Now consider a case in which we do take up an observant attitude
towards a voluntary action, I mean the very instructive case of
trying to draw a square with its diagonals by placing a mirror on
your drawing paper and directing your hand by what you see by looking at
it in the mirror.
And here one is inclined to say that our real actions, the
ones to which volition immediately applies ||
for which volition is immediately responsible,
are not the movements of our hand but something further back, say, the
actions of our muscles.
We are inclined to compare the case with this:
Imagine we had a series of levers before us, through which, by a
hidden mechanism, we could direct a pencil drawing on a sheet of
paper.
We might then be in doubt which levers to pull in order to get the
desired movement of the pencil; and we could say that we
deliberately pulled this particular lever, although we
didn't deliberately produce the wrong result that we
thereby produced.
But this comparison, though it easily suggests itself, is very
misleading.
For in the case of the levers which we saw before us, there was
such a thing as deciding which one we were going to pull before pulling
it.
But does our volition, as it were, play on a keyboard of muscles,
choosing which one it was going to use next? ‒ ‒
For some actions which we call deliberate it is characteristic that we,
in some sense, “know what we are going to do” before we
do it.
In this sense we say that we know what object we are going to point to,
and what we might call “the act of knowing” might
consist in looking at the object before we point to it or in describing
its position by words or
120.
pictures.
Now we could describe our drawing the square through the mirror by
saying that our acts were deliberate as far as their motor aspect is
concerned but not as far as their visual aspect is concerned.
This could || would, e.g., be
demonstrated by our ability to repeat a movement of the hand which
had produced a wrong result, on being told to do so.
But it would obviously be absurd to say that this motor character of
voluntary motion consisted in our knowing beforehand what we were going
to do, as though we had had a picture of the kinaesthetic sensation
before our mind and decided to bring about this sensation.
Remember the experiment (?)
p. 62; if here, instead of pointing
from a distance to the finger which you order the subject to move, you
touch that finger, the subject will always move it without the slightest
difficulty.
And here it is tempting to say, “Of course I can
move it now, because now I know which finger it is
I'm asked to move.”
This makes it appear as though I had now shown you which muscle to
contract in order to bring about the desired result.
The word “of course” makes it appear as though by
touching your finger I had given you an item of information telling you
what to do.
(As though normally when you tell a man to move
such-and-such a finger he could follow your order because he knew
how to bring the movement about.) |
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