Trying to decide if they should / leave the things that keep them crying

A friend was asking me awhile back about the phenomenology of depression. She had difficulty understanding what it could be like, e.g., to feel so hopeless about one's existence that fleeing from consciousness (through sleep or psychotropics) seems the only feasible path, despite full awareness of how it only makes the next day worse. It's not something easily explained; the best I could do, really, was point her to this article in Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace's struggle with depression and Wallace's own story "The Depressed Person."

It took me awhile to understand my own reactions to that story. When I first read it, years ago, I hated it--it inspired a rage in me usually reserved for news of contemporary politics or people being wrong on the Internet. A little too close to home, clearly; I couldn't distance myself enough to appreciate it. I didn't read it again until recently, when I heard Wallace had hanged himself; the news put the story in a rather different light.

Reading it a second time was still painful; I had to put it aside more than once. But what makes it so hard to read is precisely what makes it brilliant, at least in my mind: reading the story makes you hate the pseudonarrator as much as she hates herself, for the same reasons she hates herself. And as you come to despise her in just the way she feels she deserves, her pathetic and contemptible behavior becomes understandable--without thereby becoming any less contemptible.

Wallace explains her suffering by making the reader part of it--by making the reader simultaneously despise the depressed person, understand her to share that loathing, and yet hate her still more for inflicting her self-obsessed bathos on others (a hatred which she, of course, also shares): an unending spiral of contempt and self-aware, self-destructive action. It's a really neat trick.

Of course, this could simply be my own idiosyncratic reaction. I don't think of myself as a particularly sophisticated reader, and I've never taken any classes in literary interpretation. But it works for me, and it makes me appreciate the story quite a bit. Wallace certainly captures the tragic reflexivity of depression, the way it feeds off of self-awareness and the need to see oneself as a responsible agent, more vividly than my own bloodless philosophical musings are able to.

I'll love you in the morning / when you're still hungover

In the cold light of day, I can see the draft syllabus I posted yesterday has quite a lot of new stuff, and not very much in the way of classic articles / books. Too much, probably: one thing a student would completely miss from this syllabus is any serious engagement with the history of constitutional thought. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that I think, especially with graduate students and a broad topic like this, there's value in diving right into current controversies and contemporary statements of the issues. You lose some sense of the history, yes, but you also get up-to-date bibliographies and a better feel for how the problem is currently framed. Basically: it's not an history of political thought class, and if you want that thing, I'm not the guy for you.

But there's also a strong bias in the syllabus for on-line articles. Part of this can be defended on ideological/altruistic lines: I'm bothered by the course-pack licensing-fee racket. But it's more than that. As someone who is both lazy and only started getting into this stuff in the last, oh, five years or so, my own knowledge is heavily channeled towards on-line sources: journals my institution only has in print almost don't exist for me. This cuts the other way, too--though Solum's Legal Theory blog, I end up reading a lot of articles that would never get on my radar screen otherwise, including a number of bad ones.

Anyhow. It's a real issue.

Agency, akrasia, and Velleman

I've been reading a bit about practical rationality and reasons for action, and find David Velleman's theory quite interesting (see here, esp. chapter 3). But here's something curious: apparently both Velleman and I take it to be an advantage of his theory that it provides a plausible explanation for akrasia (weakness of will)--and yet we seem to have diametrically opposed beliefs about what exactly this explanation is.

Now, this probably just means that I've misunderstood his view, but, A, I find my interpretation independently interesting, and B, this is my blog, so there.

So. Briefly, Velleman's view of agency is that it consists in being guided by a motivation towards self-understanding, a motive that is constitutive of agency and hence inescapable. He likens it, persuasively, to a particular sort of improv: improvising the role of oneself, where a bad performance, an inauthentic performance, is one that fails to make sense. (Making sense is here cashed out in either a folk-psychologic or narrative sense.)

Now, he's not claiming that this motive dominates all others, merely that it exists and is an essential aspect of agency itself, and hence guides the formation and regulation of our other motivations. It plays the functional role of selfhood, basically.

How does this explain akrasia? Well, it seems like--at least in an earlier work--he sees the virtue of his explanation to lie in demonstrating the genuine agency of the akratic actor. He seems to be saying that akratic actions are those in which either the motive of self-understanding correctly overrides mistaken beliefs about what reasons there are, or the proper weighting of them, or correctly refrains from action, despite being aware of the right thing to do, because the awareness doesn't here constitute a full grasping of how the action fits into the agent's self-narrative.

My objection to this story, put simply, is that it makes akrasia sound okay. But it's not okay; it's awful--and if there's one thing I'm intimately familiar with, it's the phenomenology of akrasia. Under this reading, it seems like what's gone wrong isn't the "will" at all, which is doing fine; it's rather that the belief subsystem hasn't quite caught up to it. And this seems to utterly miss what's so disturbing about the phenomenon.

When I first read Ch. 3 of his manuscript, though, I felt it invited a dramatically different interpretation, one much more attuned to its tragic aspect. On this reading, is not that what the motive of self-understanding grasps has come apart from what the agent believes to be justified, or even to make the most sense. On the contrary--the problem is that the motive of self-understanding, while active, is simply too weak to enforce a coherent narrative. The akratic action may be undertaken while under the influence of that motive while remaining out of step with its demands. As a result the agent feels torn between his self-understanding as someone whose actions are under conscious control and his self-understanding as someone who doesn't do whatever it is he just, akratically, did.

On this interpretation, akrasia is worse that mere non-agency; it's an active subversion of agency, because it engages with the agent's self-understanding while undermining the narrative whose construction is its entire aim.

(I think a similar analysis helps illuminate one aspect of what's so awful about extreme depression.)