A Note on Wholeheartedness

In “The Faintest Passion”, Harry Frankfurt wrote: “It is a necessary truth about us, then, that we wholeheartedly desire to be wholehearted.”

Wholeheartedness has long been on the list of proposed virtues, with supporters as diverse as Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. We are more accustomed to being exhorted to it: “Leave off your wretched ambivalence! Put aside distractions! Tend to the one thing needful!”

But if Frankfurt is right these exhortations are in a way beside the point. If we necessarily desire to be wholehearted, then we should not need exhortation. Perhaps the exhortations are merely reminders; but it might nonetheless strike one as odd that some respond to them with ambivalence, or at least seem to. How can we be ambivalent when reminded of our own desires, desires that we cannot fail to possess?

Ambivalence Frankfurt defines as follows:

Ambivalence is constituted by conflicting volitional movements or tendencies, either conscious or unconscious, that meet two conditions. First, they are inherently and hence unavoidably opposed, that is, they do not just happen to conflict on account of contingent circumstances. Second, they are both wholly internal to a person’s will rather than alien to him; that is, he is not passive with respect to them.

The second condition will be trivial if one counts all a person’s desires and beliefs as internal to them; Frankfurt needs it because he does not. It also seems clearly right, though, if we follow Frankfurt in positing an ‘inner’ or ‘true’ self (not his chosen terms) which consists of the beliefs and desires with which one is identified: if there is such a self it is the one whose ambivalence concerns us. So either way this condition should be granted.

The first condition is too weak, however. Consider the following passage from William James’ Principles of Psychology:

With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back. Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

Many of these do in fact conflict because of contingent circumstances: the fact that the active part of most human lives is rarely more than 80 years, and very often much less, is in fact the chief driver of the supposed conflict here. There are imaginable cases of genuinely necessary conflicts of this kind in a human life – a person who genuinely desires both to be a lifelong meditative ascetic and to star in pornographic films, say – but these are mostly not the important kinds of ambivalence most of us face. We are ‘forced’ to choose, in whatever sense that word is appropriate in cases like these, not by necessity logical or metaphysical or physical, but simply by the dumb statistical unlikelihood of being able to do something worthwhile along more than one or two lines in the limited amount of time we shall have if we are lucky.

But I want to grant the idea that ambivalence is concerned with desires that necessarily conflict regardless, for the sake of argument, because I think that even with this artificially strong condition in place, Frankfurt’s claim does not follow.

What is the argument? Frankfurt writes: “Is it possible to be satisfied with ambivalence? A person may certainly come to accept the fact that he is ambivalent as unalterable. It seems to me, however, that it is not a fact with which he can possibly be satisfied. No one can be wholeheartedly ambivalent, any more than someone can desire unequivocally to betray himself or to be irrational. That someone accepts his ambivalence can only mean that he is resigned to it; it could not mean that it satisfies him. Perhaps conditions are imaginable in which a person might reasonably regard ambivalence as worthwhile in order to avoid some even more unsatisfactory alternative. But no-one can desire to be ambivalent for its own sake.”

Why not? The idea here seems to be that

-         To be ambivalent is to desire x and desire y even though x and y cannot both be achieved.

What does a person gain and lose by abandoning either the desire for x or the desire for y? Their gain is that they no longer must, of necessity, have at least one desire that will not be satisfied. Their loss, though, is that now there is only one thing which can satisfy them, whereas before they had two, of which either one would have given them at least some satisfaction.

Is having a desire unsatisfied worse than not having the desire at all? I am not sure. If we weight these two things equally, though, it seems as though either one is OK. That is, we have x & ~ y, ~x & y, and ~x & ~y as our three possibilities. The wholehearted person yields satisfaction in the first case and not in the other two; the ambivalent person receives a half-yield of satisfaction in the first two cases and none in the third.

With no information about their concrete circumstances, what can we say about this?

If we value satisfaction and don’t care about frustration, the ambivalent person is actually better off: he has three possible outcomes, two of which pay off and one of which doesn’t, whereas the non-ambivalent person has two outcomes, one of which pays off and one of which doesn’t. The expected yield of ambivalence is 2/3, as opposed to the 1/2 which comes from wholeheartedness.

If we only care about frustration, then Frankfurt is right: the ambivalent person will always feel some frustration, whereas the non-ambivalent person will only feel it half the time.

If we care about both, then the non-ambivalent person is better off, but only slightly so. His average satisfaction-frustration is 0, whereas the ambivalent person’s is -1/3. With no information about the situation at hand, then, I suppose we can conclude that a person who cares both about having desires satisfied and not having them frustrated is better off betting on wholeheartedness than on ambivalence.

Is there some a priori reason to suppose that ambivalence will tend to skew the probabilities here? One could argue, for example, that more desires mean more directions for using energy and therefore less likelihood of getting any of the things one wants. And there would be some truth to such a supposition in many real-world contexts. But not all: for example, young persons, who are unclear about their actual abilities, often learn what things they are good and which experiences they actually value by pursuing a variety of different goals, some of which may be incompatible. For a young person, then, a certain degree of ambivalence might actually make long-term satisfaction more likely, inasmuch as making first stabs at satisfying many different desires might help to teach her which ones she was likely to be able to satisfy and which ones had component acts which were satisfying to her in their own right, as opposed to perhaps painful intermediate steps to a prima facie satisfying long-term goal.

I think there is more to be said about this, and this is all I have time for for today. But it does seem that if we want even necessarily incompatible desires to generate a desire for wholeheartedness, we need to say something about the value of satisfied and unsatisfied desires. For now we can at least say that without that, there is no theorem here.