The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence

Being of Two Minds

Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia, Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429638596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debates. For example, it relates to debates about virtues, rationality, and decision-making, agency or authenticity, emotions, and social or political metacognition. It is also relevant to a variety of larger debates in philosophy and psychology, including nature vs. nature, objectivity vs. subjectivity, or nomothetic vs. idiographic.

The essays in this book offer novel and wide-ranging perspectives on this emerging philosophical topic. They will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and social cognition.

1 The Philosophical and Psychological Significance of Ambivalence: An Introduction

Berit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra Gatzia

To Be or Not to Be?

It is quite common for people not to be able to make up their minds. One of the most famous literary examples comes from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, in which the protagonist Hamlet poses the well-known question “To be or not to be, that is the question,” while contemplating suicide. In the play, Hamlet is expressing discontent about life, as he thinks of the pain and unfairness it involves. At the same time, he fears that death may be worse. It seems that he desires to have it both ways: he wants to both end his life and not end his life. This is, of course, a case of ambivalence where the stakes are very high. When we are ambivalent, it’s often about much more mundane aspects of life. For instance, you may have a strong desire for a chocolate martini, because you love the taste, while also having an equally strong desire not to have a chocolate martini, because it’s calorically more dense than other alcoholic beverages. In spite of the fact that the consequences of your decision are insignificant compared to the fallout of Hamlet’s choice, you are, nonetheless, ambivalent, as you are unable to make up your mind.

It might be thought that ambivalence about what to do is just an incoherence of desires. You are both drawn towards and pushed away from a particular course of action. But not all of our desires have the same strength. It’s only our strongest desire with regard to a pair of alternatives that determines which intention we form and hence also which course of action we take, assuming our intention is not altered or obstructed. If you are stewing over what drink to order, you may have a weak desire for a skinny margarita yet a much stronger desire for a chocolate martini. So you order the latter. Although the two desires are incoherent, you are not conflicted about what to do, so you are not ambivalent. Incoherent desires can be the basis of ambivalence about what to do, only if the desires are of equal strength.

Being of two minds about what to do is only one form of ambivalence. You can also be ambivalent about choices you have already made, even when said choices cannot be undone. Suppose that you are conflicted about whether to order a chocolate martini or a skinny margarita, but that you can’t make up your mind. So, you ask the bartender to decide on your behalf, and he makes you a chocolate martini that turns out to be the best chocolate martini you have ever had. You sip it with great pleasure. But after finishing it, you are not sure what to think about your choice. On the one hand, it was the most incredible cocktail you have ever had; on the other, consuming such a rich drink will now be a major setback vis-à-vis your diet. In this case, you are ambivalent, not about what to do, but about a past choice that cannot be undone.

But you can also be conflicted about a past choice because you fail to identify with that choice. Suppose that you are utterly disgusted with yourself for desiring 600 calories in a liquid chocolatey form. Even so, you give in to your desire and gulp down the chocolate martini. Afterwards, you feel so appalled by your action that you refuse to regard it as a reflection of your self-governing, or autonomous, agency. As you acted on your strongest desire at the time, your action is agential in the minimal sense of agency set forth by Donald Davidson (1980). But because you disapprove of that desire, your decision to inhale the chocolate martini runs counter to your values, and therefore wasn’t grounded in self-determination (Watson 1975, 1996, 2004; Smith 2005; Bratman 2007, 48; Doris, 2015; Sripada, 2016, 2017; Brogaard, 2020, Ch 2). In this case, there is a discrepancy between your apprehension of the fact that you performed the appalling act of gluttony and your disapproval of that act. So, you are not conflicted about what to do, nor about what to think about the choice you made. After all, you detest it. Rather, you are conflicted about the fact that you made a choice that is so utterly appalling to you. This particular case is also an example of akrasia, or weakness of will. Even though we may not refer to such cases as states of ambivalence in ordinary parlance, the two are at the very least closely related phenomena, as the contributions by Eric Wiland (this volume) and Neil Sinhababu (this volume) make clear.

Or consider a variation on the above case: you go back and forth about whether or not to order a chocolate martini, but you cannot make up your mind. So, you end up flipping a coin. It comes down heads, so you order the chocolate martini. In this scenario, there is a sense in which you made a choice about what to do. After all, once you saw the result of the coin flip, you freely and willfully ordered the chocolate martini. You clearly performed an intentional action. Yet even if you explicitly accept your choice, and don’t seem to be conflicted about it, your choice isn’t a true reflection of your values. So, while your choice is of your own doing, and therefore counts as agential in the minimal Davidsonian sense, it doesn’t reflect your self-governing agency. Accordingly, even though you have accepted your choice on a conscious level, you are still plagued by a conflict, not about what to do, but about your agency, or self.

The types of ambivalence just discussed do not exhaust all the many different forms of ambivalence we will encounter in this volume. Sometimes we are conflicted about what to feel about another person (see e.g., Brunero, this volume; and Feldman and Hazlett, this volume) or about what the truth really is (see e.g., Lam & Sherman, this volume). But there are many more forms of ambivalence than those we will encounter in this volume. If a genie grants you three wishes, you may be ambivalent about what to wish. If you applied for a job in another country that will uproot your family, you may hope to get it but also hope not to get it. And if you broke up with your high-school sweetheart because your parents disliked him, but you are now more or less happily married, you may be conflicted about whether you regret doing as your parents told you. It’s a good guess that ambivalence can involve any personal-level mental state. This volume, however, is not primarily about cataloging all the different forms of ambivalence. Its primary objective is to explore ambivalence in light of topics such as practical and theoretical rationality, akrasia (or weakness of will), self-determination, self-love, skepticism, uncertainty, racism, global justice, well-being, mindfulness, and intersubjectivity. The volume is divided into the following four parts: “Ambivalence, Rationality, and Truth,” “Ambivalence, Emotions, and Intentionality,” “Ambivalence, Racism, and Global Justice,” and “Ambivalence, Psychology, and Subjectivity.” In what follows, we will take a closer look at ambivalence in relation to these topics as they emerge in the contributions to this volume.

Ambivalence, Rationality, and Truth

One of the most prominent accounts of ambivalence, which is originally due to Harry Frankfurt, treats ambivalence as “a disease of the will” (Frankfurt 1999, 99–100). On his view, we act freely when we act according to our will. Frankfurt invites us to consider a case in which you are ambivalent about committing to a career in philosophy. You are both moved and not moved to commit, because while you love the subject matter, you don’t like the lifestyle a philosophy career would afford. In this case, Frankfurt says, you don’t know what you want: you have conflicting first-order desires. You both want and don’t want to commit to a career in philosophy. But your first order-desires are not endorsed by second-order desires, that is, it is not the case that you want to want to commit to a career in philosophy, but neither is it the case that you want to not want to commit to a career in philosophy. Because ambivalence of this kind prevents you from making up your mind, Frankfurt argues, it prevents you from moving forward. Or as he puts it, “your will is utterly divided, and volitional unity is really out of the question” (1999, 107). Accordingly, ambivalence is instrumentally problematic. So, the irrationality of ambivalence, as construed by Frankfurt, is a species of practical irrationality.

In Frankfurt’s opinion, a healthy will is unified and wholehearted. A person with a healthy will is able to reflect on her first-order desires and decide whether she wants to have them, and whether she wants them to move her to action. Frankfurt refers to this desire to have a first-order desire that will move us to action as our second-order volition. In the aforementioned case, you are torn between committing and not committing to a career in philosophy. But reflection on your first-order desires does not result in a second-order volitional desire. So, your will is divided and prevents you from moving forward in life. When you have a healthy will, Frankfurt argues, you wholeheartedly identify with your first-order desires, which requires that you are fully convinced that they should be among the causes or considerations that determine your actions.

In his contribution to this volume, John Brunero first challenges Frankfurt’s (1999) view that ambivalence is always irrational and then takes a critical look at Michael Bratman’s (2007) account of self-governance. As Brunero points out, Patricia Greenspan’s (1975) original case of emotional ambivalence presents a clear counterexample to Frankfurt’s universal claim: you and your friend are competing for the same position of honor, you both want to become department chair. When your friend wins, you are left with conflicting emotions about the outcome. You are happy that your friend won, because she deserves the honor and was hoping to get it. At the same time, you...