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Keith Campbell
There is just one personal centre, the higemonikon, the self from which behaviour arises. T h e heemonikon is the rational governing principle. It alone, unchallengeable, determines every action. There are not two or more competing factors, reason and the passions, for example, or conscience and desire, whose fluctuating fortunes in a perennial civil war make up the soul's biography. If, however, there are not two opposing forces, how can there be room for mastery of self as a difficult condition to attain? ViThere your higemonikon is in good shape it judges rightly as to the good, and this judgment flows smoothly into honiz?, or impulse, and so into action. 170uare a sage, and there is no call for self-mastery. Where, as is more probable, your hEgernonikon cannot be relied upon to judge rightly as to what is to be done, it is likely to favour improperly your own temporary and partial advantage. I n this case also your judgment, erroneous as it is, carries your assent into impulse and action. There are no means, no forces, by which your judgment could be overthrown. There is nothing within you by which your errant hegemonikon could be mastered. So in this case self-mastery is impossible. Here then is the dilemma: on a Stoic, unitary conception of the person, the self-mastery which moral experience shows to be both possible and needful emerges as either impossible or unnecessary. I n what follows I attempt three tasks: to show that the division of the mind into hostile camps is untenable, to account for moral conflict and moral development on a unitary theory of the personality, and to defend such a unitary theory against contemporary pluralistic accounts.
T h e fundamental reason for this is that a real conflict calls for two parties, each of which has purposes, plans for accomplishing them, and means for furthering the plans. So, on Plato's version, for example, Reason would require motivation and effector mechanisms, while Passion would need means for perception and reasoning. Both sides must be complete personal agents. T h e civil war model has universal schizophrenia as a consequence, and that amounts to a reductio a d absurdum. A further objection to the civil war model is that it accords our good actions to a 'higher' element-reason or conscience-while bad behaviour is attributed to a distinct, lower, agent, passion or desire. This is unrealistic because untrue to moral experience. It is the same agent which behaves well on some occasions and ill on others. Further, if we identify the 'real' or 'true' self with the higher element, it would follow that all selfish, harmful, or otherwise evil actions were the work, not of ourselves, but of an alien invader. Responsibility is not to be so easily avoided. Although the inner conflict must be given merely metaphorical standing, nevertheless, it is a most compelling model. It arises out of real experience of disharmony, of being divided, of lacking integration (three more expressions exploiting the same metaphor). This experience must be given a place in our moral psychology; it is not to be swept aside, but a literal rendering of it must be found. Furthermore, if the Stoics' moral psychology is to survive, this experience, and its literal rendering, must be accommodated to the doctrine of the soul's domination by the hegemonikon. On their account, all and only the acts proceeding from one hegemonikon are acts of one self. There is only one complete personal structure embracing thought, decision, and action in a person. T h e hegemonikon is its sole director. It receives inputs of various kinds, from the perceptual system, from memory, from the springs of desire. This is raw material for the hegemonikon's function as the logos or rational principle. T h e hegemonikon frames lekta or propositional contents specifying various possible states of affairs as attainable in the existing situation. It then gives assent to lekta specifying one of these ends and a means to it. If and only if the self gives assent to a lekton specifying an end does activity directed to that end occur. All moral activity is the product of an assenting adult in private. So far the possibility of moral conflict or the difficulty of moral struggle does not emerge. Assent or dissent is, according to Stoics anyway, 'within our power'. Nothing can make you assent to the lekton 'This is the best thing to do'. If one assents, it is because one so judges. If one so judges, that is one's self at work. What is difficult about assent? And what is the literal content of the metaphors of inner strife?
Keith Campbell
A unitary personality can be subject to conflicting appeals. T h e self can simultaneously endorse, or almost endorse, lekta proposing incompatible courses of action. I n such cases we hesitate and are in doubt over what to do. Moral conflict is a special case of this, usually, a case where duty conflicts with our own pleasure, or ease, or gain. T h e process of making u p one's mind what to do corresponds for practical reason to theoretical reason's dilemma in making u p one's mind what is the case. \\:e can simultaneously endorse, or almost endorse, incompatible propositions, in situations where there is conflicting evidence. For both practical and theoretical reason there can be, simultaneously, considerations in favour of incompatible alternatives. \Ye use the same metaphor, of inclination, in both cases. l y e are inclined towards both courses of action, and inclined to believe both hypotheses. When the opposite attractions are approximately equal, we 'lean' equally in opposite directions. That is, it can be a difficult matter to settle which is the better side to endorse. Where the question is one concerning ourselves, coming to a judgment can be painful as well as difficult, marking a further correspondence between the theoretical and the practical cases. T h e pain and difficulty need not depend only on approximately equal strength of evidence on either side-think of the question: 'Was my beloved father really a protection racketeer and purveyor of contaminated foods for profit?' Here the difficulty lies in accepting the evidence, not in balancing it, IVe have motives to accept or reject evidence, other than its relevance to the question at hand. Similarly, we have motives to assent to courses of action other than their relation to virtue. T h e process of making u p one's mind has never, in the theoretical case, been thought to call for a division of the personality into two or more separate seats of reason and judgment. Even where the process of deciding is difficult and painful, this is because the one Reason confronts several equally compelling alternatives, and recognizes the claims of each. Among the considerations for or against various lekta are factors other than logical weight, such as desire, prejudice, pride, fear, a n d p a r t i p r i s . When these become determining factors, what we are dealing with are intellectual temptations, and corruptions of the intellect, which are to be resisted. Corruption and temptation are factors having a distorting effect on the processes of thinking. They can be present and effective in thinking on either theoretical or practical questions. Where they are effective, they issue in assent to the wrong lekta. In the moral sphere, the conflict between virtue and desire is, in literal terms, the impulse to assent to incompatible lekta on the basis of different sorts of favourable consideration.
T h e considerations which appeal to us fall into reasonably stable clusters, and our assenting responses take on recognizable patterns. These are our dispositions and habits, tendencies and cast of character. So that it is not just isolated events of conflict between different inclinations, but rather stable incompatibilities with which we must deal. Whole stable chunks of our personalities are at odds with one another. This is what gives the civil war model much of its appeal: the incompatible inclinations to assent to different lekta are not isolated and fleeting elements which could be thought of as external to the self, but must be included within the self's boundaries. Their stability and complexity encourages us to conceptualize them as quasi-personalities in their own right. We are of course conscious of the incompatibilities involved and can assess the sorts of action to which various sorts of consideration give rise. If some sorts are judged preferable to others, those aspects of the self which issue in the preferred sorts of action will be looked on with most favour. T h u s arises the tendency to identify one's 'true' self with the favoured aspects, excluding the rest as alien. T h e tendency is natural, and may sometimes be a salutary way of repudiating and so eliminating springs of vicious action, but it is, in strictness of language, an error. If the considerations which lead to assent to a non-virtuous course of behaviour did not belong to me, or the 'true' me, the true me would not be moved by them. That it is habits and dispositions with which we have to deal, as well as particular episodes, is true no less of theoretical reason and its vicissitudes than it is of practical reason and the carrying through of the well-lived life. T h e Stoics can appeal to the correspondences between theoretical and practical reason in their claim that the right conduct of life consists in the right management of the practical lekta, giving assent to, and hence acting in accordance with, the appropriate ones only. This account of the matter admits the possibility of struggle and difficulty, yet retains the unitary h.Zgernonikon. T h e Stoic notion that for the life of virtue, what is both necessary and sufficient is that we make u p our mimds to it, is a noble and salutary one. T o the problems with assent in this doctrine I will return. If moral temptation and conflict proves to be one species of difficulty in making up one's mind, what of moral growth? How is that possible if the self is an undivided unity?
Keith Campbell
Over time, the considerations which up till now have yielded one pattern of assents can cease to be decisive. When this occurs, the life in question takes on a new pattern. T h e new7 pattern can be one more nearly in conformity with virtue. So growth in virtue is possible. But if alteration in assent is all that is required, and assent is within our power, why should such a process be in any way slow, painful, or difficult? Where is the difficulty? Why is effort required?
Keith Campbell
T o improve our golf, we put ourselves to school. We go into training, we seek advice, we follow experts, we practise. We stick at it through disheartening episodes. Perhaps slowly and with difficulty, we improve. Here, in many ways, is a model for striving after virtue. Perhaps because neither Plato nor S t Paul played golf, we do not inherit an account of this matter which contrasts the fleshly passions of hook, slice, and complete miss with the rational spirituality of lowered head and smoothly circling arms. T h e very same agent, the self, is going wrong, recognizing this, and taking steps to amend. Amendment, in the case of golf, requires rearrangement of the order of importance of the various factors which combine in determining the outcome. As these factors are embedded in our habitual sense of bodily well-being when we swing, rearranging them does not come directly and easily from recognizing and assenting to the need for rearrangement. I n the case of virtue, re-ordering the factors determining assent is also required. Egocentricity, sloth, the over-emphasis which average sensual man gives to pleasure and pain, result in assents inimical to virtue. These factors impose a distortion on the process of deciding what to do, and contra Epictetus, this distortion does not evaporate the minute it is recognized. But there is no contradiction in the view that assent is both difficult and also in our power. 'One becomes virtuous through performing virtuous acts', said Chrysippus, following * h i s t otle. Golf coaches give the corresponding advice on improving one's game. Practice and perseverance can modify not just the more superficial matter of acknowledging that a proposed course of action would be an improvement, but even assent in its full depth, the assent which determines how we act.
T h e convalescent is not in the grip of any foreign power. But he lacks the vigour, endurance, toughness, and strength to carry out the full round of human activities. He is, in each of these various ways, weak. Weakness is one way in which assent can be rendered of no effect. With bodily weakness, there is no philosophical problem. T h e convalescent merely dramatizes our normal condition of limited power. In situations where what we have undertaken is beyond our power, it can be the literal and unproblematic truth that we really want to do X , really give our assent to the lekto~z : 'It is best that I do X', and yet cannot, and so do not, do it. This is particularly plain where we only discover in the attempt that the undertaking is indeed beyond us. But what about moral weakness (the problem of akrasia)?In the case of bodily weakness, the limbs are effector organs with their own limitations, of which convalescence reminds us. But in the moral case, what is difficult is not managing to do X , but rather making up my mind to do it (or, perhaps more commonly, making up my mind not to do it). When the question is one of embezzling the funds or adulterating the foodstuffs there is no bodily impediment. If my mind is made up one way or the other, the effect will indeed follow. No forces stronger than my own muscles drive me on into acts of injustice or folly. If I act in ways involving injustice or folly, it is because I have failed to decide not to. T h e acts did have my assent, despite anthing I may protest about not really wanting to do such things. So it seems that the model of the invalid is not an appropriate one for the person finding virtue difficult. But let us look into it a little further. In convalescence, we are enfeebled not just in limb and wind, but in determination too. In good health, we have some resources enabling us to make repeated attempts at something difficult or demanding. In convalescence, these are partly taken from us. We give up. We give in. This is not a matter of failure in effector organs. It is a failure at the level of giving assent, namely, acquiescence. We acquiesce in 'I do not bring about X', that is, we assent to it, but with reluctance, since we would prefer that X be the case. Since we are all, whatever our condition, constantly in this situation, perhaps convalescence is not such an unsuitable model after all. Much acquiescence is inevitable, and much more is blameless. But what of one who acquiesces in 'I remain an addict' or 'hly work is slovenly' although he recognizes the merit in the lekta 'I stop taking heroin' or 'I get up earlier'? Can he really plead that assent to the latter is beyond him? Is he literally unable to assent as he prefers? T h e Stoic answer at this point is: provided you are in good shape, you can always assent as virtue requires. But you may be in a feeble condition, vitiated by poor upbringing or deleterious habits. In which case your business is to get back into shape.
Keith Campbell
This may require exercises, extensive but less severe demands on capacities for constancy and self-denial, to build up strength and habituate the 'convalescent' to what are, at first, the difficult paths of virtue. T h e purpose of such a regime is to reduce the extent of acquiescence, to make the preference for the difficult alternative more constantly effective. T h e regime is well directed if the pattern of activity it promotes is in fact a closer approach to virtue. ( I t is quite possible, of course, to go into training in the interests of vice.) Exercise, practice, habit, graduated progress, are thus elements which emerge from both the image of the soul in training and the metaphor of convalescence. These models of moral progress prove to coincide.
monitoring provides continual opportunities to change direction. So long as we do not change, the path we pursue is one to which we assent. What is done out of habit is something for which we are held responsible, and rightly, for it was something to which we assented. One in the grip of what he himself considers to be a bad habit is in a state of repeated acquiescence, i.e. more or less reluctant assent, and recognizes the need to form other habits. Recognizing a habit as bad is, of course, often itself an important piece of progress. T h e Stoic thesis of a single unitary self, distinguished by reason, consciously managing disparate motivational forces, is not invalidated by the existence of habitual patterns of behaviour any more than by the existence of inconsistent purposes and desires.
Keith Campbell
There is also a middle state between deliberate decision and action on the one hand, and reflex or manipulation on the other. This is the realm of habit so ingrained as to be automatic. Alanipulative skills, those involved in driving or playing a musical instrument, for example, can be like this. T h e driver can be giving her mind to conversation, or navigation, or the traffic, the musician can be concentrating entirely on interpretation, and yet in either case manipulation of the controls need not falter. Performances calling for more sophisticated responses to information can also go, as it were, on to 'auto-pilot' and be left in the hands of centres lower on the mind's functional hierarchy than the fully conscious pinnacle. T h e cook can be simultaneously planning the order in which the meal is to be prepared, and executing a part of the planpeeling the potatoes-which can be done on auto-pilot even though it needs to make use of vision, memory, judgment, and dexterity. Performances which can be relegated to auto-pilot are performances of the one self for all that. For in the normal case they are at any time open to being taken over by consciously exercised agency. T h e h2gemonikon in a properly functioning adult person keeps the subsystems under review. Driver, musician, and cook should be aware, at every stage, of how far through the automatic performance they have got. Unexpected developments should at once return the performance to conscious control. We have many auto-pilots at many levels in our mental organization. They increase efficiency and flexibility, but they are not rival selves. Schizophrenia is an altogether different matter. So is the state of mind (or minds?) produced by separating the hemispheres of the brain. In a normal person there is one central final determiner of action, just one genuine agent. That there is only one centre of agency in a person follows from the unity of remembered, planned, and acknowledged action. There is, in the normal case, just one on-going life being led, one conductor of that life, which is responsible for, and takes responsibility for, all the person's agency. This is done full-heartedly where the agent is untroubled over the action; but responsibility is also accepted for those actions where acquiescence has been somehow wrung from the agent, and which are therefore done 'in bad conscience', as we say. Such actions are actions of the same agent as the acts of which the agent is proud. T h e concept of a human person is the concept of a single, continuing agent, responsible for all the past actions and future projects centring on a given human organism. T h e concept of a person is essentially the concept of a complex of elements dicharging mental functions and organized into an integrated hierarchy. There is a chief taskmaster or master programme, which censors, sets priorities, distributes
Keith Campbell
resources, and controls structures under it. There is only one pinnacle to the hierarchy. How completely the pinnacle determines the operations of sub-systems can vary. It increases as people mature, declines in the decay of age. It can be shocked or traumatized into malfunction. 'Person' is to this degree a normative concept, in that it signifies a fully functioning integrated agent. \There the integration is lacking what we have is not one human person. Now of course no philosophy, Stoical or otherwise, can guarantee that the integration of thoughts, ideas, memories and so forth into one coherent agent ~villbe attained or sustained. But where it is not yet attained, or where disintegration has occurred, what we have is not a human person, but something less. I conclude that contemporary mental pluralism is not incompatible with the thesis of the human h?,genzonikon. T h a t thesis, in turn, is required to validate the essential conceptions of moral philosophy: agency, aspiration, and virtue.
C'nicersit~~ of Sydney