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INTEGRATING THE ACTUAL AND THE POTENTIAL
Contents:
To sustain itself, the life of a volitional being requires the integration of the actual and the potential, i.e. it requires a long-range orientation (see: The Nature of Life from Ethics). Consequently, the pursuit of values is done with respect to an integrated hierarchy of values, wherein each level of the hierarchy has a whole context of interrelated values (see: The Nature of Value from Ethics). Hence, we see that the integration of the actual and the potential is a key aspect of applying ethics in particular and philosophy in general.
As a further motivation, note that in general, the greater the value (i.e. the more essential the value is for life as a whole), the harder it is to gain and/or keep it. Why? Because the greater the value, the more it integrates on every level of one’s life, which means its pursuit involves greater cognitive and practical complexity. Hence, in general, integrating the actual and the potential to achieve one’s greatest values (and ultimately one’s value for life as a whole) is not an easy task and requires strong understanding, principles and practice.
LEXICAL NOTE:
Motivation is the concrete experience of the value for a particular potential. Willpower is the self-driven capacity of the volitional faculty to exert effort in a particular direction of focus. Willpower and motivation are ultimately integrated in one’s pursuit of value; willpower is the volitional effort to engage in a pursuit, motivation is the fuel that makes such engagement possible, especially long-range.
Motivation is based on life-affirmation in the moment. Focus on the facts is an essential form and aspect of life-affirmation, since it affirms the basis of one’s pursuit of life, namely the affirmation of reality. What does it really mean in practice? In practice, look at reality, look at your motives, keep the factual context in mind and then follow your motives to the fullest. In other words, do not divorce your motivation from the pursuit of values, but instead of trying to force your motivation through sheer willpower, acknowledge and accept your motives while staying in full focus of reality, i.e. of your relevant factual context. Most importantly, do not divorce the affirmation of life in the moment from the pursuit of efficacy, especially long-range. Why does it work?
The philosophical basis is clear: life is the standard of value and the ultimate value, which means it is what integrates every other value. In essence, every value is but one value, i.e. the value for one’s life, applied in different ways to different contexts (see: “Integrity of values” from The Nature of Value from Ethics). However, since concretes are the metaphysical source of any truth and thus any value, the metaphysical source of the value for life (i.e. the source as present in reality) is necessarily the concrete affirmation of one’s life, i.e. the self-motivated engagement with reality in the here and now (ranging from pleasure, enjoyment, etc. to focus, such as attentive focus, productive focus, etc. to recreation, relaxation, etc. to pain, serenity, struggle, etc.). Without such affirmation, no value exists and hence no motivation can be sustained.
Consider it another way: why pursue something, short-term or long-term, if there is no purpose to it? If you gain nothing from life as you live it and thereby nothing fuels or sustains you for striving toward your life’s potential, then how can you strive for any potential? Furthermore, why strive toward anything if not ultimately to affirm life in the moment? If life is not affirmed in the here and now in some form, the value for it becomes a floating abstraction and thereby loses its tie to reality. Life is the source of purpose and thereby of value, so if no affirmation of life is pursued and achieved in some form, then ultimately (1) nothing is purposeful and (2) motivation dies out.
However, why follow your motivations to the fullest while keeping one’s focus on reality rather than fight against motivations toward more “constructive” or long-range pursuits? Note that by “fighting” one’s motivations, I do not mean engaging in uncomfortable, difficult or even excruciating work — after all, motivation can persist even in great hardship and falter even in great comfort, so “comfort” and “pleasantness” are non-essentials in motivation (not necessarily insignificant but non-essential). Rather, by “fighting” one’s motivations, I mean acting against your motives, i.e. acting against what you experience most concrete value for (e.g. emotionally, psychologically, physically, etc.). Now, consider the following points:
1.
The source of volition and therefore of willpower is one’s ability to direct one’s focus. Hence, ultimately, keeping one’s focus on reality (which includes the factual context, one’s philosophical convictions, one’s hierarchy of values in a broader level, etc.) is the basic cause for the direction of one’s motivation.
2.
One’s volitional mechanism is finite in capacity and has a particular nature and range by which it operates; trying to operate one’s volition apart from its nature or outside its range leads to motivational overload, i.e. the failure to concretely value something. When in such a state, trying to push past it by mere effort is the denial of the nature of your volitional faculty and thereby a denial of reality. To put it in other words, willpower is finite (though renewable) and not omnipotent even within one’s own mind, and motivation is neither causeless nor subjective but rather based on one’s internalised premises.
3.
Drawing from the second point, one’s volitional mechanism can only operate when one’s potential is concretised in some way and to some extent. This is because the basis of volition is long-range purpose, and the metaphysical basis of purpose is the concrete affirmation of life. To concretise potential is to concretise the values present in the pursuit of the potential; if such values do not exist, the pursuit cannot be sustained after a point.
Combining the above three points, we observe that fighting against one’s motivations can at most be a short-range effort and cannot sustain long-range. Furthermore, relying only on one’s sheer willpower to fight against “undesirable motivations” ignores the source of willpower itself, i.e. one’s self-directed focus on reality and the conscious affirmation of the facts one grasps. Furthermore, it ignores the source of motivation, namely the concrete affirmation of life, i.e. the concrete experience of values, which is the metaphysical source of all values. Lastly, it is key to grasp that motivation, i.e. the concrete experience of one’s value for a potential, is key to the operation of one’s volitional mechanism; without such concrete experience, the value for the potential remains a floating abstraction, losing its ties to reality.
Summarising the point so far into a tip, the idea is: keep your focus on reality, do not practise self-abnegation but rather engage with your motivations with full awareness and full intent, check your core premises and ultimately let your premises and your focus on reality shape your motivations and thereby fuel and sustain your capacity to pursue a certain potential (be it short-range or long-range). Note that motivation does not take away from the necessity of willpower, since motivation is the fuel and not the driver of willpower.
NOTE 1: You can exert your willpower against your motivations, but only up to a point. Some short-term cases may occasionally call for such a use of willpower (e.g. emergencies or short deadlines), but note that it is not sustainable to do so and, if done as a practice, will lead you to become drained and unable to apply your willpower any further and potentially even unable to experience the value for life for a while.
NOTE 2: The nature of motivational overload is further discussed in the section “Motivational overload” from “Overload” from Sources of inefficacy.
Observations:
1.
In the face of a deadline that was not too close but important to address (i.e. my semester 2 final assignments in 2024), I found that consciously and completely engaging with concretely enjoyable activities — such as watching a show I enjoyed — had two advantages compared to pushing against my desires and forcing myself to work. (1) I did not drain my willpower, and thus, did not drain my motivation and capacity to engage with valuable but uncomfortable work in general. (2) I was able to properly satisfy myself (since I did not keep undermining my pleasure with shame or despair) and move past my need for concrete enjoyment, and thus, was able to focus on more challenging work more effectively, leading to far more efficient work and substantial results. I would compare this case to that of starvation; when you are starved, it is hard to think of anything but food, not least because food is an essential need that must be satisfied to fuel yourself for other pursuits. In this light, note that I do not regard concrete enjoyment — or any form of life-affirmation — as something “to get over with” or a nuisance or an itch that must be addressed, but rather, as a vital, genuine need of my mind and for my life, just as food is a genuine need of the body and not a mere indulgence.
KEY POINT: The above only applies if there is no evasion on your part about what you are doing and what may be its consequences to you. Only a full and true acceptance of reality as it is can ensure that such indulgence can be of any value and pleasure (in the true sense) to you; evasion is a cause of shame and despair, and thus, destroys enjoyment and life-affirmation.
2.
When I strain myself beyond my motivations, I tend to get drained in one or more respects; cognitively, emotionally or physically. Cognitive and physical drain are easier to overcome through rest, but emotional drain indicates a psychological experience of loss in values. Even though the values involved are worth pursuing in the long-run, since the psychological aspect of motivation is what drives you, such a loss in fact drains you (at least temporarily) of the will to pursue your goals further (a good analogy would be the training of muscles). The psychological aspect can be shaped over time but often not immediately, and draining it in the short-run makes losing the context of and thus value for the long-run almost inevitable (e.g. (a) initial and intermediate stages of doing the final assignments of semester 2 in 2024, (b) December-January examination preparation in 2023-2024, wherein I lost the motivation for both job applications and studying, etc.).
Since the recognition and experience of concrete value is the basis for self-sustaining goal-driven action, it stands to reason that if we intellectually recognise something to be of greater concrete value, pursuing it would result in greater life-affirmation that would be both self-sustaining and the basis for further self-sustaining and goal-driven action. Here, it is key to note that concrete value is about the experience of value, which means it is recognised based on what you can project about the experience of value in the moment and cannot based on abstract conclusions and convictions alone.
To reiterate the previous tip: Keep your focus on reality, do not practise self-abnegation but rather engage with your motivations with full awareness and full intent, check your core premises and ultimately let your premises and your focus on reality shape your motivations and thereby fuel and sustain your capacity to pursue a certain potential (be it short-range or long-range).
To add to the aforementioned tip: Motivation need not be internalised yet, since we know that not all conclusions and convictions are immediately and automatically internalised; after all, internalisation requires repetition, concretisation and practice. Hence, a motivation may still be only an intellectual recognition of concrete value, but as long as it is of clear concrete value (in your knowledge), it is wise to pursue it, knowing it will result in self-sustaining and goal-driven action, and thus, it will reinforce and potentially expand your willpower, life-affirmation in the moment and hence your sense of self-value, rather than draining them.
Here, the role of willpower is even clearer. Motivation is the fuel that sustains life-affirming action, but willpower is spark that initiates it and the wheel that steers it. Without willpower, motivation cannot be consistently actualised and would often remain mere potential. If motivation for some pursuit is internalised, the need for willpower for initiating that pursuit is reduced, but you still need willpower to stay in focus and guide your pursuit with respect to reality. Hence, motivation and willpower are both necessary, and neither alone is sufficient.
NOTE 1: Motivation fuels, willpower initiates and steers. Without motivation, volitional action cannot be sustained, while without willpower, volitional action may not be initiated and cannot be volitionally directed.
NOTE 2: Motivation fuels volition, since motivation is the recognition of concrete potential, and the recognition of concrete potential is essential to sustaining volitional action. Note that concrete potential is the recognition of achievable and valuable concretes (concretes being things that can be realised and experienced in the moment).
NOTE 3: We observe that no matter our motivation, we still have to make the choice to stay in focus and act; hence, willpower is always operative in volition. The question, then, is not whether to apply willpower or not, but whether to apply willpower in a self-sustaining and life-affirming way or not.
Observations:
1.
With the approaching deadline for my master’s project, I followed my previous tip (the tip before the amendment) and saw its value, since it enabled me to sustain a sense of self-value and value-orientation over time, despite the often gruelling and unrewarding nature of the project work. However, I noticed that, due to the difficulty of the project work, it was hard to internalise the value of pursuing it, compared to, say, pursuing other pleasures in the moment. As a result, the progress was slow and not consistent, even though I often saw the concrete value of pursuing my project work at times, with respect to the clarity, sense of purpose and peace of mind it would give me in the moment. This is not to say that pleasures in the moment should be left aside; on the contrary, I strongly think I should indulge in them sufficiently, both before, during (in breaks) and after my project work for the day. But it would be valuable to actualise my intellectual recognition of the concrete value of project work, even if this recognition has not yet been internalised yet.
2.
At night, I often feel a resistance against showering and going to bed, instead feeling like staying up and indulging in some activity or pleasure in the moment, despite the fact that often, I can recognise the concrete value (in terms of mental relaxation and a greater ability to enjoy in the moment) in at least getting ready for bed. Yet, this recognition has not been internalised yet, I think due to the lack of practice, leading to poor habits that I do not desire to sustain. Here, again, I see the value in simply pushing myself through will toward this concrete value I recognise, knowing that it would serve to affirm and strengthen my value-orientation and willpower rather than drain them.
1.
Motivation has both an intellectual (abstract) and a psychological (concrete) aspect. Both are vital and must be integrated (at least over time); the abstract aspect integrates the relevant concretes and validates motivations in the right context, whereas the concrete aspect is what ultimately drives your actions. However, the concrete, i.e. psychological aspect is largely subconscious; the abstract, i.e. intellectual aspect is key in shaping the psychological aspect, but such shaping must be done logically (remember the analogy of a programmer — the intellectual aspect — and the computer — the psychological aspect). Thus, shaping your motivations may often be a matter of a more tactful, indirect approach rather than direct intent or willpower, especially in view of the complexity of your goals and of your means to achieve them.
2.
If you lack the motivation or capacity to do something in a given context, then beyond a certain point, you literally — in fact — cannot sustain its pursuit of your own volition in that context. However, this need not incapacitate you; while you may lack the motivation or capacity to do something in the given context, you can shift your focus to improve your ability (e.g. by addressing more basic existential needs, mental or physical) or pursue something else (according to what you judge to be the most important or valuable in a broader context). Note that motivation can persevere in the hardest, most severe of conditions, and it can falter even in relative comfort; in general, it is not primarily a question of “what is going on outside” but “what is going on inside” (although, of course, both questions are important and potentially relevant to each other). Why is the motivation present or absent? Ask to understand its roots: what are its essential causes, what are the relevant factors in dealing with it, etc.? Understanding this is a part of understanding reality objectively so you can deal with it effectively. It is ineffective to try to brute-force your way through your lack of motivation because the facts about your consciousness (e.g. the nature of volition, finiteness of willpower, etc.) and its relationship to reality (e.g. how emotions and motives arise, what is the nature and role of values, how can and must a mind grasp the facts effectively, etc.) will not sustain it.
Willpower is the self-driven capacity of the volitional faculty to exert effort in a particular direction of focus, which means willpower is fundamental to the conscious pursuit of values. However, as already discussed, willpower is finite, though renewable. Furthermore, willpower relies on motivation in order to sustain effort in a given direction, which means building motivation builds both the efficiency and the effectiveness of willpower.
Thus, to live to one’s fullest potential, it is vital to realise that for any given period of time, there is only a finite amount of willpower that must be budgeted across one or more pursuits (e.g. needs, wants, goals, etc.). Hence, it is vital to be scrupulous not only in the potential value of the pursuit when considered in isolation but also its effect on one’s willpower and one’s ability to pursue one’s values as an integrated whole.
In other words, we have the following: (1) just because there are good reasons to do something does not mean it is worth pursuing in our context, (2) it is important to consider the cost as well as the benefit of doing something, since the value of the pursuit does not rest on the benefit alone, and (3) to take up a pursuit is to not at the same time take up and/or be able to take up one or more other pursuits, and this is part of the cost of the pursuit in question.
Observations:
Point (3) in the above paragraph is especially poignant to me, beacuse I have observed that a key point of failure in my pursuit of values has often been the failure to effectively allocate my willpower across a variety of pursuits. For example, being convinced of the importance of going to the gym to exercise, I failed to consider the impact of the whole process on my willpower, which in turn affected my ability to pursue other key values, e.g. project work, further studies and job applications. An alternative to going to the gym would be to work out at home, which, while lacking in some of the benefits of going to the gym, was more effective within my context as a method to maintain my fitness due to its lower physical and psychological cost (“psychological cost” implies cost in terms of motivation).
As another example, I observed that when applying for jobs, it was more effective in the long-term to apply for one job per day than it was to apply for a variety of jobs per day; the latter was often tempting in the short-term due to the attractiveness of the jobs and the fear of missing out, but as it turns out, I ended up missing out a lot more in the long-term with latter approach due to the much greater psychological cost, which in turn led me to devalue job applications in favour of more psychologically rewarding pursuits.
It is key to note that psychological cost is a real cost on one’s energy and not just “in the mind”. In other words, energy of any kind is finite, and the change in the amount of willpower one can exert in a given period of time is causal and not just a matter of whim. In particular, motivation, which fuels or at least supports willpower, is based on a variety of factors such as: philosophical convictions, physical and mental energy, efficacy in a pursuit, a sense of efficacy, a grasp of one’s potential, etc.
To make explicit what has been implicit so far: values, same as knowledge, are hierarchical and contextual. Hence, values, same as knowledge, must be evaluated from the most fundamental, abstract level to the most concrete level. Whether you start with abstract or concrete considerations, make sure to integrate to the point that you gain the most fundamental, abstract level view of the goal before applying this view to the more concrete levels; this allows you to pursue your values in a broader context, the broadest being of your life as a whole.
The goal’s object may represent one or few values, but often does not represent all the values relevant within the overall context (overall ⇒ including the process and the result). Furthermore, the probability of success is often less than certain and can even be quite uncertain. Hence, it stands to reason that what makes a goal worth pursuing is not just the values represented by the goal’s object but the integrated system of values represented by the steps within the process of the pursuit itself.
The goal is vital in that it serves to integrate the whole system of one’s values in a concrete (i.e. particular) context, and thus, serves to achieve moral and practical efficacy (the moral is the practical; distinction is made for emphasis). Hence, a goal must be evaluated with respect to not only its object but also the way it integrates the whole system of one’s values in the process of the pursuit.
In other words, the process is as valuable — if not more — than the result, because the process is (1) what makes the result possible in the first place, and (2) what helps achieve interrelated results (positive results) that can further one’s progress in other key ways as well.
To conclude…
The long-range is not separate but rather integrated to the present and the short-range. Integrating your pursuit of your value for life in the long-range to your present gives value to the present, leading to greater happiness in the moment. This is in line with the fact that happiness is the state of non-contradictory achievement of your values.