Henry Frankfurt First Order Desires

1) In Henry Frankfurt’s Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, desire is an uncontrollable urge “to want.” Wanting things and actually fulfilling the “want” however, is the efforts of the will. The will is said to be an effective desire in which causes to not want, but actually do what they want to do (elicits an action), “one that moves a person all the way to action” (Frankfurt 14). A first order desire is a wanting something such as materialistic items or “state of affairs” (which is not a desire) or wanting to fulfill an action, “when [someone] wants to do or not to do such-and-such” (13). The first order volition is whatever first order desire a person wants to be effective, since ideally people have more than one desire. Second order desire however, is the desire to desire. In other words, it is the desire to want or not to want something. Second order volition of the second order desire is is prevalent when a person wants whatever their first order desire is to be effective, they want it to be their will. In Frankfurt’s effort to define freedom, he embarks on the dilemma between freedom of action and freedom of the will. As he sees it, freedom of action can be performed without any reliance on freedom of the will. To act is simply to do a task, but when someone’s action is prohibited, “he is not free to translate his
Say for instance, I have found contentment with being gay because at a Kenyon (a liberal arts school) my sexuality is accepted. Before, I wanted the desire to not like men, but I may find it very easy and safe being gay at Kenyon now. However, in the back of my mind I still know that even though I am accepted here, the whole world isn’t a big liberal arts utopia. Therefore, I would develop the third order desire: to have the desire to have the desire, to not have a desire to think it is fine to be content to like