Unlike simple impulses or fleeting passions, Green’s concept of desire is rooted in self-conscious activity. A true desire, for Green, is not just a passing urge but a solicitation with which we identify and consciously adopt. This nuanced approach to human motivation challenges the mechanical models of Hume and aligns with the moral psychology of Idealism.
In this article, we will unpack Green’s philosophy of solicitation, desire, volition, and the true good—exploring how self-consciousness shapes morality, freedom, and fulfillment.
Understanding T.H. Green’s Conception of Desire
My true good consists in the realization of my true or real desires—but what are true or real desires? Let us start by considering Green’s conception of desire.
He thinks that it is to be understood as an action of the self rather than a passion which the self merely receives or undergoes. Passions or impulses I can adopt, reject, or for the moment ignore. Desire in the full sense, however, is not just impulse or passion, or in Green’s good word, mere ‘solicitation’ an invitation that I passively encounter or experience. It is a ‘solicitation’ with which I identify; as one might say, I make it mine.
For Green, this action of identifying oneself with a solicitation consists in resolving to satisfy it:
though we cannot fix the usage of words, it is clear that the important real distinction is that between the direction of the self-conscious self to the realisation of an object, its identification of itself with that object, on the one side and, on the other side, the mere solicitations of which a man is conscious, but with none of which he so identifies himself as to make the soliciting object his object the object of his self-seeking or to direct himself to its realisation.
This, as Sidgwick noted, appears to conflate desire and volition. It is one thing to desire something, it is another thing to resolve to satisfy that desire even by way of a conditional decision to satisfy it if an appropriate occasion turns up. But, according to Green:
in the act of will man does not cease to desire. Rather he, the man, for the first, time desires, having not done so while divided between the conflicting influences. His willing is a desire in which the man enacts himself, as distinct from one which acts upon him. Whether its object the object to which the moral action is directed—be the attainment of revenge, or the satisfaction of a bodily want, or the fulfillment of g call of duty, it has equally this characteristic. The object is one which for the time being the man identifies with himself, so that in being determined by it he is consciously determined by himself.
The disagreement may seem a verbal dispute about the use of the word ‘desire’. Both Sidgwick and Green consider choice, volition, resolution, the adoption of an end or a policy as something to pursue, as actions of the will imputable to the self. Green sets this conception of choice as self-activity against a mechanical (and he says Humean’) desire aversion model which he rejects: on this model, behavior flows from the overall balance, or vector sum, of desire, while the self seems to drop out of the picture other than as a locus of passions and impressions.
Sidgwick agrees with Green. Equally, both recognize that passion—the passive experience of solicitation or inclination—has a role in motivation. So far, so good. For ethical purposes we need to recognize (whatever more theoretical account we may want to give of it) an imputable activity of choosing whether or not to act on a solicitation, which may or may not be the one that is antecedently the strongest. And Sidgwick’s way of making this distinction does seem closer to common usage.
Still, how Green uses the word ‘desire’ is not just a matter of terminology. For he holds that one’s good is the realization of one’s desires. I interpret this to mean the satisfaction of those solicitations with which I identify. Furthermore, I think there is force in Green’s distinction between mere ‘solicitation’ and desire. In fact we need a three-way, not a two-way, distinction between
- Solicitation,
- Desire (solicitation with which one identifies, chooses to take into account), and
- Decision or resolution to satisfy the desire.
This is to depart from Green’s account, but not, I think, essentially. For the important thing for Green is not so much identifying will and desire as showing them to be equally activity of one and the same unified self.
It is part of the Idealist story, as set out, for example, by Green in Prolegomena 118—29, that the self is active in shaping and particularizing the raw material of affect. Desire, understood in these terms, arises whenever a solicitation is, we can say, fixed and taken up by the self. Even at the level of ‘solicitation’, desire presents its object as desirable, as something that it would be non-instrumentally reasonable to pursue. It solicits endorsement.
To ‘identify’ with the solicitation is then to take up or accept that presentation—it is to acknowledge realization of the object as a non-instrumental reason for action. Acknowledging it in this way is recognizing it as an apt candidate for consideration in one’s decisions. This does not mean that one has decided to act on it, or even that one decides to consider it actively in a particular episode of decision making that one is engaged in.
Reading the travel pages, for example, I feel an impulse to visit Central Asia. Reading further, I fix the object: I come to feel that Bukhara would be the place to go. I recognize this as a perfectly reasonable desire: to be accepted not dismissed.
This fixing and endorsing of a solicitation is a work of ‘self-consciousness’, which is thus effective in determining a desire. It is still true, however, that it takes another decision (another bit of self-activity) to put that desire on my agenda as something under active consideration on a particular occasion when I’m deciding where to go on holiday. Contrast an impulse of resentment at another’s success. The action that it solicits is something detrimental to the other. It presents that as reasonable (he deserves a bit of bad fortune)
I might try to fix or specify a desirable, satisfying, way of doing it, I might fantasize about it quite a bit. But I cannot endorse it as reasonable. I try to shrug it off, put it to one side, ‘silence’ it. In contrast, I don’t put aside my desire to visit Central Asia. But I may decide that it can’t come into consideration until ’ve carried out some other project, or fulfilled some obligation, or I may simply never get round to thinking about it.
Green does not have to identify these processes with an action of the will, in the sense of resolving to do this or that or to adopt this or that aim or plan. The reaction of the man’s self to a solicitation consists rather, at this point, not in volition but in endorsement of the solicitation as legitimate, that is, in his affirmation of its object as one that it’s reasonable for him to desire.
Allowing this distinction marks a further step away from the mechanical model of motivation towards a moral psychology suitable for ethics. It makes desire something that is at least in part imputable—that is, for which the person is at least in part accountable.
Furthermore, given that Green thinks that individual good is the satisfaction of individual desire, and given that he means by that a solicitation which the individual has endorsed, it makes the good of individuals something that they themselves at least in part construct. And it does not force him into the implausible thesis that satisfaction of a desire would contribute to my good only if I have resolved to act on it. There can be desires I fail to act on, goods consciously or unconsciously forgone.
Now we can ask what true desire and thus true good are. According to Green, to think of an object as good is to think of it as ‘such as will satisfy desire? Given Green’s special use of the word ‘desire’, this means: to think of it as satisfying a solicitation I have identified with, or in other words—according to the suggestion just made—to accept its object as one that there is a non-instrumental reason for me to desire, that it is reasonable for me to desire ‘for its own sake’.
So an object is a part of my good if there is reason for me to desire it for its own sake. Inclination, or ‘solicitation’, presents the object as contributing to one’s good, as ‘good to have’ identifying oneself with the inclination is thus endorsing that presentation, whether or not the endorsement ever gives rise to any resolution of the will.
Satisfying my desire is satisfying what I take (at the time of desiring) to be my good. But this does not show that it actually is satisfying my good. Now Green would not, I think, accept this distinction between my conception of what is good for me and what is good for me as philosophically fundamental.
His picture is, rather, that in endorsing some solicitations as ones whose realization would be part of my good, I make their realization part of my good. Constructivism, in this further sense, is a feature of the Idealist account of a person’s good; self-conscious self-activity generates normativity.
Even so, he still has to make some room for the distinction, since it is clearly a critical resource we apply in thinking about our own or another’s good. He does so by distinguishing between truer and less true conceptions of my good, or alternatively, between determinately potential, immanent desires of my truest self, the self towards whose realization it is my telos to progress, and desires of less true, more transient selves. And he has a criterion for deciding which desires are those of my truest self regarding the good generically as that which satisfies desire, we shall naturally distinguish the moral good as that which satisfies the desire of a moral agent, or that in which a moral agent can find the satisfaction of himself which he necessarily seeks. The true good we shall understand in the same way. It is an end in which the effort of a moral agent can really find rest.
So far we’ve been using ‘satisfaction’ and ‘realization’ in the sense that your desire that p is satisfied or realized if it’s the case that, But when Green in this passage talks about a desire as one in which ‘a moral agent can find the satisfaction of himself which he necessarily seeks’, he uses ‘satisfaction’ in another, more familiar way. He means not just that you get what you want, but that you are satisfied with it. You don’t regret trying to get it, it doesn’t turn out to be Dead Sea fruit; you want it not just ex ante, before you’ve got it, but also ex post, after you’ve got it.
The assumption is that human beings have determinate natures which shape, both actually and potentially, the ends they seek, and in virtue of which some activities and achievements bring fuller satisfaction than others. That thesis is needed for any developmental, progressivist notion of an individual’s good, Idealist or other. Friedrich Schiller, Marx, or Mill need it as much as Green or Hegel do. And in itself it does not seem unrealistic. But of course, as we see in this passage and more explicitly elsewhere, Green is making a more heroic teleological assumption, which is that lasting satisfaction is provided for all human beings by, and only by, virtuous pursuit of the common good, and that it is this fuller satisfaction that they ‘necessarily’ seek, and only this in which they ‘can really find rest’. We shall come back to this.
There is something of a tension between this criterion of lasting satisfaction and the constructivist element in Green’s conception of the good. How can my lasting satisfaction, in the sense of my being satisfied with the object, content with it, when I get it, be the criterion of my good, if my endorsement of a solicitation already determines that its satisfaction, in the formal sense of its object being realized, is part of my good? Should we say that my good consists not in the realization of my desires but in whatever it is in which I would find lasting satisfaction? Actually, it seems to me that neither account is correct, because both are reductive.
The fact that I identify with or endorse a solicitation does not make it true that realizing it would contribute to my good. But neither does the fact that realizing its object would give me lasting satisfaction make it true that it would contribute to my good. On the one hand, it can turn out that what I desire gives me no lasting satisfaction when I get it. In other words, when I get it, I find that I don’t want it, or perhaps don’t want it as much as I thought I would. In that case, the test of antecedent desire is defeated by the test of posterior desire.
What I desired, and what I believed I had reason to desire, there was in fact no reason for me to desire. On the other hand, the fact that something gives me lasting satisfaction equally does not entail that achieving it contributed to my good. Achieving it may have been deleterious to my personality, reduced my capacities for enjoyment, made me an addict, affected my capacity to take in relevant information, etc.
This is not the place for a careful investigation of all the pitfalls of this king that attend reductive models of a person’s good. The general point (I would want to argue) is that no facts about what a person does or would desire, either ex ante or ex post, entail a conclusion about that person’s good. The connection is criterial. Facts about what a person does and would desire can be better or worse a priori evidence for conclusions about the person’s good, about what is desirable for that person, and nothing other than facts of this kind can be a priori evidence. But the evidence is always in principle defeasible, however good it is in practice. So the correct account of a person’s good must be in explicitly and irreducibly normative terms: it is what there is reason for him or her to desire.
However, let’s waive this general point, about the difference between criteria and truth conditions for propositions about a person’s good. I want to go on describing Green’s view in terms of the notion of a ‘true desire’. So I shall use this phrase in such a way that those same sets of facts about a person’s actual or potential desires that would constitute good criterial evidence, to varying degrees of goodness, that there’s reason for him to desire that p (that its being the case that would be part of his good, desirable for him) will constitute equally good criterial evidence, to the same varying degrees, that this person ‘truly’ desires that T.H Green takes it that such true desires have a genuine though potential existence in me, presumably as solicitations, in a way that gives them power to determine the course of my development. So my true desires are, roughly, the desires that my most fully realized self would come to endorse in a conscious way.
Anything that’s desired is desired under some idea of one’s good. What is truly desired is desired under a true idea of one’s good. But it is misleading to say, with Green, that all desire is the desire for self-satisfaction. In the formal sense of ‘satisfy’, it is trivially true that a desire is always a desire for that which would satisfy it. But if satisfaction, and in particular, self-satisfaction, are used substantively, to refer to the state of being satisfied with the achievement of one’s desire, then it is false that all desire is desire for self-satisfaction. One can desire something which one will never know one has achieved, such as posthumous fame, to take Sidgwick’s example! or the happiness of one’s children after one’s death. And this is important in highlighting the expansive nature of Green’s conception of a person’s good.
We’ll consider in the next section the objection that it is too expansive. But before turning to that important question, I end this section by tying Green’s formal egoism to his theory of motivation. Green thinks that all my actions, in the full imputable sense of intentional action from a motive, are motivated by desires, and hence by some idea of my good:
To every action morally imputable, or of which a man can recognize himself as the author, the motive is always some idea of the man’s personal good.
In all conduct to which moral predicates are applicable a man is an object to himself such conduct, whether virtuous or vicious, expresses a motive consisting in the idea of personal good, which the man seeks to realize by action.
In terms of the German philosophical debate that Green was trying to bring to Britain, one can say that he takes sides on this matter with Hegel rather than Kant. On the Kantian view there can be reason to pursue an end irrespective of whether one desires it, or indeed whether it is reasonable to desire it: there can be reason to pursue it just because it is right to pursue it. The recognition that the end is right can itself be a motive. Such a motive involves no process of self-identification with any solicitation or impulse presented to the will. In Kant’s understanding, which identifies the will (Wille) with practical reason, it is wholly internal to the will. Practical reason itself judges reasons for action and determines action in light of that.
We thus note three steps away from the mechanical model of motivation, involving three distinctions. The first step distinguishes between solicitation and desire, in the way we have examined. Desire involves taking up a solicitation, acknowledging it as reason-giving. This is a good, indispensable distinction. The second step distinguishes between desire and the activity of practical decision. Acknowledging a solicitation as reason-giving is one thing, resolving to act on it, even if only conditionally (placing it on the agenda), is another. The third step distinguishes between motive and desire. This step allows that there can be a source of practical reasons irrespective of solicitation, and thus of desire.
Green refuses to go beyond the first step. But this is not enough to give the self autonomy (which he wants to give it, as we shall see in section IV). Autonomy presupposes all three distinctions just mentioned. It requires all the abilities involved in assessing the reasonableness of solicitations, deciding whether to take desires into account in some process of decision making or to rule them off that decision-making agenda, and, no less importantly, deciding whether there is reason to bring about an outcome irrespective of whether I desire that outcome even if I do not desire it—and acting accordingly if one so decides.
Green does not give himself the philosophical room to deal with all this. As he says, the mechanical model of motivation makes the will ‘merely a designation for any desire that happens for the time to be strong enough to determine action’—Green’s model does not do that, but it still makes the will a servant of solicitations or passions, a servant whose only discretion lies in picking which passion to serve, instead of mechanically identifying with the one that’s most peremptory. Autonomy, however, lies in being able to recognize that there is reason to bring about an outcome irrespective of whether I desire that outcome—even if I do not desire it—and in being able to act on that recognition.
It is not ‘empiricist’ preconceptions that prevent Green from taking the Kantian direction. His motive, like Hegel’s, is to avoid dividing the self. At one level the Absolute Idealist striving for unity doesn’t stop until everything has been incorporated in the self—even if that self is hard to recognize as oneself.
At this level there’s a question about where ‘solicitations’ come from, Just as there’s a question about where the sensations involved in perception come from. Once we’re on the Absolute Idealist train, we have to conclude that they themselves somehow come from the self. But a more modest unifying view is more tenable: the unifying fact is the play of self-consciousness, in the form of rational assessment, in the three spheres of belief, feeling, and action.
My passions are mine both in the sense that they are spontaneous to me, not products of indoctrination, and in the sense that they are shaped and acknowledged by my own reflection. They don’t have to be mine in the sense of somehow being produced by me. Indeed, if they were, it would be a mystery why different individual people have different passions. This is one of the ways in which Idealism (rather than utilitarianism) has difficulty in coping with the separateness of people.
But there’s also a very good question underlying the Hegelian direction: on the Kantian model of conscientious action, there seems to be no room for the self to find satisfaction in doing its duty. How can duty be at the same time absolute irrespective of one’s desires and at the same time satisfying, liberating? How can it give meaning to one’s life? To this question we shall return.
For the moment, we conclude that Green’s psychological egoism is the product of two things a model of motivation in which desire is the only motive and a definition of personal good in terms of desire. This in turn underpins his normative egoism. By removing the model of motivation to which Green adheres, we remove this underpinning, even if we still maintain a definition of personal good in terms of desire.
We also make it easier to defend the Idealist conception of individual good. If we use desire widely, as in effect equivalent to motive, it becomes implausible to identify individual good with realization of the individual’s desires. If we use it narrowly, it becomes at least more plausible. One’s good is the satisfaction of what one has reason to desire: of those solicitations which one has reason to take up, endorse. This is no longer a formally egoistic view there can be good reason to pursue objectives that are distinct from one’s own good. Nevertheless, isn’t this conception of a person’s good still too expansive? Don’t people have desires, and reasonable desires, that have nothing to do with their own good?