The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency

Christopher Erhard, Tobias Keiling, Christopher Erhard, Tobias Keiling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351597517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Phenomenology has primarily been concerned with questions about knowledge and ontology. However, in recent years the rise of interest and research in phenomenology and embodiment, the emotions and cognitive science has seen the concept of agency move to a central place in the study of phenomenology generally.

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency is an outstanding reference source to this topic and the first volume of its kind. It comprises twenty-seven chapters written by leading international contributors. Organised into two parts, the following key topics are covered:

• major figures
• the metaphysics of agency
• rationality
• voluntary and involuntary action
• moral experience
• deliberation and choice
• phenomenology of agency and the cognitive sciences
• phenomenology of freedom
• embodied agency

Essential reading for students and researchers in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of cognitive science The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency will also be of interest to those in closely related subjects such as sociology and psychology.

PART I

Important Figures

From Brentano to Tengelyi

1

FRANZ BRENTANO’S CRITIQUE OF FREE WILL

Denis Seron

The German philosopher Franz Brentano is usually portrayed not only as one of the founding fathers of the so-called phenomenological tradition but also as having played a significant role in the history of contemporary ethics, through his theory of value and will. In spite of this, Brentano offered no proper theory of action in the vein of later attempts by direct or indirect followers. His ethics is basically about feelings, and feelings can be ethically right or wrong even if they intrinsically involve no reference to action. This is so even in the case of desire: for example, you can desire that the weather gets warmer (Montague 2017: 113). However, Brentano’s account of volitions does make reference to action.¹ Insofar as Brentano bequeathed us a fully developed theory of the will of his own, it can be said that he indirectly contributed to the theory of action. This is particularly true of his critique of free will, which this chapter aims to discuss and explore.

Brentano intended to investigate free will in the fifth of the six planned books of the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, devoted to emotion and will (Brentano 1924: 1, engl. trans.: xxvii, 1925: 110, ftn., engl. trans.: 254) – a book which, unfortunately, he never wrote. Most of Brentano’s reflections on this topic are found in Part 3 of his 1876–1894 Vienna lectures on practical philosophy that were posthumously published as The Foundation and Construction of Ethics by Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand. Other relevant sources include the second volume of the Psychology and the 1889 lecture The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong.

Before beginning, three points should be underlined. First, Brentano considers the will neither as a sufficient nor even as a necessary condition for freedom: there can be volitions that are not free as well as free acts – for example “the pangs of remorse over an earlier transgression, malicious pleasure, and many other phenomena of joy and sorrow” – that are not volitions (Brentano 1925: 110–111; engl. trans.: 254–255). Second, the problem of freedom, as Brentano sees it, has to do with time and causation. As such, it belongs to genetic rather than to descriptive psychology.² Third and finally, Brentano is interested in the freedom of will rather than freedom of action. In his Vienna lectures on ethics, he makes a distinction between the actus a voluntate imperatus and the actus elicitus voluntatis (Brentano 1952: 235; engl. trans.: 147).³ The former is the action that you desire to bring about; the latter is your act of will itself. As we will see, Brentano’s extended discussion of the determinism-indeterminism debate is mostly about the actus elicitus voluntatis.

Determinism and empiricism

The most striking feature of the mature Brentano’s approach to free will is its uncompromising determinism.⁴ A crucial aspect of this determinism is what could be called Brentano’s “actualism” – an epistemological view which follows from his radical empiricism (another aspect, his so-called necessitarianism, will be considered later on). At first glance, it seems natural to think that the free will issue has to do with the possibility or impossibility to act or will otherwise than we actually do. Our will is said to be free insofar as we could, at least in some cases, want to act differently. But Brentano rejects this idea – which he attributes to Descartes (Brentano 1952: 242; engl. trans.: 151). The reason for this is that, at a more general level, he considers reference to possible events incompatible with his empiricism. Thus, he heavily criticizes how John Stuart Mill appeals to “possibilities” in order to dispense with the non-empirical assumption of real things beyond appearances (Brentano 1930: 130; engl. trans.: 77).

In his critique of indeterminism, Brentano repeatedly emphasizes that, since merely possible volitions are not given in experience, no empirical argument can support the indeterminist’s principle of alternative possibilities:

It is just as impossible for the determinists to perceive that we cannot do otherwise as for the indeterminists to perceive that we can. Only concrete facts can be perceived; not possibilities, impossibilities, or necessities.

(Brentano 1952: 269; engl. trans.: 167)

The indeterminist contends that we are not determined to will this or that, and that this indetermination of the will is empirically evident. In other words immediate consciousness, that is, inner perception, tells us that (at least when the opposite motives are of equal weight) we are able to will the opposite of what we are willing now. To this, Brentano objects that “we can only perceive what is actual, not what is merely possible” (Brentano 1952: 246; engl. trans.: 154). Knowledge of possibility is derivative, that is, acquired on the basis of the experience of what is actual. But how could the indeterminist validly infer that she can will non-A from her experience that she wills A?

In the same vein, an argument in favor of indeterminism may be that “our will occasionally withstands a passionate desire with resolution and energy, but then leaves off the battle in a state of exhaustion, only to renew its resistance after a pause” (Brentano 1952: 251; engl. trans.: 156). In such cases, it seems that the will is not determined, but resists motives that would determine it if it didn’t resist them. Brentano’s objection to this argument is that no experience can ever support it and hence that it is purely fictional. What does the indeterminist mean when she says that the will struggles against desires? She cannot have in view here the (present) act of will, for the act of will must come after the motives and thus does not exist yet. Does “the will” denote the ability to will? The ability to will is not the sort of thing that can act or offer a resistance to anything: “It is simply a potentiality.” Hence, Brentano concludes, the correct interpretation is not that the will battles against the motives, but that “one motive battles against another.”⁵

Two points should be noted before we move into a closer discussion of Brentano’s determinism. First, Brentano constantly assumes that, if the free will dispute makes sense, then it can and must be resolved on the basis of experience alone. It is worth noticing that the same concern prompted Brentano to warn against the use of abstract phrasings such as “I have overcome my passion” or “My inclination to do my duty overcame my leanings towards pleasure.” Because abstracts are no more than fictions, we should say instead: “One part of myself gained a victory over another part of myself” (Brentano 1952: 251; engl. trans.: 156). Second, Brentano’s empirical approach to free will does not involve abandoning all talk of dispositions as nonsensical. The key point is rather that, since habits and inclinations cannot be perceived, but only derived from perceptual experience (Brentano 1968: 119, 238–239; engl. trans.: 93, 172), they have no (empirical) reality except insofar as they function as actual motives for actual actions.⁶

Brentano’s demonstration of determinism

Brentano provides a detailed demonstration of determinism in his Vienna lectures on ethics. The issue at stake concerns the will rather than action. By determinism, Brentano means the view that the will is causally determined. Thus, he seems to take it for granted that, within certain limits that are fixed by internal and external conditions, the actus a voluntate imperatus is free (Brentano 1952: 235 ff.; engl. trans.: 147 ff.). In short: you can do what you want, within certain limits. Brentano’s contention is that not the willed action, but the will itself is causally determined. A second point to keep in mind is that the determinism-indeterminism dispute is not about freedom in general, but only about freedom in the sense of being “free from necessity” (Brentano 1952: 235; engl. trans.: 147). The question is whether the actus elicitus voluntatis – the act of will – is “necessarily determined,” that is, caused in such a way that its cause is not the will itself and that it makes it necessary for it to be so and so.

The third part of the Vienna lectures is devoted to establishing successively that indeterminism is very improbable (Brentano 1952: 276 ff.; engl. trans.: 172 ff.), that it lacks explanatory power (Brentano 1952: 279 ff.; engl. trans.: 173 ff.), and that it is necessarily false. I shall here restrict myself to the final argument.

Brentano distinguishes between an extreme and a moderate form of indeterminism. The former is the view that the will simply has no cause. The latter holds that the will has no cause that makes it necessary (Brentano 1952: 267; engl. trans.: 166). The moderate indeterminist admits that the will may be determined, but denies that it is determined necessarily (Brentano 1952: 283; engl. trans.: 175). In Brentano’s view, both extreme and moderate indeterminism thus defined involve the assumption of an “absolute accident,” that is, of something that is not necessarily determined. Brentano’s aim is to demonstrate that this assumption is self-contradictory (Brentano 1952: 281 ff.; engl. trans.: 174 ff.). His argument takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum and runs as follows:

1. As an empiricist, Brentano requires his determinism as well as his critique of indeterminism to be empirically grounded. If determinism holds that the will is causally determined, then necessary causal relations must be somehow accessible to experience. Let us first consider causality. Brentano agrees with Hume that outer experience does not make us directly acquainted with anything such as causation, and hence that physical causality is no more than a relation of temporal antecedence between events. However, unlike Hume, he claims that we do experience causal relations in inner perception. Brentano cites inference and will as examples of such relations (Brentano 1952: 283; engl. trans.: 175). Your act of drawing a conclusion based on premises is caused by previous acts of judgment; your act of willing something as a means is caused by your act of willing the end it is a means to.
2. Inner perception teaches us that these causal relations are such that if a process A causes another process B, then B is made necessary by A. A conclusion necessarily follows from given premises; a volition necessarily derives from other volitions. That is why both are amenable to a priori treatment: volitions are subject to genetic laws that are the “main psychological foundations of ethics”; acts of reasoning are subject to genetic laws that provide the “principal psychological foundations of logic” (Brentano 1925: 67–68, 109; engl. trans.: 224, 253). Since it is conceptually true that the effect must take place when the cause occurs, the concept of a non-necessitating cause is self-contradictory. Therefore, “moderate indeterminism contradicts itself when it says that motives are causes that can bring about acts of will, but need not necessarily do so” (Brentano 1952: 283; engl. trans.: 175).
3. Accordingly, the only option left to the indeterminist is to endorse the stronger view that the will has no cause whatsoever, namely extreme indeterminism. But Brentano claims to demonstrate that this latter view, too, involves contradiction. More generally, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason – the “law of causality” to the effect that it is impossible for something to exist out of nothing – is an analytic truth. Brentano’s demonstration proceeds (very roughly) as follows (Brentano 1952: 287 ff.; engl. trans. 177 ff., 1970: 137 ff.): (3a) “Something is” is necessarily equivalent to “something is present.” (3b) Necessarily, everything that is (present) is subject to continuous temporal changes. In Brentano’s terms, this means that everything that is must be a beginning, an end, or an inner border of a time lapse, and that between beginning and end there must always be some interval, however small: nothing can abruptly begin and end at the same time. (3c) Brentano then asks us to imagine a white dot on a black table, and to suppose that it is contingent absolutely speaking. Then, there is no necessity for the dot to exist, and it is even much more likely to cease to exist, a moment later. But if so, the dot is both beginning and end at the same time – which is assumed to be impossible. Therefore, the concept of an “absolute accident” and hence extreme indeterminism are self-contradictory.⁷
4. Since both extreme and moderate indeterminism are necessarily false and are the only possible forms of indeterminism, determinism is necessarily true.

Obviously, the argument is controversial in many respects. First, even supposing that, as claimed in step (2), causality involves necessity, one may object, following Thomas Reid, that motives are not efficient causes and that a motive, by its nature, does not make the motivated action or volition necessary, with the consequence that the agent can be regarded as morally responsible even though determinism is false and her actions and volitions are contingent. Brentano, however, does not take the objection seriously and considers the motive-cause distinction as a sophism:

To be sure, Thomas Reid thought we ought to distinguish between motives and causes, for motives can move us to act, but cannot themselves act. But was this anything more than a mere sophism? If motives impel us to action, they are clearly working in conjunction with other factors; that is, d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Important Figures: From Brentano to Tengelyi
• Part II Systematic Perspectives
• Phenomenology of Agency 1: General Issues
• Phenomenology of Agency 2: Aspects of Agency
• Index