Willing, Wanting, Waiting by Richard Holton (Oxford University Press) £27.50/$49.95 (hb)

It is a pleasure when a path-breaking book is written in a relaxed and communicative style that persuades the reader not by intimidating intricacy but by clarity and good sense. It is true that Richard Holton’s ease of presentation is at times allusive; and it is a pity that the most complex discussion, of partial belief, comes early on. Yet his book can be recommended to anyone keen on fresh insights and tolerant of occasional obscurity.

A focal topic is weakness of will. This phrase has generally been conscripted to signify whatever, within a wide area, an author wishes to write about. Too often it is attached, for lack of an English alternative, to the classical question whether an agent can freely fail to do what he knows (or believes) to be the thing to do. Holton escapes this by focusing upon intention and choice. Why do we need to be able to make choices, and not just to form judgements? He thinks it is chiefly because we often know that we are in no position to identify what is the thing to do. Knowing we can’t do that, we form an intention to do this act rather than that. If we fear that we may yet be tempted into doing that act rather than this for no good reason, we further form a resolution not to be so seduced. Weakness of will is an over-readiness to discard one’s intentions or resolutions. It is thus a value-laden notion, and not just a descriptive one. (What a critic sees as flightiness, a friend may see as flexibility.)

The opposite qualify is strength of will. How do we exercise this? Another distinctive feature of the book, not common within analytical philosophy, is its frequent citing of psychological experiments. (Just one is inept. Holton isn’t the first philosopher to take seriously a questionnaire that showed that, asked how to use the adverb “intentionally”, most of us confuse it with “deliberately”. So what? Plenty of people confuse “uninterested” and “disinterested”. Even with a knowledge of Latin, I only grasped the distinction after meeting it in J. L. Austin, who had a nose for these things.)

The rest are apt. One test was of children’s ability to delay gratification to achieve a greater reward. Children were offered one cookie if they rang a bell, two cookies if they waited till an adult came in. What strategies did they use? These were various, but the most successful was self-distraction, focusing not on the rewards but on other things (or even going to sleep). Holton infers a faculty of willpower. He can cite evidence of “ego depletion”: forcing oneself to eat radishes rather than chocolates in one experiment was found to make one less likely to persist in trying to solve puzzles in the next. Pursuing certain exercises, and enjoying good spirits, help one to persevere. Yet, where strategies are so various, it isn’t clear to me that a single faculty is at work. Distracting oneself is voluntary, and may need some exercise of will; but a capacity to be engrossed, voluntarily or involuntarily, sounds different.

I recall an illuminating lecture by Michael Wood. He argued that Mann’s Aschenbach (who lingers too long in Venice) and Proust’s Marcel (who demands a goodnight kiss) went wrong in trying to defeat temptation by bare strength of will, when what was needed was a refocusing of the imagination upon reasons for acting otherwise (the dangers of cholera, a mother’s anger). Such focusing exercises the will, of course, but not in a tug of war. If the phrase “strength of will” suggests otherwise, it may be misleading.

What of freedom of the will? Do we know by experience that this is a reality (as Dr Johnson famously supposed)? Here I find Holton persuasive. What we do learn, just in forming intentions, is that we can make a choice that isn’t a passive response to an internal play of beliefs and desires. Reasons can usually be given for making one choice rather than another (though one’s selection of an option may be intuitive rather than discursive). But seldom does a reason compel a choice; when it does, this is only within a certain range, within which selection remains free. Yet this can’t refute determinism as a general thesis about the causation of events (ill-grounded though it may be). Our conscious considerations hold us on a loose rein. What else goes on, in our minds or brains, is not our responsibility; and yet we accept responsibility in choosing and acting on reasons. With this contrast Holton leaves us, having clarified the real problems that remain after confusions have been cleared away. He thus respects the autonomy at once of agents, and of readers.

A. W. Price is a reader in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Contextuality in Practical Reason (Oxford University Press)