DECISION IS THE FOCUS OF THE ACTIVITIES OF FREE WILL

Transcendence versus Appetite

The remainder of this chapter will be almost entirely concerned with the extended significance of freedom, and we shall thereby continue to constructively complete our image of the person. This image emerges more completely alongside the increasing prominence given to the transcendence in the action which, owing to freedom, that is, self-determination, is the privilege of the person. Because of the fact itself of being free - the fact of self-determination and its related ascendancy over the human dynamism - we call this transcendence "vertical." The experience of this ascendancy is not impeded by the spontaneity of freedom, though the ascendancy is perhaps

better marked when there is more reflectiveness in self-determination, in the rational maturation of decisions. At any rate, now that we are equipped with a more or less clearly defined notion of "vertical transcendence," we can embark upon a deeper analysis of the will. The consecutive steps of this analysis will, so to speak, unveil deeper and deeper levels of that transcendence of the acting person in which the person's structure, in its existential status of reality, is manifested experientially. The outer, overlying layers of this reality, those we can uncover and objectify first, are conditioned by the inner ones, and as we proceed in depth each will tell us more about the person, about his specific structure. They will allow us to define more and more fully the person's specificity and his spiritual nature.

This procedure for the analysis of will and, at the same time, the in-depth study of the person's inner structure, seems to differ in some respects from the traditional approach, in which the will seems to be viewed rather in the dimension of

"horizontal" transcendence. Some philosophers and psychologists in their discussions and analyses have treated it as if it were an "appetite." Their stand brought into prominence, not without reason, the will's characteristic urge toward good as its object and end. Thus the most important part of the analysis of the will was that which dealt with its intentionality, with the intentional acts or volitions whereby it was manifested and actualized. It seems, however, that an analysis of volitions themselves with all their variety of tone and all their modifications fails to bring us right down to the roots of the will. For these grow out - as we have been trying to demonstrate - from the structure of the person: and apart from this structure the will finds no justification. As to the intentionality of willings, the turn they manifest

toward a value-end is insufficient to constitute or determine the will fully and comprehensively or to allow a sufficiently clear insight into the dynamism and potentiality appropriate to it.

Appetition, Intendedness, and Intentionality

Special note ought to be taken of the term "appetite," especially when used in conjunction with the attributive "rational." Its content with all its connotations has to be closely examined and properly grasped. There is in it the element of striving, and as striving is necessarily directed toward an end, appetite is intrinsically incident to an end. But there is also in appetite an element of desire, which, insofar as will is concerned, adds to the term a certain semantic convergence as well as a divergence.

For desire, with its connotations, seems to point only in the direction of what is happening in man, to what lies beyond the range of his conscious decision. Thus from this point of view, to speak of "rational appetite" seems somewhat strange, almost a contradiction in terms, though at the same time the element of conation makes "appetite" more neutral and seems to offset the contradiction.

From the semantic point of view appetite can hardly be attributed to the will, at any rate, to the extent to which it retains any connotation of sensual passivity and as such originates and unfolds on its own, spontaneously, outside of conscious choice and decision. In this context questions of language and terminology are by no means futile; our purpose is to find a definition that would be in all respects' adequate for every human willing or, more broadly speaking, for every "I will something,"

regardless of whether the desired object be X or Y. We are considering will as endowed with some features of "intentionality" that are appropriate to it but also

with others diametrically different from the intentionality of cognition, of cognitive acts. We differentiate in fact between what could be termed "intention" and "intent."

44

An intentional act of man's experience consists in being oriented or directed outward toward an object. Its "intention" is a special kind of going out toward an object, a motion in which the limits of the subject are overstepped. This takes place in acts of volition as well as in acts of cognition, of thinking. Being intentional the acts of thinking and volition resemble each other in that they are directed toward their object and thereby overstep the limits of the subject; but they differ In their whole specific nature. Beyond that, the act of will crystallizes Into a peculiar "intent." In this respect "to know" or "to understand" and "to will" are dissimilar. It is the

distinction between "tending toward something," on the one hand, and "being intent upon something," on the other. In either case the experience the subject has of being directed toward an object has entirely different consequences for the subject and for the object. In this study we view thinking as an "intentional act" par

excellence, distinguishing it clearly from an "intended" act as expressing foremostly the manifestation of will. Having introduced these explanations we can proceed to examine the act of volition.

Decision as the Crucial Constitutive Moment in the Experience of "I will"

The first point to make is that the moment of decision always forms part of volition envisaged as an intentional act, that is to say, in the specific way in which the will is directed toward its appropriate object. This moment is an essential part of volition and is crucial for both the inner structure and the dynamic distinctness of volition. It is contained in what psychologists, such as Ach or Michotte, call a "simple volitive act" as well as in what is sometimes referred to as a "compound" or "expanded"

act.⁴S We shall later attempt an explanation of this distinction by examining the two kinds of volitive acts separately. At present it suffices to note that volition is present in our willing as its essential and constitutive moment, regardless of whether we simply want something or we choose something - that is to say, we want it at the conclusion of a process of motivation. Choice and decision define the intrinsic

essence of volition (of "I will"), especially in what concerns its intentional attribution to an object ("I will either X or Y").

In true willing the subject is never passively directed to an object. The object - which may be a good or a value, though the meaning of these conceptions would require a separate differential analysis -never leads the subject back upon itself; it never forces the subject into its own reality thereby determining it from without; that kind of subject-object relation would in fact amount to determinism; it would mean that the subject was in a way absorbed by the object and also that innerness was

absorbed by outerness. The moment of decision in the human will rules out any such pattern of relation. Thus when I will something, I myself am moving outward toward the object, toward whatever I will. We already saw that it is not the directing toward a value as such but the being directed that is appropriate to volition. The passive voice of "being directed" brings out very well the distinctness that results from the active engagement of the subject. It is here that we touch upon the root itself of the experiential difference between man's acting and the happening of what only occurs in man. The will is the factor of acting, of the action. The remarkable thing is that this is due to the mechanism of decision to which the will is essentially related. This

relationship brings into full view the person in his efficacy as well as in his transcendence and, what is more important, it shows the person as a person.

Readiness to Strive toward Good Underlies All Volitive Decisions

Choice and decision are obviously no substitute for the drive toward good that is appropriate to will and constitutive of the multifarious dynamism of the human person. The greater the good the greater becomes its power to attract the will and thus also the person. The crucial factor in determining the maturity and the

perfection of the person is his consent to be attracted by positive, authentic values, his unreserved consent to be drawn in and absorbed by them. But this makes it all the more necessary to stress that all the forms and degrees of such absorption or engagement of the will are made personal by the moment of decision.⁴⁶ Decision may be viewed as an instance of threshold that the person as a person has to pass on his way toward the good. Moreover, this personal outgoing has to continue throughout his absorption by the good, even when it may rightly appear that the human being will be literally engulfed by the good, by the glorified end of his striving. Indeed, the more he becomes engulfed, the more fundamental is his decision and vice versa. We may also look upon this interpretation from another side: the consequences of the initial decision augment as the good is approached, in the intercourse and union with it. But these consequences would never be possible without the person's going beyond the threshold of his own structural borderlines, transgressing his own limitations.

The will's ability to decide in no way condemns it to an attitude of cool aloofness either toward its object or toward values. Indeed, there are no grounds to assume that there is a neutral attitude to all values, a kind of indifference to their

attractiveness and to their visible hierarchy in the world, lurking somewhere deep at the bottom of the person, at the origin of all the dynamizations that are proper to the will. On the contrary, it lies in the nature of every "I will" - which is always object oriented and consists in an "I want something" - that it is constantly prepared to come out towards a good. In a sense this readiness is more primitive and more fundamental for the dynamic essence of the will than the ability to make decisions;

for the ability presupposes a dynamic readiness to strive toward good. If however we were to conceive of the will, of man's "I will," solely or even primarily in terms of this readiness, then we would miss what in the dynamism of the will is most essentially personal, what most strictly binds the dynamism of will with the structure of the person and through this structure allows us to exfoliate and interpret the nature of the person.