Source
Velleman (2002), “Identification and Identity”, LIT-292, read in full in NOTE-268. Pages are Self to Self (2006). All claims about Frankfurt are as Velleman reports them, with his pinpoint citations.
What was actually shown
The target (pp. 331–338). On Frankfurt’s late view, “a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from the essential character of his will” (NVL 132). The essence is a set of volitional necessities, willing inabilities endorsed at every higher order, which define the person, so he “could not alter them while remaining the same person” (ANL 138). Hence the self must be wholehearted, with a rival desire “extruded entirely as an outlaw” (IWWCA 170). Velleman shows this yokes autonomy to a Parfitian, un-Lockean account of survival.
The critique.
- Authenticity, not autonomy (p. 338). Winnicott’s False Self is moved by neither his simulated nor his essential motives, yet “his problem is one of excess: he is overly self-controlled”. He is inauthentic but all too autonomous.
- No motivational essence (pp. 338–341). If Aulis ended Agamemnon, “we wouldn’t have the concept of a sequel at all”. Frankfurt “simply asserts” that abandoning a commitment ends a person, and the appeal of the claim may be wishful.
- Wholeheartedness as defence (pp. 341–347). The Rat Man was made ill not by ambivalence toward his father but by repressing the hatred as “entirely foreign and repugnant to him”. So he “suffered, not from the disease of ambivalence, but from something like Frankfurt’s cure”.
- Two senses of identification (pp. 347–353). Ordinary identification is imaginative and aimed mostly at other people. Read that way, identifying with one of one’s own motives is Sartrean bad faith. Velleman says this is how readers may hear Frankfurt, not what Frankfurt meant.
The positive sketch (pp. 354–360). “Self” expresses reflexivity and refers to no single entity across contexts. In identity contexts one’s past and future selves are those one can pick out first-personally by memory and anticipation. In self-regard contexts, cares can be essential to the self-conception: losing them means not knowing for a while who one is, not ceasing to be (p. 356). In autonomy contexts, the part one cannot regard from outside, the understanding, is one’s essential self only aspectually. “I agree with Frankfurt that autonomous action is guided by a part of us with which we cannot help identifying; I disagree mainly with his claim that our identifying with a part of ourselves incorporates it into something called the self” (p. 360).
What could have come out otherwise: Frankfurt’s texts could have offered an example of a person ended by losing a care. Velleman says they offer none, and treats the Agamemnon passage as the attempt.
What this does not say
- That Frankfurt’s late view is false. The genealogical argument shows only that its appeal could be wishful or defensive. Velleman frames it as a “worry” (p. 341).
- That Velleman’s own account of autonomy is established. He says “Expounding my own views is not the purpose of this essay” (p. 354), and how the understanding motivates is “beyond the scope” (p. 359). His view of personal identity is assumed from “Self to Self”.
- That the Rat Man argument is independent of Freud. It depends on Freud’s case interpretation and on a folk premise that mixed emotions must “mingle” to be digested (p. 346).
- Anything about Frankfurt’s 1971 hierarchy. The early theory gets one paragraph and is deferred to “What Happens When Someone Acts?” (LIT-295). The regress is flagged only in a footnote (n. 10).
- That Frankfurt “simply asserts”. This is a claim about his whole corpus that the record cannot check from here.
- That autonomy and authenticity always come apart. The Winnicott case may show only that they can diverge in pathology.
Connections
- THEORY-029 is the regress against the 1971 hierarchy, from Velleman’s 1992 paper (LIT-295) and others. This account targets the later view that answered it with volitional necessity, and keeps the separation the regress account does not draw: between the self of governance and the self of persistence.
- THEORY-120 states Frankfurt’s identification account of freedom and responsibility. This account accepts its guiding insight, that autonomy rests on a capacity to reflect on and feel a special relation to parts of oneself, and rejects reading identification as self-constitution.
- THEORY-054 grades autonomy by integration with one’s other values. On this account integration achieved by extrusion would be defensive, not integration.
- THEORY-546 (psychological continuity) and THEORY-464 (Dufner on what relation the ethical questions turn on) are the identity side that Velleman separates from governance.
- QUESTION-011 asks what makes a will-organization the agent’s own rather than merely effective within it. This account says that the answer need not be what makes the agent persist.