The Price Of Intention

"Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense." —Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Culture and Value" p.59.

I am sure I have often said and have certainly often heard others say: "I didn't realise until afterwards, what I was trying to do." This post is an attempt to pay close attention to the nonsense buried in this utterance and to tentatively suggest that the associated notion of unconscious striving — of unconscious desire even — is incoherent. It may already be clear that such a view runs contrary to one or two foundational ideas within psychoanalysis, some of which continue to garner significant recognition within the arts. If we shouldn't be afraid of talking nonsense, then we probably shouldn't be afraid of identifying nonsense either.

To realise something after the fact is to have learned something new; to have become aware of something that was previously unclear or inaccessible. The sentence "I didn't realise until afterwards, what I was trying to do." is commonly used as an acknowledgement that our goals are often vague, fragmentary or imprecise and only through the gradual, or sometimes sudden, accumulation of understanding do we become capable of clearly articulating this more developed knowledge. But whilst our goals can be sketchy, a vague intention is not an intention for vague outcome. A sketchy idea for a diagram is rarely a desire for a sketchy diagram.

There is nothing confused or paradoxical about such thoughts. Where the confusion arises is in the suggestion that some part of us, some inner and inaccessible intelligence, seeks to express itself through our actions; that an alleged unconscious or subconscious self is trying to tell us things that may only dawn upon our conscious awareness later. Certainly there are times when we recognise patterns or significances in our past actions. But is this sufficient grounds for the supposition that we are host to unconscious intentions that are striving to articulate themselves? I hope to show that it is not.

Trying, striving, endeavouring, pursuing, envisaging, seeking, aiming etc. are intentional goal orientated behaviours. Without goals there can be no striving  because there can be nothing to strive towards. If we were never capable of communicating an outcome of our actions in any shape or form, then we could not be said to try to achieve something either. "All 'willing' is willing something," as the neurologist Oliver Sacks puts it.

If someone asks us what we are doing and we have no answer, then we cannot be said to be acting purposefully. It is for this reason that goals are fundamentally reliant upon our powers of communication; upon our ability to offer some sort of token, word or gesture that would be acceptable to others as a representation of our intention.

In a 2006 paper, Jack Glaser and John Kihlstrom argue that: "Unconscious Volition Is Not an Oxymoron." They write:

...the unconscious, in addition to being a passive categorizer, evaluator, and semantic processor, has processing goals (for example, accuracy, egalitarianism) of its own, can be vigilant for threats to the attainment of these goals, and will proactively compensate for such threats.

Clearly Glaser and Kihlstrom recognise that volition demands goals, but it is extraordinary that they are prepared to suggest that unconscious behaviour is fundamentally intentional: that it has ulterior motives, even if these are as seemingly benign and basic as accuracy and egalitarianism etc. In its most extreme form, such a view opens the door to any number of unwitting intentions and renders us as nothing more than witnesses to motives beyond our control or ken.

If goals can be pursued without our conscious awareness or control, then we are puppets in a theatre not of our own making, and all we can do is observe our actions like passive audience members in the hope of gleaning some comprehension of the hidden goals that actually drive us. Consciousness never looked more wretched.

The alternative is to reject the notion of unconscious volition altogether and to seek a less extravagant explanation.

When in 1974 Oliver Sacks broke his leg whilst fleeing from a bull, the trauma of the injury left him with a temporary inability to properly sense or move his leg. In essence the episode had rid him of all knowhow in the use of his leg. A closely related condition is sometimes experienced by people who become temporarily blind in response to the traumatic loss of a loved one or some other major upset. These sorts of psychological responses to trauma are known as "Conversion Disorders" and it is interesting to note that the term was first coined by Freud as an alternative to "hysteria" or "hysterical blindness."

In a paper on the subject of conversion disorders, Harvey et al. (2006) point out that: "One difficulty facing research in this field is the complexity of the conceptual issues and variable ways in which terminology has been used." The authors helpfully include a table of definitions and explanations of key terminology and they also explicitly state that conversion disorders are “not intentionally produced” and cannot be feigned. It should be made clear that they do not make any suggestion that conversion disorders are the result of unconscious intention, striving, trying etc.

When overtired drivers are overcome by sleep, their unconscious is not striving to take control. If you attempt to kill yourself by holding your breath, it is not inner volition that will rob you of consciousness before the job is done. These are simply highly evolved autonomic responses that have no goals and do not have to strive, seek or endeavour to impose themselves. They have no more volition than the iris of the eye. No doubt conversion disorders are similarly rooted in complex autonomic processes.

Can we aim for one thing only to find that we were actually aiming for something else? If goals are necessarily communicable, then it follows that we cannot be oblivious of those we are pursuing. We can certainly aim for inappropriate goals or be confused, uncertain or vague about our goals, as I have already mentioned. But I don't think we can be mistaken that the thing we are intent upon is actually the thing we are intent upon. That would come at an extremely high price; the price of intention itself.

Indivisible Atoms of Intention

We are purposeful creatures. That would seem to be beyond serious doubt. Aside from the occasional twitch, sneeze, hiccup, yawn, or blush—and a wide range of autonomic processes—our behaviour is not merely efficacious but directed. It consists of actions.

But what makes an action intentional? A common assumption is that intention consists in some prior inner event: a thought, a decision, or a particular configuration of neural activity that initiates what follows. We have reason to resist that assumption.

Consider a familiar case. When you rose from your bed this morning, you did so intentionally. But it would be a mistake to suppose that your intention consisted in a discrete episode in your brain—a nascent act that then caused your body to move. Certainly there was neural activity, but there is no need to treat it as an inner “intender” issuing commands. There is no agent within the brain pulling the strings.

Instead, intention is better understood as a feature of the organism as it is situated in its world—as a way it is poised to engage with its circumstances. It concerns how you are constituted: your situated dispositions to respond to particular situations, prompts, and possibilities in certain ways. When you get out of bed, you act as the kind of creature you are, in the situation you are in: one whose habits, sensitivities, and history incline it toward that behaviour. This is what we register when we say that someone “acts in character.”

Put this way, intentional action can begin to look merely habitual. But habits need not be blind. What matters is not whether an action is preceded by explicit thought, but whether it belongs to an organised field of responsiveness—one that is sensitive to circumstances, open to adjustment, and able, in the right conditions, to be made explicit.

Here a further feature becomes important: our readiness to communicate what we are doing. If I were to interrupt you and ask what you are doing, you would almost certainly have something to say. You are not covertly narrating your life in advance; rather, you are disposed to communicate your activity when prompted, within practices where such communication has a place.

This readiness is not merely evidence of intention, though it is that. It is also part of what it is to act intentionally. To act intentionally is, in part, to be the sort of creature whose engagements with the world belong to organised patterns of responsiveness—patterns that sustain, and sometimes give rise to, communication, though not always.

This cannot depend on actual performance. One might be gagged, interrupted, or otherwise unable to respond, and yet still act intentionally. What matters is not the act of communication itself, but the underlying preparedness: a structured sensitivity to situations and to others that would ordinarily enable it.

Seen in this light, more explicit forms of deliberation—imagining outcomes, weighing reasons, anticipating consequences—are not more intentional than ordinary, habitual actions. They are more elaborate expressions of the same underlying capacities. Some actions involve explicit communication; others unfold through gesture, movement, or skilled response. All belong to a continuum shaped by the ways in which an organism is situated and able to respond.

This perspective also raises a further question. What of animals? When a dog chases a squirrel, is it acting intentionally? It would be too strong to deny this. Dogs exhibit patterns of behaviour that we readily take to be directed toward outcomes, and they respond to their surroundings in flexible and intelligible ways. Their behaviour expresses urgency, pursuit, and excitement in forms we recognise.

Part of what is at work here is that we find it easier to attribute intention where there are signs of responsiveness that resemble communication, broadly understood. We are more confident in attributing intention to a dog than to simpler organisms, not because the behaviour is more complex in a purely causal sense, but because it is more evidently embedded in patterns of signalling, coordination, and response.

Wittgenstein draws attention to a related shift in perspective: “We say: ‘The cock calls the hens by crowing’ … Isn’t the aspect quite altered if we imagine the crowing to set the hens in motion by some kind of physical causation?” What changes here is not the observable behaviour, but how we are prepared to situate it. In one case, it belongs to a pattern of interaction; in the other, it is reduced to a mechanism. The difference lies not in the presence of some hidden ingredient, but in whether the behaviour is taken as part of a responsive exchange.

A similar sensitivity can be seen within our own species. Doubts about intention are sometimes expressed—or allowances made—in cases where communicative responsiveness is diminished or unfamiliar: in descriptions of so-called feral humans, or in early encounters between cultures whose forms of expression were not yet mutually intelligible. In such cases, it is not simply behaviour that is in question, but whether it can be situated within a shared field of response and recognition. Where that field is thin or disrupted, our confidence in attributing intention can falter.

What differs across these cases is not the presence or absence of intention as an inner state, but the richness and accessibility of the situations in which behaviour can be understood. Human beings possess highly developed practices for making activity explicit—for describing, explaining, and evaluating what they are doing. This does not create intention, but it deepens and refines it, situating action within more complex networks of possibility and response.

If this is right, then we should be cautious about locating intention in inner mechanisms, whether neural or otherwise. Communication, in its various forms, is not the output of a hidden agent, but an expression of organised engagement with the world. Agency is not something contained within us as a part; it is a feature of us as situated organisms.

There has, in other words, to be a cutoff. Intention does not extend indefinitely inward to organs, cells, or atoms. But neither is it located in some inner component. It belongs at the level of the organism as it is situated in its world—the level at which a living being can act, respond, and, in its various ways, make sense of what it is doing.

Animal Minds?

The American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, once wrote "The ancestor of every action is a thought." Superficially this idea seems plausible enough, but on closer examination it turns out to conceal a vicious paradox. If every purposeful action necessitated a prior thought, then every act of thinking – every thought – would itself have to be initiated by a further motivating thought. This inextinguishable spiral of antecedent thoughts is sometimes known as a “Rylean regress,” named after the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle who took the view that “intelligent practice is not a step-child of theory.”

At the core of Ryle’s philosophy was the conviction that intelligent behaviours are not the result of practical knowledge but are instead instances of practical knowledge. Confusion arises because we tend to conceive of knowledge as an independent "thing" that leads to, results in or produces actions. Ryle exposed the “category mistake” implicit in this reified conception. Knowledge for Ryle is neither an entity nor a neurological region that we can point to on a fMRI scan – it is a repertoire of aptitudes, skills and dispositions. For Ryle, skillful action is a form of thinking. And if thought and action are indivisible in this way, then there need be no prior “thought processes” driving intelligent behaviour. Actions are already integrated processes of intelligent engagement with the world.

So, do animals think before they act? A Rylean analysis would suggest not. But this is not to support the view that only language users are capable of contemplating the future or of making plans. Many plans are diagrammatic objects after all. Nonetheless what it does strongly suggest is that the skills involved in planning and other sophisticated forms of future directed activity, rely upon techniques that must be learned and practiced through trial and error. In the human case this is achieved through publicly negotiated forms of communication, both verbal and nonverbal. Without such public exchanges it is extremely doubtful that any creature could ever develop the capacity to ponder with any degree of complexity or proficiency. Skills are demonstrated and tested in the unforgiving crucible of actuality, not in the cosseted ether of thought or imagination.