| OCR Text |
Show Part I: Ideals 50 can motivate action because no such desire is one a unified agent can have. Motivationally effective desires as well as the final ends that are their ultimate intentional objects, then, are subordinate to the minimal consistency requirements of theoretical reason on Kant's view. I argue in Chapter II, following, that theoretical reason thus provides necessary conditions both of action and therefore of its final ends. However, Kant's conception of the self implies even more than this. Kant's conception also implies that reason itself can precipitate action, independently of desire - and hence provides sufficient conditions of action as well. For in order that the minimal consistency requirements of theoretical reason filter out anomalous motives, emotions and thoughts from conscious unified experience, they must function effectively as sentinels, as gatekeepers of coherence that evaluate such possible experiences for inclusion in or exclusion from conscious awareness. That is, they function as motivationally effective cognitive norms that select from the array of external and internal information and experience the content of both latent and occurrent thought, belief, emotion, desire, intention, and sensation, for minimal internal consistency with those which already form and constitute the structure of the self and character of the agent. Otherwise stated, unified agents are overridingly disposed to preserve their own internal rational coherence in cognitive acts of rational content-selection. Then consider those instances in which such minimally consistent desire is absent, but occurrent thought is present, the content of which is minimally consistent relative to the agent's other experiences and dispositions, and so meets the criteria of theoretical reason. Here there need be no mystery as to what moves the agent to perform a particular action. As we saw in Volume I, Chapter VII in discussing Nagel, occurrent thoughts, beliefs, rememberings, recognizings, and so on are cognitive events with causal efficacy no less than are desires. We can distinguish among such events only on the basis of their intentional content. More specifically, I show in Chapter V below that we can distinguish the motivationally effective from the motivationally ineffective occurrent cognitive events only on the basis of their intentional content. And more specifically still, it is the intentional content of such an event that decides its degree of motivational efficacy relative to the agent's other experiences and dispositions. Most specifically of all, an agent can be motivated by the intentional content of an occurrent thought or belief to perform an action that expresses that thought or belief, whether a desire is present or not, provided that this content motivationally overrides the intentional content of other, competing beliefs and/or desires. This intentional content is rational if it satisfies the two minimal consistency conditions of theoretical reason which I develop in Chapter II, Section 4 below, and elaborate further in Chapter III, following. In Part II of this volume, I describe © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
