Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (38 page)

The difference between acting from some concern and acting
because you want to do it is important. It is sometimes deliberately
ignored when people argue with one another. Imagine a relationship that is in difficulty. Annie feels bound to leave Bertie because
of some cause: perhaps a duty to others or a life plan that requires
moving. Bertie can ratchet up the emotional temperature by insisting that Annie would not be leaving if Annie didn't want to. `You
must want to otherwise you wouldn't be doing it: These are hurtful words, since the accusation is that leaving Bertie puts a gleam
into Annie's eye or counts as a positive feature of her course of action. And this may be entirely unwarranted. Annie may be completely dejected at the thought of leaving Bertie. But, like cutting
the grass, it has to be done.

It might he suggested that when we have a concern there must be
something in the offing that we desire. If I am concerned to cut the
grass, but do not want to do it, then if I do it, this must be because
I do want something else: perhaps just peace of mind, for instance.
This introduces another very dangerous mistake, which is that of
thinking that whenever a person has a concern, what she `really' desires is some state of herself, such as her own peace of mind. Psychologists, especially, have been apt to think of desire in terms of a
kind of build-up of tension, and what the agent is driven to do is to
release the tension. It is then easy to think that the release of tension
was the real object of desire all along.'I'his too can introduce hurt ful words: `You weren't really concerned about the starving children, you were just wanting to feel good: And all behaviour is diagnosed as fundamentally selfish, as though it is always your own
state that concerns you, with other goals and aims a kind of mask.

This set of thoughts (sometimes called psychological egoism) is
entirely wrong. Suppose you want food. Following the train of
thought of the last paragraph, I interpret you as wanting relief
from the tension of wanting food. So I punch you in the stomach,
making you sick enough to stop wanting food. Did I get you what
you wanted? Not at all (even forgetting that the punch may have
been painful). You didn't want any old relief from the tension. You
wanted food. Similarly a normal person aroused by sexual passion
does not want any old relief from the passion. A bromide might
give him that, but he doesn't want a bromide. He wants sex.

Consider more wide-ranging concerns. Suppose I am a Mafia
godfather and believe myself to have been insulted by Luigi. I order
you, my henchmen, to rub out Luigi. You go away a little daunted
by this dangerous task. But, you reflect, what I really want is relief
from the tension that Luigi's existence brings to me. You can relieve
me of that in another way: give me a completely successful delusion that you have killed Luigi. So this is what you do, by arranging
convincing appearances. Did you do what I wanted? Clearly not. I
didn't want to live in a fool's paradise in which I falsely believed
that Luigi was dead (and just imagine the upshot if I learned that
this was what you had brought about!). I wanted you to kill Luigi.

We might say: one of our concerns is not to be deceived about
whether our concerns are met.

Again, we here uncover a central cause of strife and misunder standing. For communication is often a matter of addressing one
another's concerns. This is not done if one side has a concern, and
the other regards that concern just as a kind of problem or obstacle
in itself-something to be managed or cured. Suppose Annie is
concerned about her career and self-development, and Bertie responds not by thinking about ways to nurture her career and selfdevelopment, but by thinking about ways to damp that concern.
'Don't get upset, darling, you won't worry about that if we go out
to dinner/hold my hand/have a baby. .: The response is inappropriate in just the way that the punch in the stomach removing
hunger was inappropriate. But it is probably not quite so obvious
that it is inappropriate, at least not to Bertie, and probably not even
if Annie walks out on him. In terms I introduced in Chapter 3, we
can put this by saying that Bertie has 'objectified' Annie's concern,
treating it itself as the problem, rather than seeing what it was that
concerned Annie. But from Annie's perspective it is Annie's career
that is the problem, not Annie's concern with her career. In so far as
Bertie does not share that perspective, they are not on all fours.

This point has vast repercussions in connection with the whole
culture and industry of `therapy'. I return to this after putting one
or two more pieces on the board.

I said that one of our concerns is not to be deceived about
whether our concerns are met. A parallel point is that often, but
not always, one of our concerns is not just to lose our concerns.
Suppose the godfather who really wants Luigi dead is told that if he
waits ten years this desire will pass over ('So it will all be all right in
the end, someone might say). This is like telling the partner concerned about her career that if she waits until she has had a baby that concern will diminish. The person doesn't want the concern to
diminish. We can express this by saying that the godfather identifies
with his desire for revenge, and the woman identifies with her concern for her career.

Now there are indeed cases in which we do not identify with our
desires and concerns. We might wish ourselves to be rid of them by
any means. A person craving a cigarette might not only want the
cigarette, but want also to be rid of the craving any way he could.
Therapy or a kind of surgical removal of the state of mind would
do fine. If you find yourself `obsessing' about someone or something, you might also come to regard your obsession as something
you need to be without, and perhaps set about getting rid of it. Categorizing a desire or concern with which you have been identified
as a craving or an obsession is a way of distancing yourself from it,
and beginning the process of objectifying it, en route to seeking
some strategy for escape. The wife with the concern for her career,
in the example above, might come to share her husband's perception that it is that ambition that is to be regarded as the problem,
and seek with more enthusiasm to rid herself of it by other distractions. But then again she might not do this, and she might make a
mistake if she does, for the concern may be more central to her
identity than she has been led to think.

This shows that the difference between concerns with which we
identify, and concerns that we can objectify, is not always evident.
We may not know until we try whether it is possible (or appropriate) to shake ourselves out of some concern, or whether it is only
possible, or appropriate, to go ahead and to try to meet it.

What then are concerns? I said that to have a concern is to be moved by a thought. Some aspect of things engages our motivations and becomes an aspect that weighs with us or that matters to
us (it is interesting that the natural metaphors are ones of weight,
or pressure). Aspects of things weigh with us when we are deciding
what to do, obviously. They can also weigh with us by influencing
attitudes, such as admiration or contempt, or emotions, such as
fear or hope. Reading a work of fiction, for example, I can find myself repelled by some character, meaning that the character is described in ways that weigh with me. I am moved to admiration by
the virtues of the hero or to loathing by the vices of the villain.

When we have concerns, the aspects of things to which we are
sensitive can be described as our reasons for choosing one thing or
another, or feeling some attitude or emotion. My reason for cutting the grass is that it needed it. Annie's reason for leaving Bertie is
that her career requires that she moves. Our reasons in this sense
are those aspects of a situation that weigh with us as we deliberate
about what to do, or how to feel about something. In a slightly
wider sense our reasons may outrun what we call to mind as we
deliberate. They can include aspects of situations that in fact affect
us, even when we are unaware or only half-aware of what is
happening. In this wider sense, Annie's reason for leaving Bertie
might be that he bores her, even when she does not admit this to
herself.

When we talk of the reasons that move other people, there is an
important distinction to notice. We can speak descriptively, or nor-
inatively. That is, we can describe what it is about a situation that is
moving them. Or we can say that what concerns them is or is not
reallya reason, expressing our own endorsement or rejection of the concern. It is important to keep this distinction in mind. If we say
Annie had no reason for leaving Bertie, we may be making a (probably false) remark about Annie's psychology: that she acted entirely on impulse, without thought and without any desires or
concerns that she was trying to meet. Or, more likely, we may be rejecting the concerns that actually motivated Annie: she went because she was concerned to pursue her career in the ballet, but in
the circumstances that was a silly ambition or something that
should not have weighed with her. When we speak normatively we
should signal what we are doing by words like 'ought' and 'good'
But sometimes, instead of saying'She had no good reason' we say
things like 'She had no reason at all', and that can be misinterpreted.

On the face of it, our concerns can be a very mixed bunch. The
death of an enemy, the pursuit of a career, the state of the grass, the
well-being of family and friends, are common kinds of concern, as
are many others: the fact that you gave a promise, the fact that
someone once did something for you, the fact that you area spouse
or a doctor or a lawyer. People have different concerns, as many as
there are different people and different kinds of people. And we
have already rejected one attempt to reduce this diversity to some
kind of unity. That attempt tried to see us as always and only concerned with our own states of mind (our own relief from the tension induced by having a concern). But that was a mistake, and it
rides roughshod over the distinction between concerns with which
we identify, and ones that we can indeed distance ourselves from
and wish away.

THE VOICE WITHIN

Many concerns are private and optional. Suppose I am interested
in steam engines. Then the feature of a place, that steam trains run
there, weighs with me. It is a reason, in my eyes, for going there. It
need not weigh with you. And it need not bother me that it does
not weigh with you. I might even be glad that it does not, since I get
a better view when the crowds are smaller.

But there are other concerns that we expect people to have. That
is, it is one of our concerns that these things should bother them in
a certain way. There are features of things that we expect to influence their decisions and attitudes: the fact that doing something
would be deceiving someone, or breaking a promise, or behaving
dishonestly or manipulatively, and so on. Similarly we expect the
fact that some course of action would cause distress to weigh with
people. We would be surprised or even shocked if it did not. This
brings us to the traditional domain of ethics. What are the concerns that we can expect from each other?

We can separate two different ways of taking this question. One
asks what are the concerns that make up an ideal life. What is the
way to live? Different ethical traditions answer this in different
ways. The ideal life of a Homeric hero is full of concern for his honour, status, and success in battle. The ideal life of a Christian saint
is full of concerns that include the love of God, the suppression of
pride, and various ideals of brotherly love. According to Confucianism, the ideal life contains a large dose of respect for traditional ways. All these ideals can be fleshed out and painted in more or less attractive colours. Yet there is something uncomfortable
about them, if only because there is little reason to suppose that
there is any such thing as the ideal life. Since different people have
different tastes and interests, and different cultures encourage different concerns, it seems likely that any `ideal life' will be heavily
contextualized: ideal for this person in these circumstances, perhaps, but not much more. Even the components of a good life,
rather than an `ideal' life, are not obvious. Some core components
are pretty uncontroversial. Most people will put down health (and
the means to secure it), happiness (but of the right sort: not as a result of living in a fool's paradise), achievements (but again, only of
the right sort: not the fulfilment of vain or foolish ambitions), dignity, friendships, love, family. Beyond that, things like wealth or
leisure would be controversial, and some varieties even of the core
elements may count as a curse rather than a blessing. A person
might have had a better life if, for instance, he had not been blessed
with such rude health that he was unable to sympathize with the
frailties of others.