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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 345 Harry Frankfurt describes as a wanton an agent whose first-order desires are neither evaluated nor governed by higher-order ones.13 The basic idea can be generalized beyond the constraints of the Humean, desire-based conception of the self that Frankfurt takes for granted. An agent may be motivated by sentiment, conviction, emotion, principle, belief, or need, in addition to desire; and may act in a similarly unselfconscious manner with respect to any of these normative motivational guides. When reason is silent, she fails to subsume that behavior under any concepts, fails to identify it conceptually at all. However, this does not imply that she is unconscious in quite the sense Nietzsche appears to celebrate when he says, [W]ith noble men, cleverness … is far less essential than the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts or even than a certain imprudence, perhaps a bold recklessness whether in the face of danger or of the enemy, or that enthusiastic impulsiveness in anger, love, reverence, gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls have at all times recognized one another.14 Nietzsche is quite right to notice that, as was true of solipsistic denial, true wantonness is similarly a luxury of the privileged. But contra Frankfurt, a wanton is not necessarily at the mercy of his instincts and impulses alone. He may be fully alert and sensitive to his surroundings; and may formulate intentional objects, both of consciousness and of will. However, because he lacks conceptual guidelines for self-evaluation, he lacks the tools with which fully to differentiate himself as a subject from the intentional objects he formulates. Unlike the solipsist, the wanton does not implicitly exempt himself from the principles that govern his world. Rather, he is fully identical with their practical workings. A wanton is an agent in whom self-reflective reason and so pseudorationality are silent. The concept of the wanton would seem to imply a negative moral evaluation of an agent whose behavior, because rationally unsupervised, is morally irresponsible.15 For example, a wanton may be motivated by the Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," The Journal of Philosophy LXVIII, 1 (January 1971), 5-20. 14 Nietzsche, op. cit. Note 11, 39. 15 Thus Frankfurt says about the wanton, Nothing in the concept of the wanton implies that he cannot reason or that he cannot deliberate concerning how to do what he wants to do. What distinguishes the rational wanton from other rational agents is that he is not concerned with the desirability of his desires themselves. He ignores the question of what his will is to be. … he does not care which of his inclinations is the strongest (11). Frankfurt later issues a caveat that "a person's second-order volitions [do not] necessarily manifest a moral stance on his part toward his first-order desires" (13). But of course this does not imply that his indifference toward the worth of his desires is not susceptible of moral evaluation from a third-person perspective. The terms "person" 13 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
