Autonomy. Beate Roessler
that she could not also become a farmer, but this does not necessarily mean she is not autonomous. The ways in which we differentiate between those reasons or motivations that we do not follow, with which we do not identify, and those on the basis of which we act, encompass a broader spectrum than either Frankfurt is able to allow or Velleman describes.
What then does it mean to accept ambivalences? Bernard Williams offers one suggestion for how to describe such acceptance in a way that is both phenomenologically adequate and best for ethics – including the ethics of autonomy. His distinction between contradictions and conflicts of beliefs and those of desires is a first point of interest here: “If I discover that two of my beliefs conflict, at least one of them, by that very fact, will tend to be weakened; but the discovery that two desires conflict has no tendency, in itself, to weaken either of them.”26
Why is this so? Because, according to Williams, the relationship between belief and truth is different from that between a desire and its satisfaction. If I decide that one of two beliefs is not true, the false belief
cannot substantially survive this point, because to decide that a belief is untrue is to abandon, i.e. no longer to have, that belief. [. . .] A rejected desire, however, can, if not survive the point of decision, at least reappear on the other side of it [in] one or another guise. It may reappear, for instance, [. . .] in the form of a regret for what was missed.27
Conflicts of desire along with moral conflicts moreover “can readily have the character of a struggle, whereas conflicts of beliefs scarcely can.”28 Two conflicting beliefs, Williams argues, threaten our rationality, that is the consistency of what we hold to be true; two conflicting desires do not, at least not necessarily.
The persistence of a conflicting desire is expressed, in Williams’s terminology, as regret. In the case of conflicts of desire or conflicts between moral demands, this regret can linger on even after a decision has been made. This is particularly clear in moral conflicts: Agamemnon must and can make a decision, even “with certainty.” But, according to Williams, this does not mean that he does not lie awake at night. The reasons to decide in favor of his daughter and against his army persist, and the only way to resolve the conflict is to regret that both possible actions could not be pursued. Agamemnon “lies awake, not because of a doubt, but because of a certainty.”29 Now the regret a person feels after making a decision in a moral conflict is different from the regret experienced in ethical conflicts of desire (such as the case of the poet and the farmer). But it is still regret, the knowledge that the reasons in favor of the rejected desire or action have not simply lost their persuasiveness or validity, have not simply disappeared.30
Williams thus allows us to give a positive meaning to Velleman’s “acceptance” of ambivalences. The reasons we have to decide in favor of one side can endure as reasons for us, but they simply are not strong or convincing enough to be effective. However, these reasons – or desires – can continue to be understood as part of our values and evaluations, as aspects of our self. If purist theories hope to eliminate ambivalence entirely, they precisely cannot explain what it means not to be completely one with oneself in the wake of an ambivalent decision. I want to adopt Williams’s idea that a regret remains after a person has turned away from certain possible actions – and here we can speak not only of desires but also of beliefs and, above all, reasons. As Williams writes, we can only explain what reasonably coping with ambivalences might look like, and what it means that we do not feel any “satisfaction” after deciding a conflict of ambivalence, if we do not entirely remove the “should” from the scene.31
How large can the distance be between the motivations that we did not follow and those that were able to motivate our actual action? How much contradiction, how many lingering ambivalences, can a person stand? Here we can make use of a helpful insight from Richard Wollheim, who argues that desires can exist alongside each other, even if we cannot and do not want to satisfy all of them. The same could be said of the reasons that motivate our actions. Desires can rationally coexist when the conflict between them does not make it impossible to act, when it is not paralyzing. Wollheim offers a criterion for how conflictual this coexistence may be: “The index of this limit is anxiety.”32 Hence it can only bring as much friction with it as we are yet capable of tolerating. The coexistence of desires has personal and affective connotations, a subjective index. If our conflicting desires – and the reasons that persist if we are unable to follow them – become oppressive and make us anxious, then our anxiety may translate into the kind of indecisiveness or vacillation that makes acting impossible. It must be possible to act with certainty, however, even if we can also remain aware – regretfully, lamentingly – of our ambivalence. This limit of irrationality still allows a broad spectrum of possibilities for dealing rationally with conflicting desires and conflicting reasons.33 Reasonably coping with ambivalences conforms to a reasonable interpretation of the ambivalent self. I will demonstrate this below, before finally discussing the kinds of conflicts of ambivalence that I described above as cultural conflicts or conflicts of identity.
The ambivalent self
The magnificent opening of Richard Ford’s novel The Lay of the Land describes the protagonist, Frank Bascombe, reading a report in the morning paper about Don-Houston Clevinger, a “disgruntled nursing student” who burst into a classroom full of students taking a test, pointed his weapon at the attendant professor, and asked, “Are you ready to meet your Maker?,” to which the professor replied, “blinking her periwinkle eyes in curiosity only twice, ‘Yes. Yes, I think I am.’” At this point, Mr Clevinger shot first her and then himself. Bascombe is plunged into deep reflection by this “sad and dreary conundrum.” He would have answered Mr Clevinger’s question differently: “You know, not really. I guess not. Not quite yet.” He would have immediately started thinking about all the things that he really might have liked to do: “Faced with Mr. Clevinger’s question and a little pushed for time, I’m sure I would’ve begun soundlessly inventorying all the things I hadn’t done yet – fucked a movie star, adopted Vietnamese orphan twins and sent them to Williams, hiked the Appalachian Trail, brought help to a benighted, drought-ravaged African nation, learned German [. . .]. Voted Republican.”34
Over the course of nearly 500 pages, and with a light and subtle touch, Ford’s novel addresses nearly all of the great human themes: the threat of disease (Frank Bascombe has cancer), frustrated love (his wife has left him), fate (the presumed-dead husband of Frank’s second wife returns home), estrangement (his son lives and works in a completely different social world), the horrors of aging. It is also a masterwork of socio-critical analysis. There are obviously a multitude of ways to interpret this kind of opening to this kind of novel – for it is also concerned with the question of how to live one’s life; with the pursuit of a life well lived, even in the face of a terminal illness; with the fear of having made the wrong decisions, having mishandled, misinterpreted, misunderstood one’s relationships. Hence we can say that the opening of this novel is also a study in coping with ambivalences.
Frank Bascombe’s musings on the ambivalences of life are able to wonderfully illustrate the complexity of his self, of what it means when one’s self is not completely harmonious and integrated. Bascombe does not live in profound ambivalence, and the fact that he names so many desires and intentions clearly gives an aspect of irony to each individual one. But it remains the case that if someone put a gun to his head, he could list off a richly contradictory conglomeration of differently attractive forms of life, differently meaningful projects, conflicting ego-ideals. The fact that “flat-footed, unsubtle fate”35 can put us, again and again, in situations that shock the boundaries of our self and the foundations of our identity only goes to show that this self and this identity are more complex and fragmented than a purist theory of ambivalence is able to articulate.
This confusing, contradictory conglomeration is part of Frank Bascombe. It would obviously be wrong to describe his unrealized plans and desires as externalized, alienated desires that are externalized and alienated because he does not pursue them. Frank Bascombe has not completely rejected these unrealized plans and