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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 481 physical therapy. It is literally a moving and often a traumatic experience, an occurrent event that precipitates further events - mental, emotional, conative. It is the kind of experience that does enable one to act in opposition to settled traits of character under the right circumstances - even to act out of respect for the moral law, or to spark a motivationally effective desire to do so. If desires were nothing but thought-activated, settled character dispositions, the experience of exposure to relevant and available facts and logic would be unable to generate them. They would require habituation - in which case they could be activated by thoughts and instrumental reasoning about how a particular action might realize their objects. Exposure to facts and logic would be superfluous. On the other hand, in those cases in which cognitive psychotherapy is sufficient to engender a rational desire, that desire cannot be merely a thought-activated disposition to act, because no process of habituation has formed the relevant disposition (remember that we are considering the nontautologous interpretation, so it won't do to claim that if we performed the act we must have been so disposed to perform it). Here the desire must be an occurrent event, itself caused by prior deliberation. So Brandt's account of how cognitive psychotherapy produces desires essentially follows Nagel's Kantian model. So if desires are thought-activated dispositions in the tautologous sense, cognitive psychotherapy can neither evaluate nor improve their rationality. Where cognitive psychotherapy can generate a rational desire, on the other hand, that desire cannot be a thought-activated disposition. If desires are, rather, nontautologous, occurrent mental events of the orthodox Humean sort, then rational actions are precipitated, not by the thought of their instrumentality, but by a Kantian recognition of their rationality. However, if the orthodox Humean model of desire is, indeed, the one that underlies Brandt's assertion that we must always have a desire to ensure the satisfaction of our future desires in order to do so, it is then unclear from whence the necessity - and hence the universality - of this claim derives. As we have already seen in examining Nagel's view, desires understood in this sense are obviously not the only sorts of occurrent internal events that go on in us. Emotional states such as joy, outrage, or respect, as well as cognitive states such as conviction, doubt, or certainty may be among the others. Nor does Brandt rule out the possibility that these other internal states may have some causal role to play in fueling action as well (89). So it is unclear why desires should be ascribed a necessary part to play in motivating action, and why, other things equal, other internal, occurrent states such as certainty or respect should not at least on some occasions be sufficient. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
