nucleation

LIT-575: Identification and Wholeheartedness

6 min read

Properties3
StatusUnavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge's chapter records and the record's own second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found: the chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core in both the Schoeman volume and the 1988 collection, Unpaywall lists no open copy, and the copies a web search turns up are uploads to academia.edu and lecture notes about the essay, not the essay. A human reader with library access to either volume (pp. 27–45 of the first, pp. 159–176 of the second) can read it in an hour; that reading would move this to Active and is the first-hand text THEORY-029 needs for its middle case.
Version2
Tagsself-governance, agency, personhood

Graph View

Harry G. Frankfurt, “Identification and Wholeheartedness”, in Ferdinand Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–45 (chapter 2) — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511625411.002. Reprinted as chapter 12 of Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 159–176 (DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511818172.013), and in John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (eds.), Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 170–187 (Crossref DOI 10.7591/9781501721564-007).

The date. The brief, and most of the literature, dates the essay 1987. Cambridge’s own chapter page gives the Schoeman volume a “Print publication year: 1988”, and Crossref gives it a full date of 29 January 1988; the 1988 collection follows on 27 May 1988. I did not see the volume’s copyright page, which is where a 1987 date would come from. published: carries the earliest full date a source gives, 1988-01-29, as the record’s rule asks; “1987” in other readings is the same first printing, not a different text. Both publications are confirmed; the Schoeman volume is the first.

Key takeaways

Registered from the record’s second-hand readings, not a reading of the essay. Each point says who reports it.

  • The reply to the regress. Dryden’s IEP entry (LIT-297, NOTE-266) reports, with page numbers in the 1988 reprint, that this essay ends the series of higher-order attitudes with a decisive commitment made “without reservation”, where the agent feels no reason to go on deliberating (pp. 168–169); that stopping there is “hardly arbitrary”, since possible error is a feature of all deliberation; that in deciding a person seeks “to overcome or to supersede a condition of inner division and to make himself into an integrated whole” (p. 174); and that the decision sets “a constraint by which other preferences and decisions are to be guided” (p. 175).
  • Wholeheartedness is separation, not peace. Velleman’s “Identification and Identity” (LIT-292, NOTE-268) quotes the essay’s image of a decisive identification as a “radical separation of the competing desires”, the loser “extruded entirely as an outlaw” (p. 170), and cites p. 168 for the image of a commitment that resounds “through higher and higher levels” of the hierarchy.
  • Who reads it, and how little. Velleman’s “What Happens When Someone Acts?” (LIT-295, NOTE-265) lists the essay but takes Frankfurt’s decisive-commitment view from a 1976 footnote (IWWCA p. 68 n. 3), not from here. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, NOTE-270) date wholeheartedness to 1994, where the IEP dates it to this essay. Buss and Westlund (LIT-296, NOTE-267) list it and never cite it.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, in the batch on authenticity and self-governance. It is philosophy of agency with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Wholeheartedness” found nothing.

Deferred because it was not read. Five readings in the record cite it, and none of them reads it closely, so this entry gathers what they say rather than reconstructing the essay from them.

How it bears on THEORY-029. That account holds that no higher-order attitude makes a motive one’s own by its order alone: any stopping point specified without the agent’s participation can be disowned, and any specified to include it begs the question. Its middle case is Frankfurt’s decisive commitment, which Velleman (LIT-295, pp. 113–114) defeats with an unwitting decision to end a friendship. This essay is the text that stopping point comes from, and the record has never checked the case against it:

  • Velleman argued against the 1976 footnote, where a decision is said to be immune to externality because decisions “do not seem to be susceptible both to internality and to externality”. This essay, as the IEP reports it, adds conditions the footnote lacks: the commitment is made “without reservation”, and the agent sees no reason to deliberate further. An unwitting decision plausibly fails both conditions, so the counterexample may not touch the 1987 view.
  • If it does not, the 1987 view sits on THEORY-029’s other horn. Velleman already says (n. 35) that restricting decisive commitment to commitments the agent actively makes would make the answer “uninformative”. “Without reservation” and “no reason to continue deliberating” are conditions on the agent’s own stance, so they look like that restriction. Whether they can be stated without presupposing the agent’s participation is exactly what THEORY-029 turns on, and only the essay can settle it.
  • The essay is also where, by the IEP’s report, Frankfurt answers the regress itself (“hardly arbitrary”). THEORY-029 says the 2004 lectures (LIT-293) never address the regress; this essay is the one that does. THEORY-029’s promote_when lists the 1992 and 1994 replies and Bratman’s policies but not this essay, though it is the earliest of Frankfurt’s replies and the one the middle case is about. That omission is worth repairing in THEORY-029.

How it bears on the SDT theories. The integration Frankfurt seeks here, a decision that makes the person “an integrated whole” (p. 174, as reported), is all-or-nothing and reached by extruding the rival desire. THEORY-054 holds that autonomy is integration graded by congruence with one’s other values and needs (Ryan & Deci, LIT-559). An extruded desire that still moves the person is close to what SDT calls an introject, “within the person, but still relatively external to the self” (Deci & Ryan, LIT-558, p. 235, as THEORY-054 quotes it). Velleman (LIT-292) argues from the Rat Man case that extrusion is a defence, not health. So the two accounts give opposite verdicts on the same agent: Frankfurt counts the decisively divided agent as wholehearted, and SDT counts the extruded desire as a failure of integration. Reading the essay would show whether Frankfurt’s wholeheartedness requires the rival desire to stop operating.

Its successors in the record. Frankfurt’s Tanner Lectures (LIT-293, NOTE-264) are his late statement of wholeheartedness, now as love whose lovers are stipulated never to be ambivalent. Bratman’s “Three Theories of Self-Governance” (LIT-596), filed with this, revisits the Frankfurt–Watson exchange, and is filed Deferred too.

Priority for a reading: high. It is the cheapest first-hand reading that would move THEORY-029, and it settles two of the record’s open disputes about Frankfurt’s dates: whether wholeheartedness is 1987 or 1994, and whether the “unopposed volition plus settled judgment” formulation that NOTE-270 asks about is Frankfurt’s wording.

Access when seeded:

  • Crossref records for both chapters (titles, pages, ISBNs, dates). The Schoeman chapter: pp. 27–45, ISBNs 9780521327206, 9780521339513, 9780511625411. The IWWCA chapter: pp. 159–176.
  • Cambridge Core chapter pages for both, which show only the opening paragraph as a summary (“The phrase ‘the mind–body problem’ is so crisp…”) and require purchase or institutional access.
  • Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar: no open-access location.

Backlinks