The Problem of the Will
in the Analysis of the Ethical Act
Karol Wojtyla
"Zagadnienie woll w analizie aktu etycznego," Roczniki Filozoficzne 5.1 (1955-57): 111-135.
Translated from the Polish by Theresa Sandok
1. THE CURRENT DIRECTION OF RESEARCH ON THE
WILL IN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
The problem mentioned in the title of this essay is a familiar one in books on ethics; it occupies a place of its own in that science, a place somewhat different but mutually related to the one it occupies in philosophy and psychology. This essay is written from the ethical point of view. In it I wish to present some reflections on the problem of the will that were evoked by my reading of a number of works on the will from the field of contemporary experimental psychology of the will. The works in question are from the school founded by Narziss Ach. For psychologists Ach's scientific activity is of pioneering significance because he was the first to do research on the will along decidedly experimental lines, although certain attempts in this direction had already been made by Wilhelm Wundt. For ethicists, on the other hand, the results of the research carried out by Ach and other psychologists of his school are important because they provide a modern tool for reflecting on ethical experience. The proper interpretation of this lived experience has always been one of the main tasks of ethics, since ethical experience is the experiential fact upon which this science is based. The impossibility of divorcing ethics from experience derives, in turn, from the most general assumptions concerning the nature of all human knowledge, which is always in some way based on experience.
Kant, who pushed the attempt to sever science from experience perhaps farther than anyone else, also contributed in the realm of ethics to a different treatment of the will than the one that characterized the philosophical tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. For Kant the will is not merely under the direction of practical reason but is completely identified with it. Kant defines the will as "a faculty either of bringing forth objects corresponding to conceptions or of determining itself, i.e., its causality to effect such objects (whether the physical power is sufficient to this or not)."1 Such a definition would lead one to assume that Kant recognized the dynamic character of the will. And yet his whole theory of ethical life shows that this dynamic character of the will left no mark on his view of the structure of the ethical act. For Kant motivation plays a primary role, since it allows him to define the set of contents he finds in practical reason. He tries to resolve the entire problematic of the will, and in particular the ethical problematic to which it is so intimately related, in the sphere of practical reason through an analysis of the principles by which practical reason directs the will. Kant goes so far as to literally identify the will with practical reason.2
Not only is such an account of the matter one-sided, but-more importantly-it also does not square with experience. Kant inherited his method of investigating the will from Hume. He also exhibited the Cartesian tendency to objectify only what could be known in a clear and distinct way. While the particular contents of practical reason may certainly be one of the clearer aspects of the will, the essence of the will does not lie in them but in the specific dynamism contained in the efficacy of the rational person. Since Kant's philosophy did not provide him with a proper vehicle for apprehending and depicting the dynamism that forms the essence of the will, he reduced this whole spiritual faculty along with its freedom to the noumenal order, asserting that if experience tells us anything at all about the will, it certainly does not tell us anything about freedom of will.
Kant's view of the will naturally has important consequences for his whole theory of ethical life. I shall illustrate these consequences for just one aspect of his theory by analyzing the famous Kantian imperative from the psychological side. Although Kant speaks of the immanent "causality" of the will, he portrays the will as a faculty that is basically submissive. The will is very submissive to the promptings of feelings, which impose their relation to various goods of the "empirical" world on it, and is less submissive to practical reason. When practical reason wants to impose its relation to goods - especially to moral good - on the will, it must resort
to a command.3 This imperative, which has its chief significance in Kant's ethical views, is an expression of his psychological views as well. Reason commands the will with a corresponding power, and the will passively submits its own "causality" to reason's command. In such a treatment, however, all we see are causes operating on the will; we do not see the will itself operating as a cause. And so the cause of the will's activity must lie either in feelings and practical reason or in practical reason alone. In the former case the will submits to inclinations; in the latter reason must command it. If there is a "causality" proper to the will, it exists only for the benefit of other psychic agents, and not so that the will itself can act in a causal way.This problem, which is so important for the ethical life, was viewed by St. Thomas Aquinas in an entirely different fashion. He realized that an act of will can be commanded by reason,4 but this command always relies on the will. Reason may formulate the command, but the will provides the power inherent in every command.5 According to St. Thomas, this process occurs as it does because the will's whole natural dynamism has a distinct inclination toward the good (bonum in communi). By the power of this inclination that arises from the will's own nature, the will shares in the act of command (imperium), for it provides the power upon which reason relies in formulating the content of a command. As far as human activity in general is concerned, the will appears there as a faculty that acts in conjunction with reason-rather than one that merely submits to the causality of motives. In such a view, the immanent power of action proper to the will is no fiction.
As we know, Hume had already challenged the causal-efficient character of the will in psychology prior to Kant. In late 19th- and early 20th-century psychology there were those who regarded the will as a separate element of psychic life. Others attempted to reduce the will to associations of images (Spencer), to sensations of muscular tension (Munsterberg), to emotionally laden representations of goals ~bbinghaus), and finally to feelings themselves (Wundt).6 All of these resolutions of the problem of the will have the character of allogeneic conceptions. Against this background, the earlier mentioned position of Narziss Ach and the whole school of psychologists of the will that adopted his experimental method of investigating the will is distinguished by its insistence on the strictly idiogeneic character of both the lived experience of the will and the process of the will in general. For these psychologists, the will is an entirely distinct element in human psychic life and cannot be reduced to any other element of that life. The element of the will comes to the fore in the so-called actual moment (das aktuelle Moment) of lived experience, which usually takes the form "I do in fact will," although it can also assume a somewhat different form, e.g., "I can," "I must," "I ought."7 The term moment here is used in the sense given it by Husserl and means a "non-independent part of a certain whole."
Along with the actual moment, Ach also distinguished in the simple act of will the objective moment (das gegenstandliche Moment), which consists in the presentation of an end in an intuitive or nonintuitive way and in the presentation of a relation to future action, which is given "intentionally" as a means of achieving the intended end. An act of will also contains an intuitive moment (das anschauliche Moment), which is characterized by intense bodily tension, and a dynamic moment (das zustandliche Moment), which involves a sense of effort.
Ach himself concentrated mainly on the simple act of will-the actual moment. Worthy of note here is the distinct connection of this moment, which is a simple and irreducible element of psychic life, both with the subjective self in the lived experience "I do in fact will" and with the object or end at which this self aims in a corresponding action. The lived experience of willing includes an anticipation of the action that leads to the realization of the content of that simple act of will. Both in simple willing and in the will's subsequent activity aimed at realizing the content of that willing, the self exerts a determinate influence. The determinate tendency arising from this self must overcome various resisting forces that take the form of associational-representational tendencies, perseverational tendencies, and other determinate tendencies. But this is also what brings into clear relief the dynamic character of the act of will, the tendency that originates in the self as a result of the actual moment and develops into a broadly diversified process, whose various aspects provide psychologists with material for experimental research.
Such research was pursued with great intensity and insight. First A. Michotte and N. Prum8 studied the problem of motivation, taking into consideration not just the simple act of willing but the whole process of the will from the moment of the onset of stimuli and the appearance of motives to the moment of decision. Earlier investigations of the will are mentioned by Johannes Lindworsky in Der Wille,9 and later developments in this area are discussed by Mieczyslaw Dybowski in Dzialanie woli.10 In Poland this experimental direction of research on the will also found adherents and yielded results. At the same time as Narziss Ach was conducting his investigations, Edward Abramowski was working on the problem of the control of the emotions, which he saw as an expression of will power. Dybowski studied performance as the factor that brings to completion the process of the will begun in the lived experience of willing; he also focused on the typology of the will.11 Other Polish exponents of the psychology of the will directed their experimental efforts toward a number of different problems, some focusing more on issues related to the dynamic aspect of the will's activity and others more on issues related to its objective aspect. Thus, for example, Wladyslawa Mielczarska12 concentrated her research on problems such as effort and defiance, and 36zef Reutt13 on the presentation of goals and the problem of indecisiveness.
It would be difficult to list all the individual studies that contemporary psychologists - or even just Polish psychologists-have generated on the topic of the will. Moreover, moral philosophers reading these works will quite naturally attach greater importance to certain things than do empirical psychologists. For example, the method of investigation is of only incidental interest to moral philosophers, whereas they are extremely interested in what psychologists are studying and the conclusions they reach. Psychologists in their investigations often approach the boundaries of ethics. Ach, for example, in his work Ober den Willensakt und das Temperament, discusses the topic of the psychological basis of conscience,14 and others (e.g., Lindworsky15) touch upon the problems of upbringing that are so prominent in connection with the will. But regardless of how much light these discussions may shed on ethical experience, the most important thing they do for moral philosophers is establish the psychological problematic that allows them to arrive at a proper interpretation of ethical experience.
2. THE RELATION OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE WILL TO ETHICAL EXPERIENCE
In what does this "establishing" consist? In other words, what do these psychologists of the will bring to ethics through their investigations? First of all, the science of the will that they developed is based on the premise that an act of will is any lived experience in which the personal self appears as a real efficient cause of its actions. Ach expresses this when he writes: "In activities of the will, the individual has, upon the appearance of a determinate presentation, a distinct awareness that he or she is the cause of its realization (Verwirklichung). The self appears as the cause of action."16 Lindworsky expresses the same view in the following words: "An act of will is that particular lived experience in which the self appears as the cause of activity."17 This assertion is treated as a fact of phenomenological experience. The most evident feature in an act of will is the efficacy of the personal self. This efficacy is immediately given: it is reflected in the awareness of the acting person as an act of will. Ach treats this fact of phenomenological experience as the basis for all experimental research on the will. All such research focuses on the different individual moments of that lived experience in which the will appears as causal expression of the personal self.
The fact that the will reveals itself in the lived experience of the effacacy of the person directs us to the specific dynamism that constitutes its proper essence. Kant abandoned this dynamic essence of the will in his interpretation of ethical life, confining himself to an analysis of the contents of practical reason as the determining factors in the direction of the will. And yet the first and most fundamental aspect of ethical experience is the very efficacy of the personal self, which Ach, Lindworsky, and other representatives of the same school of psychology describe as essential for the will. The awareness that I am the efficient cause of all my individual actions is a necessary psychological basis for the ethical experience that I am responsible for those actions. Consequently, when psychologists point to efficacy as the primary element of the lived experience of will, they take the same position that ethicists must take in apprehending ethical experience. The will reveals itself here as the true ore of such experience. Ethical experience is contained immanently in very human activity in which the personal self is conscious of its efficacy. This means that ethical experience is contained immanently in the act of will itself, and not in something outside of it, e.g., in feeling, as Max Scheler suggested.18
Consequently, the phenomenology of the will upon which Ach and his school of psychology base their experimental research threatens not only ant's position; it also strikes no less forcefully at the position on ethical experience that Scheler was led to adopt as a result of his aprioristic emotionalism. Although Scheler is a phenomenologist in his assumptions, he derives his view of the ethical life of the human being primarily from the set of emotional factors he sees as comprising that life. He realizes lat ethical experience is connected with the willing of value.19 For Scheler, however, this willing of value is only a tendency connected with the presentation of a desirable object.20 Because Scheler believes values cannot be adequately presented in any image or concept but can only be felt, he connects willing with the feeling of value and not with the efficacy of the person. For this reason, too, ethical experience is not contained immanently in willing, in the act of will, but has its source, according to Scheler, in emotion. The very core of ethical experience, in Scheler's view, is not the efficacy of the person but the emotional experience of value.
Scheler's emotionalism-a full analysis of which must be left for another occasion-is expanded into a rich system of an ethics of values. From the point of view of experience, however, I cannot agree with his system, precisely because he completely disregards the efficacy of the person. If persons are not the efficient cause of their actions, then there is no explanation for where ethical values come from. The experience upon which ethics is based reveals that persons who experience themselves as the efficient cause of their actions simultaneously experience them-selves as subjects of ethical values-moral good and evil.
The distinct immanence of ethical experience appears, therefore, in the lived experience of the efficacy of the person, that is, in the phenomenologically apprehended act of will. This is also suggested by the sense of responsibility that accompanies action and is related to ethical value. If the efficacy of the person is the basic element of the experiential whole we call ethical experience, and if the experience of responsibility is connected with it, then ethical value originates, so to speak, between these two elements. Ethical value originates in the lived experience of efficacy, that is, in the act of will apprehended phenomenologically-and this is what gives us the experiential basis for connecting ethical value with the person as its proper subject. When Scheler speaks of the purely emotional experiences of happiness and despair, these experiences already presuppose an action involving the efficacy of the person. These experiences are elicited by the awareness that the ethical value arising from an action remains in the person as a subject, and its presence is for this person a source of happiness if it is a positive value and of despair if a negative one.
The lived experience of responsibility is a confirmation of the relation that exists between an action's moral value and the person's efficacy, both when this experience occurs after the deed is done and when it occurs before it. The lived experience of responsibility points to the will as the psychological factor that constitutes the very core of ethical experience.
By bringing to light the efficacy of the person as the phenomenological fact in which the will is revealed, the contemporary experimental psychology founded by Ach, which is also pursued in Poland, enables us to overcome some of the consequences of Kant's critical philosophy for ethics. In the experience of the efficacy of the personal self, the dynamic essence of the will is once again given its due. The discovery of the actual phenomenological moment forms a common point of departure for both psychologists and ethicists. Empirical psychologists will proceed from this moment to their own investigations, employing the experimental-inductive method; ethicists will find in this moment the key for apprehending ethical experience, and from there they will proceed using a method proper to their own science. Nevertheless, the point of departure is the same.
But there must be a convergence at a later stage as well. As we know, in Kant's ethics, as a result of his failure to perceive the efficient and dynamic moment of the will, there appeared an excess of the objective moment. Kant's whole view of the will and its significance in ethical life, as he developed it particularly in the Critique of Practical Reason, is partially reducible to an analysis of the influence of feelings on the will; basically, however, it is reducible to an analysis of practical reason and its imperatives. A similar situation, but in a different form and based on different assumptions, occurs in Scheler's ethics. In place of the rational-practical apriorism we encounter in Kant's ethics, Scheler adopted a different apriorism, an emotional one.21 Both forms of apriorism lead to a disproportionate excess of the objective moment at the expense of the efficient moment of the will, an excess of motivation at the expense of dynamism. The will in both of these views remains completely enmeshed in the apriorism of either practical reason or emotion. There can be no doubt, however, that the will itself contributes a dynamic element to human psychic life, an element that appears in a tendency determined by the very self. Scheler does, in fact, say that willing has the character of a tendency, but unfortunately this tendency remains for him somehow completely submerged in the emotional elements that he regards as an a priori factor in the life of the person.
Consequently, both Kantian and Schelerian apriorism in ethics lead to an essential analysis of static forms, which for Kant are imperatives or maxims and for Scheler values, but neither of these apriorisms allows us to objectify the dynamic factor of action, which is fundamental for ethics. Action, after all, is the locus of authentic ethical experience. And so apriorism becomes the enemy of experience. Ethics must be free of apriorism if it is to remain properly related to experience.
When, on the other hand, we take as the point of departure in our investigation of the will the familiar inner experience of efficacy, which has its source in the personal self and manifests itself in the whole act of will, we cannot help but grasp correctly the balance that occurs between motivation and action in the process of the will. The excess of motivation at the expense of action that characterizes Kant's and Scheler's view of ethical matters then disappears. After all, a motive has meaning only in relation to the act of will it motivates. An analysis of the contents that are motives and operate as such (whether they be Kantian maxims and imperatives or Schelerian values) that does not take into account the activity of the will must necessarily distort the very essence of those contents, for such an analysis is inconsistent with the demands of the actual facts known from experience.
What is at stake here is an accurate apprehension of the whole practical order. In the practical order, an act of will (which is often most clearly revealed in self-control) is always an essential factor, and the practical function of reason arises under the influence of impulses of the will. Consequently, all motivation belongs to the process of the will and must be considered within the context of the will. We cannot, therefore, conceive the matter by examining the activity of practical reason in isolation, and then later adding the "activity" of the will to it from without-which is precisely what Kant did. The actual structure of practical reason is different. The activity of the will is a primary factor here, and it shapes and permeates the entire practical activity of reason. Reason becomes practical by acting in conjunction with the will. Hence, there are no a priori practical principles of reason, which would subsequently be presented to or imposed upon the will.
Scheler takes a different position. For Scheler it is not principles of reason-maxims and imperatives-that have an a priori practical character, but rather emotionally experienced values. These values can only be felt; they cannot be grasped by reason. Neither reason nor the will plays any role in the apprehension of values, which, as Scheler maintains, are later to become objects of the will's striving, or goals to be realized. Schelerian values are not the same as principles of practical reason. They do not direct or command the will but only draw it to themselves. Scheler replaces Kantian a priori imperative motivation with a priori emotional motivation, and so instead of an ethics of pure duty we have in Scheler an ethics of pure value. Nevertheless, this emotional motivation does not occur within the framework of the process of the will. Values are something ready-made and a priori practical when they appear before the will in order to draw it in the direction they want it to go.
Motivation is what inwardly links the whole act of will, and so if we do not connect it organically with the act of will a proper and adequate interpretation of ethical experience becomes impossible. Here again the school of psychologists of the will that I referred to above assists us in interpreting ethical experiences because, in keeping with experience and reality, it treats motivation in the context of the process of the will. The process of the will is not the same as the simple act of will. The lived experience "I will" (or other analogous experiences) is the simplest experiential fact in which the efficacy of the personal self is revealed. This simple experience, however, develops into a specific process thanks to the appearance of motives. The appearance of motives should lead to a decision. Frequently, however, in the course of the process of the will, a weighing or even a conflict of motives must take place. The result of such a weighing or conflict of motives is the victory of some one motive, followed by a choice made by the will. Decision leads to performance. Performance is an extension of the actual process of the will and remains closely dependent upon it. In experimental psychology, we find discussions of the causal22 problem of the will, a name that embraces the various ways performance manifests its dependence on forms of the process of the will. The very name of this problem points to the causal-efficient character of this dependence. This character qualifies the activity of the will in all of its dimensions.
This causal character, however, which qualifies all the will's activity that has its efficient source in the self, takes on distinctive features thanks to motivation. As a result of motivation, simple willing develops into the process of the will, until finally, depending on the motivation, it leads to performance. Motivation is an immanent part of the whole lived experience that goes by the name an act of will. This is how the mauer looks in the light of experimental research. As we know, the problem of motivation was studied by Michotte and Pru~m.23 Lindworsky stressed the importance of motives in the task of training the will.24 Ach accentuated the so-called formal development of the will as consisting in the exercise of effort, whereas Lindworsky took the position that motivation is of fundamental importance for the development of the will. A motive of the will is always some value or other, and values create stronger stimuli for the will when they are connected with feelings. Nevertheless, the immediate power of feelings is not direcfly proportionate to the duration of their influence on the will. Although higher feelings operate more weakly, their influence on the will lasts longer than that of lower feelings. Reutt,25 who approached this problem from a somewhat different angle, also arrived at the conclusion that higher aims, those that involve values beyond ourselves, are for the will a source of greater strength and permanence than aims that involve only values pertaining to ourselves.
These and other psychological works based on the experimental method show time and again that there is a strict connection between motivation and the will's activity. This connection can be verified experientially: it can be investigated by empirical, statistical, and inductive methods. The results psychology achieves by these methods can even function as empirical laws for the formation of the will. If experimental psychology of the will is in keeping with experience in its stance that motivation is contained within the precincts of the process of the will, then ethicists must also adopt this stance when they attempt to interpret ethical experience in keeping with experience. Ethical experience, as I said earlier, is contained immanently in the efficacy of the person, in the whole act of will, which has its efficient source in the personal self. The immanence of ethical experience in the act of will appears with particular intensity, however, in the process of motivation, in the weighing or outright conflict of motives and the ultimate choice the will makes.
It should be noted that the psychology of Ach's school, to the extent that its method of experimentation and field of empirical-inductive science permit, presents the psychological problematic in such a way that it interprets ethical experience in the context of its approach to the lived experience of the will. The will appears there in lived experience as a determinate experiential structure in which the efficacy of the personal self is organically connected with motivation. This is the type of experiential phenomenological structure that the psychologists of this school took as the basis of their research, which, by means of experimentation combined with introspection and statistically based induction, are meant to lead them to particular knowledge of the will as a lived experience. This same phenomenological structure must also be adopted by ethicists as the basis of their interpretation of ethical experience. This empirically ascertained experience is contained within the framework of the phenomenological structure that empirical psychologists, using their own methods, investigate as the act of will.
The most important thing in this structure is the strict organic connection of motivation with the efficacy of the person and the activity of the will. This connection prevents what I earlier referred to as the "excess of motivation at the expense of action" that we see in Kant's ethical system and, in a different way, also in Scheler's. Strictly speaking, however, we cannot call what happens in their systems an excess of motivation at the expense of action. They simply present a method of apprehending the problematic of the will in ethics by analyzing a priori practical forms (which for Kant are maxims or imperatives and for Scheler are values) in separation from the activity of the will and the efficacy of the person. The reason why this method cannot be called an excess of motivation at the expense of action in the strict sense is that these forms, insofar as they are divorced from action, are not de facto motives, even though Kant and Scheler regard them as a priori practical forms. Hence, the definition in this case was more of a working definition. In reality, an excess of motivation at the expense of action can only occur in persons in whom the number of rational reasons for and against a certain action, or else the intensity of emotional experiences connected with the decision to act, clearly surpasses the intensity of the act of will.
In the phenomenology of the will, therefore, moral philosophers and experimental psychologists converge with respect to the structure of the lived experience that presents itself as the will in immediate experience. After that their paths diverge. Nevertheless, this convergence in their point of departure is important in that it establishes moral philosophers in their relation to experience. Once we become acquainted with the phenomenological structure that empirical psychologists investigate as the experiential act of will in all its dimensions, and especially when we explore the essential connection between efficacy and motivation, we can see a definite relation to the teaching on the will contained in Thomas Aquinas' Summa.
St. Thomas arrived at his conception of the will by a different route, namely, through a metaphysical analysis of human reality, and especially of the substantial soul, whose essence (essentia) does not operate by itself but through the medium of faculties potentia). The will, like reason, is a faculty for which the spiritual substance of the soul itself is the subject, whereas the other faculties of the human soul are subjectified in the cornpositum humanum as a whole.26 The activity of the will is understood by St. Thomas as having two basic sources of actualization. One is the nature of the will itself, for the will is by nature an appetite (appetitus), and so it exhibits an inclination toward everything that is in any way good (bonum in communi).27 Because this appetitive inclination constitutes the very nature of the will, the will does not need any external causal-efficient impulses in order to operate. The only such causal-efficient impulse is the act of the Creator, who endowed the will with such a nature.28 By virtue of this nature, the will is itself already a causal-efficient source of impulses in the human being, impulses that have various goods as their object. That which St. Thomas calls motio quoad exercitium comes from the will itself and is the will's natural motion.
But since the will is a rational faculty, rationality permeates the inclination toward the good that the will has by nature as an appetitive faculty. The rationality of desire constitutes the essence of the will, which is why St. Thomas always defines the will as a rational appetite (appetitus rationalis). The will's natural rationality of desire is actualized when the will conforms its motion to reason and to reason's judgments concerning objects of desire. These judgments have a practical import: they specify the goodness of particular objects of desire. The proper object of reason is being and truth. Reason's task, in cooperating with the desire for good that naturally resides in the will, is to objectify for the will the true goodness of those goods and thereby direct the inclination of the will. This objectification is the other source of the will's actualization. St. Thomas calls it motio quoad speczficationem,29 and says that this motion, which comes from practical reason, consists in directing the appetitive efficacy that constitutes the essence of the will toward appropriate objects. These objects are the various goods objectified by reason. The will with its whole natural dynamism is in potency with respect to these goods, and this potency of the will is actualized by reason. That is why St. Thomas defines specificatio also as motio.
St. Thomas is well aware, however, that the will's activity as we know it from experience is not based merely on the peaceful, sedate objectification of reason. Feelings arising from the senses and from sensory desire-passiones appetitus sensitivi-are always trying to affect this activity. According to St. Thomas, these feelings do not directly influence motio quoad exercitium. The will's appetitive motion remains distinct from the motion of sensory desire (if this were not the case, it would be difficult to understand the rationality of the appetitive motion of the will). Rather, the feelings attempt to influence reason's objectification of the objects of desire and to conform these objects to the feelings themselves and their own relation to the objects.30
The above observations are not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of St. Thomas' teaching on the will. Nevertheless, even in such cursory form, we must be struck by the similarity between it and the relation to the will we find in Ach and his school of experimental psychology, despite the totally different methods employed. St. Thomas constructed his view of the will by analyzing the fundamental reality of the human being, and that is why he speaks of the faculties through whose medium the soul operates.
If, however, we consider the internal efficacy of the faculty that expresses itself in the desire for all that is in any way good and in the inclination toward the good of the whole human being, then it is not hard to agree that philosophers must find just such a faculty in their metaphysical analysis of the lived experience of the efficacy of the personal self, which is the basic moment of the phenomenology of the will. As to the strict connection of this experience with motivation in the process of the will, we must again acknowledge that the Thomistic view of the process of the will, in its notion of the will's dual motion (quoad exercitium and quoad specificationem), faithfully reflects what is presented in immediate experience as the unity comprised of the actual-dynamic moment and the objective moment.
Even in the case of feelings, we find that they play the same role in the experimental view as in the Thomistic view, for they are said to give a particular intensity to the lived experience of value and thereby influence motivation in the process of the will. The so-called determinate feelings that arise below the activity of the will are a separate issue. They are discussed by Ach,31 who focused mainly on the actual-dynamic aspect of the will. It would not be difficult to show that they constitute a new point of similarity with St. Thomas' view.
If these various elements of similarity suggest themselves despite the totally different methods and terminology employed by St. Thomas and Ach's school of experimental psychology in their science of the will, it is because both of these views are united in basically the same relation to the will as an empirical whole known from lived experience. One could say that the same phenomenology of the will that the psychologists of this school adopted as a basis for their experimental research in a certain sense also accompanied St. Thomas in his metaphysical analysis of the will. It turns out that the phenomenological image of the will must be basically one, namely, that presented by experience.
Consequently, the first condition of the truth of a view is a proper relation to experience. Obviously, the kind of results we reach will differ depending on whether we use such a proper relation to experience as a basis for experimental research or as a point of departure for constructing a metaphysical view. In the end, however, both endeavors will yield true results, though each in a different realm. Their truth will depend in each case primarily on a proper relation to the empirical facts, whereas their different realms will depend on the selected method. Experimentation produces different true assertions about the will than those arrived at by metaphysical analysis. Both types of assertions about the will are true, even though they render the truth about the will in different realms.
3. THE PROBLEM OF AN ADEQUATE INTERPRETATION OF ETHICAL EXPERIENCE
Moral philosophers realize, of course, that experimental psychology, by adopting a proper relation to experience, can arrive at many true particular assertions concerning the will. At the same time, however, they believe that by means of these assertions alone they cannot formulate an interpretation of ethical experience that would serve as a basis for ethics, which is, after all, a normative science. To conclude these reflections, therefore, I wish to indicate the principal reasons for this belief.
Experimental psychology of the will is based on the lived experience of the efficacy of the personal self, which presents itself in immediate experience as a phenomenological fact. Ethics, in interpreting ethical experience, proceeds from the affirmation of this same fact, because this fact forms the psychological core of that experience. Characteristic for the efficacy of the person is the whole process of the will, a process that depends on motivation and initiates the realization of a chosen end. This is the sort of structure of the will that psychologists observe and investigate experimentally. Ethicists, on the other hand, are interested in ethical experience. Using contemporary phenomenological terminology, one could say that ethical experience is that lived experience in which a new value appears, namely, ethical value. Scheler, who regarded the phenomenological method as sufficient for interpreting ethical experience (and even for interpreting ethics in general), maintains that this value appears in the person as its proper subject. According to Scheler, the person experiences himself or herself not only as the subject of ethical value but also as its very source.32
The manner in which the person is the source of ethical value is a point in which I definitely cannot agree with Scheler. He maintains that the person is the source of ethical value merely by reason of a certain emotional exuberance of the person's nature, which distinguishes the person from, say, an animal, and which causes the person's willing of various objective values to be accompanied by this new "additional" value - ethical value. In the light of the correct assumptions of the phenomenology of the will upon which Ach, Lindworsky, and the earlier mentioned Polish exponents of the psychology of the will based their research, I must firmly insist that the source of ethical values is the efficacy of the person. The person experiences himself or herself as the efficient cause of his or her actions, and ethical value is connected with this experience. Scheler did not perceive this efficacy; in his assumptions, he was not only an emotionalist but above all an essentialistic phenomenologist. Consequently, he lacked the tools to reveal and objectify such a dynamic factor as the will. Nevertheless, the will definitely presents itself in this manner, and the service rendered by Ach and his school of psychologists is precisely the discovery of a complete phenomenology of the will.
But the disclosure of the immanence of ethical experience in the efficacy of the person still does not completely resolve the problem of an adequate interpretation of this experience. Scheler maintains that ethical value manifests itself experientially primarily in the person and only secondarily in the person's acts. Thus, according to Scheler, the person is the proper phenomenological subject of ethical value. This position is correct. Even though I cannot agree with Scheler that the person's acts are only a secondary subject of ethical values33 (Scheler held this view because he did not regard the efficacy of the person as a phenomeno logical fact of experience and did not perceive the immanence of ethical experience in this efficacy), I cannot deny that ethical values are essentially connected with the person as their proper subject. I hold, then, on the one hand, in contrast to Scheler, the immanence of ethical experience in the efficacy of the person, and, on the other, in keeping with Scheler, the immanence of ethical values in the person.
These are two phenomenological poles of a single whole. These two poles, which are very clearly interrelated in lived experience, do not reveal phenomenologically the full structure of that whole, but they do provide an adequate basis for apprehending, by another method, the structure of the whole to which they organically belong. If the person's lived experience, which has a distinct, experientially ascertainable, efficient-causal character, brings with it the subjective experience of ethical value, then we must acknowledge that this ethical value, which the person experiences internally as its proper subject, was causally engendered by that person's lived experience. I also find support for this conviction in the experiential fact that the person who experiences himself or herself as a subject of ethical value simultaneously feels that he or she is the source of that value. The person cannot be the source of ethical value, however, except through his or her own efficacy. This is, after all, substantiated experientially by the perceived immanence of ethical experience in the lived experience of efficacy. Thus the efficacy of a person in some way gives rise to ethical value, which this same person then perceives experientially as its subject.
This is how a complete account of ethical experience looks when apprehended phenomenologically. The account Scheler left us in his ethics is incomplete because it fails to consider the efficacy of the person. Even after including the efficacy of the person, however, Scheler's phenomenological explanation does not present an adequate interpretation of ethical experience because it still does not conceptually apprehend the essential core of this lived experience. The psychological core of ethical experience is the efficacy of the person together with motivation, whereas the essential core of ethical experience is ethical value itself. Phenomenologists maintain that this value manifests itself in the person as a subject; they even say that it is a consequence of the efficacy of the person. These assertions, however relevant they may be to ethical value, do not conceptually apprehend the very essence of this value, for it must be conceded that ethical value resides essentially in the trans-phenomenological order. If ethical value were only to "reside" in the person as its phenomeno logical subject, even as its uniquely proper subject, then despite all else it would not be found in the place where we de facto discover it experientially.
By ethical value I mean that through which the human being as a human being, as a concrete person, is simply good or bad. Ethical value is a qualification of the very person as a rational and free concrete being. And this is why the phenomenological "place" of ethical value is not its real place. From experience, we know that ethical value is not just that which we experience "in a person" as his or her "goodness" or "badness," but consists in the fact that this person as a person is simply good or bad. If, in turn, we wish to emphasize the nevertheless accidental character of ethical value in relation to the very being of the person, then we will say that ethical value is that through which a given person as a person is good or bad.
The person, then, is not just the uniquely proper phenomenological subject of ethical values but is their ontic subject as well. This fact indubitably belongs to experience, which in turn belongs to the general human experience upon which ethics is primarily based. This experience is more fundamental than so-called phenomenological experience. It deals with concrete beings themselves as genuine wholes, and not just with the "moments" of them that in some way or other "manifest themselves."
For ethicists, the acting human being is just such a genuine whole. The human being is a person, a being that is conscious of itself. When the human being acts as such a person then each of his or her conscious acts is an ethical experience. In apprehending and investigating this lived experience as a phenomenological fact, we focus only on what happens in the person while performing an action. Although we then perceive the lived experience of efficacy and ethical value, these phenomenological elements do not present us with the actual whole so long as we do not apprehend what happens to the person through the act that person consciously performs. What happens to the person is that the person himself or herself becomes good or bad depending on the act performed. And this becoming good or bad of the person through the performance of a conscious action is what constitutes the essential core of ethical experience. This becoming of the person also belongs to the totality of experience:
the person experiences his or her ethical becoming.
Scheler himself expressed this in a sense when he wrote that the person experiences himself or herself as the source of "good" or "evil." And yet this ethical becoming of the person did not fall within the orbit of what Scheler took to be the content of phenomenological experience, even though its experiential character is not subject to doubt. Ethical experience does not just occur in the person, but it is the lived experience of the person because it involves the person's very being.
If ethical experience essentially consists in this specific becoming of the person, then the only interpretation of it that can be considered adequate is one that apprehends and expresses this ethical becoming. This is what also leads me to believe that we should consider the view of the human act developed by Thomas Aquinas34 an adequate interpretation of ethical experience. I do not intend here to analyze his view or its adequacy in relation to the complete structure of ethical experience. I only want to draw attention to its origin. St. Thomas based his view of the human act on Aristotle's theory of potency and act, a theory by which the philosophy of being explains all changes that take place in beings. Every change, whether it is of a material or spiritual nature, whether it takes place in an organism or in the psyche, can be said-in an analogical sense, of course-to be a form of passage from potency to act. A conscious human act is for St. Thomas not merely a stage upon which ethical experience is enacted. It is itself an ethical experience because it is an act of will. An act of will is for St. Thomas a passage from potency, since the will is a faculty (potentia) of the soul. A separate study would be needed to show how the ethical becoming of the person is reflected in this view as a whole.
Nevertheless, the reasons presented in this last part of the essay clearly show that phenomenology of the will alone does not suffice for interpreting ethical experience, even if this phenomenology happens to be as much in harmony with experience as that upon which Ach and his whole experimental school are based. Phenomenology can indirectly assist us in overcoming certain errors in views of the will that arise from an improper relation to the empirical facts, but it cannot serve as a tool for the sort of interpretation of ethical experience upon which ethics as a normative science is based.
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs, 1956)15.
2. See, for example, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 23-24: "Reason [is] a truly higher faculty of desire, but still only in so far as it determines the will by itself and not in the service of the inclinations."
3. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 18.
4. "Actus voluntatis potest esse imperatus (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-Il, 17, 5).
5. "Relinquitur, quod imperare sit actus rationis, praesupposito actu voluntatis, in cujus virtute ratio movet per imperium ad exercitium actus" (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theoL I-il, 17, 1).
6. Johannes Lindworsky, Der Wille: Seine Erscheinung und seine Beherrschung (Leipzig: Barth, 1923)1-4.
7. Narziss Ach, Ober den Willensaki und das Temperament (Leipzig: Quelle,
1910) 237 ff.
8. A. Michotte and N. Prum. "Etude expenmentale sur le choix volontaire et sea antecedents imm6diats," Archives de Psychologie (1910).
9. Lindworsky, Der Wille.
10. Mieczyslaw Dybowski, Dzialanie woli na tie badan eksperymentalnych [The Activity of the Will in the Light of Experimental Investigations) (Poznan,
1946).
11. Mieczyslaw Dybowski, 0 typach woli: Badania eksperymentalne [On Types of Will: Experimental Investigations] (Poznan: Ksieg. Akademicka, 1947).
12. Wladyslawa Mielczarska, Przezycie oporu i jego stosunek do woli [The
Experience of Defiance and Its Relation to the Will] (Poznan: Poznanskiego Tow.
Przyjaciol Nauk, 1948); 0 wplywie wysilku na wynik pracy [The Influence of
Effort on the Results of Work] (Poznan, 1947).
13. J6zef Reutt, Przedstawienie celu a postepowanie [The Presentation of Goals in Relation to Behavior] (Poznan, 1947); Badania psychologiczne nad wahaniem [Psychological Investigations of Vacillation] (Poznan, 1949).
14. Ach, Uber den Willensakt 273.
15. Johannes Lindworsky, The Training of the Will, trans. Arpad Steiner and Edward A. Fitzpatrick, 4th ed. (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1955).
16. Ach, Uber den Willensakt 265.
17. Lindworsky, Der Wille 21.
18. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Persona lism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973).
19. Scheler, "The Relation of the Values 'Good' and 'Evil' to the Other Values and Goods," Formalism 23-30.
20. Scheler, "Conation, Values, and Goals," Formalism 30-38.
21. Scheler, "The Non-Formal A Priori in Ethics," Formalism 81-110.
22. Dybowski, Drialanie woli 195 ff.
23. Michotte and Prum, "Etude exp6rimentale."
24. Lindworsky, Der Wille.
25. Reutt, Przedstawienie celu a postepowanie 95.
26. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. I, 77, 5-6.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. I-Il, 9, 1.
28. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. I-Il, 9, 6.
29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. I-Il, 9, 1; I-il, 9, 3, ad 3.
30. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. I-lI, 9, 2.
31. Ach, Uber den Willensake 307 ff.
32. Scheler, "The Stratification of the Emotional Life," Formalism 328-344, "The Idea of Sanction and Reprisal in Relation to the Connection between Happiness and Moral Values," Formalism 354-369.
33. Scheler, Formalism 27.
34. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. I-Il, 18-20.
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