I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine concerning shopping for pants. They remarked that shopping with women for pants is an awful experience, because they have to try on a million pairs, and it all just reinforces how fat they feel. My friend then added – unless they're anorexic.
As it happens, I disagree. I expect the anorexic women have to try on two million pairs, and also feel fat. What this reflects is that there is something out of order with their desires, as it were. That is, a desire impels me to take certain actions in order to satisfy that desire. But I happen to know that taking those actions won't actually satisfy the desire that impels me to take them. If I take the actions that I don't want to take, but which will actually satisfy (or should I say eliminate?) the desire, I believe that I am taking responsibility for myself in the way that Frankfurt advocates.
To apply this to the case of women shopping for pants: the women in question have this desire to lose just a little more weight, because then they'll be thin and feel okay about their bodies.* But, I believe, evidence indicates that (in many cases) losing weight is not the way to feel okay about one's body (to believe that one is beautiful). It more often involves changing one's attitude.
What I think is interesting about the way I've been talking is that I've been presenting desires, impulses, as “cognitively loaded” - they represent the world as being a certain way. They tell me, if you do X, then you'll satisfy me. I think this is closely connected to one of Michael Thompson's basic points: that actions by their nature fit into part-whole relationships, “I did.... in order to...” If desires didn't have this cognitive content, they couldn't produce actions. But this connection is exceedingly foggy in my mind.
* Wittgensteinian footnote: Wittgenstein asks us to imagine an individual going paint shopping. They're looking for a particular shade of red. We show them, say, firetruck red; they respond, no, that's not it, not quite. So we show them "sunset crimson." And no, that's not it either. And fifty, a hundred paint chips later, and none of them are quite right. We want to ask: do they really have a particular shade of red in mind?
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4 comments:
I think the desire that enters into the study of action as Thompson imagines it might be called "instrumental desire." Given that A aims at Xing and Y is a step toward or part of Xing, it's open to A to "instrumentally desire" to Y. The expression of instrumental desire in language is the thin sense of wanting to __ (in order to __, because one is __ing, because one wants to __, etc.). I'm not sure if this notion of desire is connected to what comes up in thinking about the anorexic, but I can see how it might be.
Now I know why you wanted the paint chip citation... which, by the way, I couldn't find. I think it's in the PI...
Here's a good distinction: our "desires" (scare quotes because maybe this is not a unitary phenomenon) can have as their targets either actions or states of affairs. For example: I might want for my mother to accidentally die, but this is ipso facto not the kind of thing that could ever really be rephrased as a desire to take some action. From the other way, while I might say "I desire for it to be the case that I do X," this sort of masks the fact that my doing X is not something that just happens; I need to do the damn thing.
More later.
That is, however we understand the nature of the desire for another's (or my own) accidental death, it won't be the same as when I desire to do X - we can't really say, "Oh, it would be really nice if I found myself doing X," except in a case where I have a very dissociated relationship from my future self.
Ok, I'm going to abandon this idea that desires are "cognitively loaded." The only thing I can think to say is that, in some cases, part of desiring X involves thinking that, after X has been attained, the desire will be gone. (Hunger is a good example).
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