Frankfurt’s Addicts

Frankfurt’s picture of what it is to be a person is a picture of tensions and instability. This unsteadiness that lies at the heart of human nature is traced to having two different kinds of desires where one checks or qualifies in some way the other.

Frankfurt puts it like this: Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, we may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires or motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call “first order desires” or “desires of the first order”, which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.

Like those molten mashes of rock that cooling at different rates and pressures produce very different compounds and crystals, so people – we might guess – turn out to have several differing but relatively stable states. Something of this sort is illustrated by Frankfurt’s broad-brush pictures of three different kinds of addicts.

Frankfurt’s analysis turns upon the concept of our ‘effective will’.  To identify an agent’s will is to identify the desire or desires that would push him towards or all the way to action. Our second-order desires, if they are really desires of the kind we take them to be – what Frankfurt calls ‘volitions’ - , will act upon and in some sense modify our first-order desires.  This creates the possibility for three types of addict in his illustrative bestiary:

A simulation of Brownian motion

1   (1) The ‘wanton’: The wanton’s first-order desires for drugs or money to obtain drugs and the like rule the roost in his life. He may have second-order desires of many seemingly advanced and desirable kinds. He might want to be a philosopher – a common desire among drug-addicts – or to be seen as an upstanding CEO in the world of banking, but unless these desires are volitions that he wants to make part of his will he is in effect simply driven through life by his first-order desires. These may push him in many different directions so that his life is like one of those particles of pollen that are knocked this way or that across the surface of water by the random action of fast-moving atoms or molecules. Frankfurt characterizes this extreme instance like this:  I shall use the term ‘wanton’ to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second-order, they have no second-order volitions. Frankfurt’s wanton is a logical extreme, though one might call to mind images of clapped out rock stars who have had far too much of what they wanted. The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. He does not care about the sort of person he is or might become.

An unwilling addict?

     (2) The unwilling addict: Let us now imagine a second addict, someone whose physiological addiction is identical with that of our imaginary wanton. What might make this second addict different from the wanton is his second-order volitions which make him an unhappy and unwilling addict. This second addict struggles against his addiction, but these desires are too powerful for him to withstand, and invariably, in the end, they overcome him. He is an unwilling addict, helplessly violated by his own desires. This is a human person, but one divided against himself. If there is to be any progress in his life it would seem that this could only be by achieving some degree of integration between his first and second-order volitions. He has to be able to make his second-order preferences actual in his life, but finds that he cannot do so. Frankfurt’s argument is that such a person cannot be described as having ‘freedom of the will’. It is not that this unwilling addict is not able to do what he wants, but rather that his will is not free. It is this that leads him to say puzzling things to the effect that the force that makes him take drugs is not his own. He does not have the will he wants, whereas the wanton simply doesn’t care which of his first-order desires is driving him.

Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider, played as hero

3   (3) The willing addict: Let us consider a third kind of addict. Suppose that his addiction (says Frankfurt) has the same physiological basis and the same irresistible thrust as the addictions of the unwilling and wanton addicts, but that he is altogether delighted with his condition. He is a willing addict, who would not have things any other way. If the grip of his addiction should somehow weaken, he would do whatever he could to reinstate it; if his desire for the drug should begin to fade, he would take steps to renew its intensity. Is this willing addict’s will free? No, it isn’t, for his desire to take the drug will be effective regardless of whether or not he wants this desire to constitute his will. But when he tales the drug, he takes it freely and of his own free will. How are we to regard this person? How is he, for example, different from someone who is driven by an overwhelming sexual desire of whatever kind? Or from someone whose life is driven by a desire to see himself as a Master of the Universe? Someone, say, like Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street and his many real life golems?

     

      This is simply a schematic version of a theory that the author himself describes as a rough sketch, but it is enough for immediate purposes. It raises a number of questions that are relevant directly or obliquely to our reading of Kierkegaard. You might like to think, for example, about some of these: 

     (a) What kind of person is most directly implied by the simple theory of Utilitarianism? (I’m thinking of Bentham’s original version?)

     (b) How might we envisage a person progressing on this scheme? How might a person get himself to care about the sort of person he is and actively create new second-order volitions? 

    

     (c) Is there any natural line of development for a person pursuing such a moral career? What his will be like? Would it take him in specific directions? Would we all end up as the same sort of person?

     (d) Does a man (or a woman) have an ultimately stable identity if their character is that of someone who fits in well, even perfectly, with their social situation? We might think, for example, of Robert, Earl of Grantham and his wife, Cora, in the TV series, Downton Abbey. Here are two people who seem to be tailored for their lives as model aristocrats of a now bygone era. Are their identities stable or admirable?

  

     (e) How does this link up –if at all – with Kierkegaard’s scheme of three spheres or stages of life?