Three Faces of Desire (Philosophy of Mind) 1st Edition

I love this book, although I must add the qualification, as I have with many other books to which I am drawn, that it is a technical book of analytic philosophy. Three Faces of Desire belongs to a trilogy of books I heartily recommend in the same way, the two others being Stephen Stich’s From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case against Belief and Paul Griffiths’ What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. What makes these a trilogy, in my view, is not only that all three are top-notch, but also that they deal with an interrelated set of fundamental psychological attitudes, with the focus on belief in Stich, desire in Schroeder, and emotion in Griffiths (with the added wrinkle that folks like myself parse emotion into belief and desire).

Yet also tying them together in a neat bundle is, ironically, the different conclusions they come to; for these differences cover the territory. Thus, Stich concludes that belief (and probably also desire and the emotions and all the rest of the categories of everyday psychology) turns out to be incoherent, once you analyze it closely, and hence … does not exist! Meanwhile Griffiths concludes that emotion is a jumble and therefore should be divided into several distinct categories. Finally Schroder, the hero of the present story, smooths out the rough patches of the everyday concept of desire but saves the phenomenon in the end. Thus, three faces of metaphysical method, you might say.

In other words, all three discover that their chosen phenomenon is like a messy room – only to be expected of a category that arose from the non-scientific discourse of everyday life – but choose to deal with the mess in a distinctive fashion: Stich by discarding everything and looking for a cleaned-up replacement (presumably to be provided by a sophisticated cognitive science), Griffiths by sorting everything and putting various items in different closets, and Schroeder by organizing everything into a neater arrangement. However, that does not quite characterize what Schroder has done, since he makes it very clear that he is dealing with only one of several phenomena that go by the name of “desire” in everyday discourse. So perhaps, then, Schroeder is more accurately seen as adopting a modified Griffiths approach, privileging one of several categories as the most important of the bunch.

Yet another important way all three books are linked is that, while definitely treatises of philosophy, they pay close attention to the latest (when they were written, which is now one, two, and three decades ago) findings from scientific psychology and biology. Focusing now on Schroeder, his investigation is a tour de force of interdisciplinary theory building. I simply must take my hat off to a philosopher, or anyone, who can write a passage like the following:

“These cases suggest that something must happen in order to generate instrumental desires, that this something can generate conflicting instrumental desires, that this something can generate instrumental desires for immediate action or for future, conditional action, and that this something is not merely the taking of a positive attitude toward that future action of superficially deciding to engage in it: the something must bring about a state with real motivational weight, even if that motivational weight is outweighed by something else. In the brain, it is clear what meets these criteria: the activation of the structures in motor cortex, SMA, motor AC, and motor PFC” (p. 154).

The level of analytic precision and the comprehensiveness of adduced evidence from both everyday experience and the scientific literature displayed in this passage and throughout the book are breathtaking. As Schroeder himself points out in his final chapter with no false modesty, this should be the model of investigation of a phenomenon, catholic with regard to disciplinary source of the evidence and argument. Needless to say, only a small percentage of both conceptual and empirical work meets this standard. And this tends to perpetuate the status quo, since scientists then look at philosophical work as uninformed and philosophers look at scientific work as conceptually crude, and so all consider it a waste of time to indulge the other. Yet final understanding of any phenomenon must involve both; so we are indebted to dedicated workers like Schroeder who undertake the herculean task of not only understanding the phenomenon they are studying but also understanding the relevant literature in fields where they are not only not specialists but must also hold their nose as they wade through the muck to find the gold (to sort of mix metaphors).

But what is perhaps most impressive about Schroeder’s book, and setting it apart from the two other fine works of the trilogy, is that, unlike them, it provides a definitive analysis of its chosen phenomenon. In other words, Schroeder pulls off the sort of trick that folks like Stich and Griffiths have so eloquently rejected. Granted, as noted above, part of what enables Schroeder to do this is his privileging a single aspect of the everyday (or “folk”) jumble of “desire” as desire proper. But maybe that is just a smart move, for, as I say, the result is a precise and novel theory of desire.

I do admit to the disappointment, however, that Schroeder does not quite account for why the rest of the folk notion of desire is called “desire.” He certainly explains how his chosen desire, so-called intrinsic desire, relates to the other main contender, instrumental desire. But it seems to me there remain all sorts of interactions among these two in our everyday understanding of ourselves that are not ultimately illuminated by giving us a theory that explicates what the one is while thereby denigrating the identity of the two.