Will and Empowerment

The thesis that has been proposed here--that the immediate object of Consciousness is always Will--might be construed as a perhaps insightful alternative to some traditional theories. But, it can also be taken as a potentially effective discovery. For, it reveals, as a stratum of even cognitive experience, a moment of setting oneself in motion. Thus, it exposes, in even a presumed passive relation, an active ground the discernment of which potentially transforms Experience. That transformation can occur when some physiological motion ensues upon the perception of some external object, i. e. in the context of a response to a stimulus, which, given the presumed passivity of perception, is never more than reactive. But, if every awareness of an outer object is a Consciousness of one's extending oneself towards it, e. g. looking at it, listening to it, etc., and if any subsequent motion is self-activated, then reactive behavior is transformed into active conduct. In other words, that Will is the immediate object of Consciousness is not only potentially insightful, but potentially empowering, as well.

Will and Perception

As the fundamental principles of Experience, Will and Consciousness combine to constitute it in an infinite variety of different ways, often with one or the other predominating, but not to the absolute exclusion of the subordinate factor. Now, Will is self-exteriorization, and Consciousness is self-interiorization. So, experiences that tend to extroversion are expressions of the predominance of Will, while Consciousness predominates in the more introspective experiences. Thus, Perception, i. e. the awareness of an external object, is, on this model, constituted by a predominance of Will over Consciousness, despite the efforts of many systems to gloss over the Motility entailed in it. By attempting to characterize Perception as a direct relation between incorporeal mind and the external world, they neglect to explain how an inward-directed process such as Consciousness becomes everted.

Will, Consciousness, Self-Consciousness

On the model of Experience being proposed here, the immediate object of Consciousness is always Will, i. e. what one has been doing. Hence, Consciousness is always, properly, Self-Consciousness, in terms of which standard concepts of 'consciousness' and of 'self-consciousness' often express greater fidelity to dogmatic commitments than to the features of Experience itself. 'Consciousness' is frequently conceived as a relation between mind and an external object, while 'self-consciousness' as relation of mind to itself, each thus abstracting from corporeality, thereby supporting, wittingly or otherwise, doctrines that assert the independent reality of an incorporeal realm of existence. In contrast, the object of Self-Consciousness, as conceived here, is always, irreducibly, one's walking, one's looking at, one's sitting, etc., all modes of Will, all entailing a physiological dimension.

Will and Sense Experience

As previously discussed, Will entails interaction with one's environment, i. e. the physiological motions that it initiates are not merely intra-organistic. For example, walking entails the ground's support for and the resistance to the exertions of one's legs. Similar examples of such Motility include the interaction between one's eyes and light waves, and that between one's ears and sound waves. In other words, sensory activity is a mode of Will, from which traditional concepts of passive 'sense experience' are abstractions.

Will and Environment

Physiological motions are often treated as merely intra-organistic, but, as Dewey argues, they are actually constituted by the interaction between an organism and its environment. For example, walking involves the resistance of the ground to the exertion of the legs, not merely the latter alone. Similarly, the effect of the air pressure that constantly surrounds one's body tends to be ignored until a heavy wind makes even lifting one's arm difficult. In other words, Will, the setting oneself in motion, is both a venture into Exteriority and an engagement with Alteriority. So, Levinas fails to recognize that one's engagement with another person is only a special case of Will-Environment interaction in general.

Will, Reasoning , Animality

On the model of human Experience presented here, Will is the process of setting oneself in motion, into which Reasoning effects a type of connectivity. Now, in the absence of any direct access, the question of whether or not non-human animals are capable of Will and/or of Reasoning is indeterminable, i. e. the abundant empirical evidence of intelligent animal behavior is always susceptible to a reduction to mechanistic explanation. Likewise, both the traditional thesis that Rationality is the defining characteristic of the specifically human animal, and its modification, that humans possess greater Rationality than do other animals, are sheerly speculative. However, humans do evince a greater diversity of motions, as well as a greater diversity of organized motions, than do other animals, from which more comprehensive Reasoning, as the organizer of those motions, can be at least inferred, even if a capacity to perform abstract calculations cannot be. So, even without the speculation that has been its traditional support, there remains sound grounds for the thesis that humanity is a higher species than other fauna.

Will and Reasoning

A stream of utterances can be more or less coherent. In some cases, coherence is a function of the meanings of a sequence of utterances, but in other cases, e. g. rhyming, it is not. 'Reasoning' can be defined as a sequence of utterances the coherence of which is determined by certain rules governing sequences of utterances. Now, uttering is a mode of Motility, and, therefore, of Will. Hence, Reasoning can be defined as a characteristic of Will. Of course, an influential tradition argues that the rules of Reasoning are independent of utterances, and, likewise, that Reason exists even where there are no utterances. Instead, according to that tradition, Reasoning is a process of unpacking what already implicitly exists, with respect to which a novel utterance is extrinsic. However, that interpretation leaves unexamined the meaning of 'implicit', likely because it recognizes the difficulty in proving, without making it explicit, that something implicitly exists. In other words, that interpretation has difficulty denying that even 'pure' Reasoning does not consist in the issuance of a new proposition. Until it surmounts that difficulty, that interpretation remains vulnerable to the counter-thesis that Reasoning is primarily the process of generating new utterances, i. e. is fundamentally a characteristic of Will.