RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER SIX

Going Along with the Crowd:
Discursive Formations and Responsibility

Section IV

The connections between Frankfurt/Stump and Foucault are fairly easy to make. Foucault portrayed ethics, evaluation, and responsibility as having less to do with particular ends, desires, and pleasures and more to do with how those particular objects fit within an overall evaluative and conceptual framework. It was by means of the overall framework (embodied in many ways by his notion of a "discursive formation"), that a subject could come to stand in a particular relationship with his desires--thinking of them in particular ways and identifying with certain subsets of them. This parallels Stump's emphasis on the intellect presenting various ends (of desires, motives, and so on) under some description as goods to be pursued. It also parallels Frankfurt's idea that effective second-order desires can stand as reasons behind following certain first-order desires.

If Frankfurt is right about freedom of will then Foucault's subject acts with freedom of will in the following situation. When the intellect presents a certain end as a good to be desired, it also presents means to that end (whether that end be conceptualized as achieving a certain aesthetics, holiness, or mental health). Furthermore, the subject has desires that, if fulfilled in the proper manner, can serve as means to that end and are therefore goods. If the subject identifies himself with those desires as means to the end (and thus forms an uncontested second-order volition to want those desires to be fulfilled), then he acts with freedom of will.

Let's bring in Nietzsche at this point. According to Nietzsche, a subject must be strong-willed in order to be free. First, what he seems to mean by a strong-will is a set of second order volitions that are the result of the intellect having presented the various desires of an individual under a description in such a way that the subject is able to identify with as many of them as possible as goods to be pursued. In such a way the fulfillment of these various desires come together to form a style of character. The various desires are each affirmed and that fits with Nietzsche's valorization of whatever is "life-affirming." This goal is, undoubtedly, difficult to achieve, but it gives us some better idea of what Nietzsche means by a strong-will and hardness towards oneself.

Second, Nietzsche says that taking responsibility for oneself is the road to freedom. By "taking responsibility" Nietzsche intends the sort of self-formation described in the previous paragraph. With Frankfurt's model in mind we can see how this sort of "taking responsibility" will lead to enhanced freedom of will. On Frankfurt's account, freedom of will consists in a coordination between effective second-order desires and first-order volitions (by the second-order volitions becoming reasons for the pursuit of the first-order ones) along with the elimination of any second-order desires that conflict with first-order volitions. Nietzsche's notion of forming second-order volitions in such a way so as to include as many first-order desires as possible (and thus make them into one's will) would naturally eliminate conflicts between the first and second orders, maximizing freedom of will.

On the basis of these points, we can better see some of what is, perhaps, going on in Foucault's apparent privileging of ancient Greek ethics over Christian ethics (as he understood and interpreted them). Since Greek ethics allowed for pleasures and desires, facilitating them in certain directions and to certain ends (moderation), those desires are affirmed within an overall system. Thus, from a Nietzschean point of view, the Greeks, in their ethical lives, were relatively free in Frankfurt's strong sense. Christianity, on the other hand, pursued the mortification of desire and the avoidance of pleasure, in the task of fulfilling the higher and better end of duty to divine law--a difficult task indeed. This would lead, of course, to increasingly mixed first-order desires, and difficulty in achieving purity of motive at the second-level in identifying wholly with duty. Thus the Christians were relatively less free and Christianity is not appropriately, as Nietzsche would put it, "life affirming."

I couldn't disagree more with that analysis of Christianity (though I admit any number of Christian writers have ill-expressed themselves), but I think it helps us understand what is going on in both Nietzsche and Foucault concerning ethics and responsibility. I now want to pick up one thread that has wound its way through the discussion in this section. That thread is held by both Foucault and Stump (and harks back to Millar) and involves the appropriation of conceptual and evaluative frameworks in the movement of the will. This thread is picked up by Charles Taylor and, finally, finds application in responsibility for belief.