerity, and sense that we are being manipulated, may be mirrored in Dick's own worries that his true motives remain obscure, and his character beyond the reach of his own conscious efforts at self-development. 3.3. The Instrumentalization of the Self Note, then, that the instrumentalization dilemma is not generated by assuming the nonmateriality or privacy of Dick's desire for moral self-improvement, or whatever desires are hypothesized to motivate that one. The dilemma would remain even if we could literally see Dick's internal states represented on a video screen as states of his organs and brain. For the question would still arise as to how these states should be interpreted, and what explanatory hypothesis was best suited to this purpose. The hypothesis in question, namely the belief-desire model of motivation, stipulates that all such states are resources for the satisfaction of desire, and it has already been © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
