What I Would Rather Want

Three photographs of a home-made table go up on a Friday night. What he does next has little to do with the table: each time he passes it he opens the page and goes down the list of everyone who has been on it, looking for one name.

Harry Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ appeared in The Journal of Philosophy on 14 January 1971. A person’s will, in his use, is a particular desire: the one that moves, or would move, him all the way to action (p. 8). Of desires about desires he distinguishes two kinds: ‘Someone has a desire of the second order either when he wants simply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will’ (p. 10). Frankfurt’s volitions are the second kind. Wanting to be rid of a wish is not yet wanting another to move you.

A volition that never wins is a volition still. Frankfurt’s unwilling addict is ‘helplessly violated by his own desires’, gives in every time, and has a volition of the second order all the same; the addict he calls a wanton gives in in the same way and ‘does not care about his will’ (pp. 11–12). ‘Both desires are his, to be sure’. What identification adds is that the desire he wants to be his will becomes ‘more truly his own’, while he ‘withdraws himself from the other’ (p. 13).

Frankfurt then separates two freedoms: being free to do what you want, and having the will you want (pp. 14–15). Someone who lacks the second can feel the lack, he says, in knowing that their coinciding is ‘not his own doing but only a happy chance’ (p. 15). His physician wants the desire for a drug, to know what it is like, and does not want it to move him: he ‘may prudently arrange to make it impossible for him to satisfy’ it (p. 9). The wanting stays where it was.

Left open

What would be left of us if we got every wish we have about ourselves?

Who would we want to have seen us, and why that one person?