The One and The Many
reflecting on the experience of desire and conflict
As I progress through university, and begin to pose the question "what on earth do I want to do with my life" more and more often, I have noticed a change in what I take to be an acceptable answer.
By this I mean that, before I arrived at college, before I went through the trials and tribulations of college classes and personal interactions, I was quite single minded about what I wanted to do with my life.
Now, single minded certainly does not mean without conflict. It was not as if until arriving at school, I had come up with an ironclad life plan that I could not even bring into question. To the contrary: I was quite conflicted. Some days I yearned for the academy, for the life of a writer--and other days the corporate world called out to me. Suits just look so cool!
This was the extent to which I was conflicted. There were times when I felt strongly that I wanted to do one thing, and other times where I felt strongly that I wanted to do the other thing. Now I am less single-minded. I want to do different things—become a writer, or maybe start teaching, at the same time. But more on that at the end.
It is worth pausing for a moment, and asking how what single-minded me experienced could be properly called conflict. After all, as I have thus described it, there was not a moment where I wanted to do different things at the same time, when I was genuinely torn between equally appealing options.
So, the philosopher among us might poke: "If you were never pulled in both directions, how could you call that conflict? At best, it seems like you can't make up your mind."
There is something to this. Because I was so single minded, there is a sense in which calling me conflicted is a misapplication of the word. Namely, there was never a moment where I was genuinely torn. It was rather that I bounced between various different options.
Of course, this is not very appealing. After all, I say, stomping my foot down: I was conflicted! If you want proof of that, just look at this period of my life ! I was constantly moving back and forth between completely different goals. If that isn't conflict, what is?
But while this sounds nice, it is quite weird. So far I have said that there was never a moment I was conflicted, but, when I 'zoomed out' from myself, evaluated all my changes in goals together, the conflict became visible. How could that make sense?
And, worse, maybe, viewing this as conflict threatens to make the concept of conflict quite meaningless. After all, we will change most of our opinions and goals over the course of our lives. If we zoom out enough, and take change to equal conflict, then we are always conflicted.
But surely there are times where we are more conflicted than others. Surely saying we are 'always in conflict' threatens to destroy our ability to appreciate a special type of conflict.
It will be worthwhile to shift our focus for a moment and to take a look at this ‘special’ type of conflict. What is it?
Let’s return to my life for a moment. Where I once was quite single-minded about my goals, I have recently found myself thinking about them quite differently.
Yes, I would like to be a writer. That is one thing I would like to do. But there are other things I want to do. Some of them are silly: I want to drink tea and watch dumb television shows. But some of them are more serious: I want to write, but I also want to teach, and maybe travel a bit too.
So far, this has nothing to do with conflict. After all, these goals are not mutually exclusive: I can write and teach—maybe even travel too. It is not as if writing requires that I give up on teaching.
But, having a goal-structure like this, I want to say, is required this sort conflict to be possible. Namely, I must be more than single-mindedly focused on a goal: it is essential to my being able to suffer from this sort of conflict that I be able to entertain more than one desire at a time.
Of course, that does not guarantee conflict, nor does it imply it — but — if I am going to be conflicted, I must have various desires in this way. I must have a variety of goals, and view them as all fitting together in some sort of way.
Once my will looks like this — once it begins to look more like a mosaic — conflict becomes possible. After all, only if I have a variety of goals that can fit together can I have goals that fail to fit together — goals that require me to choose one set over the other: maybe becoming a writer requires that I be mysterious in some sort of way, while becoming a teacher requires that I make clarity my guiding principle. That is a conflict. Now I must decide, which do I want more? Which one is worth prioritizing?
I have just said the same thing twice. Our imagined philosopher poked us, and said that if it were not possible for us to be pulled in both directions, the word 'conflict' will simply not be applicable to us. I have just now shown how what we initially called a ‘special type of conflict’ is possible: it requires that we have a variety of goals—rather than single-mindedly going after a single one.
So single-mindedness makes conflict impossible. We must have multiple desires at once to be in a position of needing to choose between them.
So conflict is only possible if we are not-single minded. Rather than having a singular, core desire, we must have a tapestry of them.
Conflict requires we have a tapestry of desires because it is a way this tapestry of desires can be organized. “Conflict” is what we call it when we have a number of desires or core projects or goals that exclude each-other. When our will is organized in this way, in a ‘conflicted’ way, we will have to choose, or compromise, among the things we care about.
So, to be conflicted, we must have a tapestry of desires. We must have a variety of things we care about at once. This is also called a personality. To be conflicted, we must have a personality.
So, it is the cost of living with a personality that we risk being conflicted among the various things we care about. We’ve just decided, after all, that a personality is the very thing that makes conflict possible.
But, when I say cost, I speak loosely. It is not that conflict is an accidental byproduct of having a personality, but the price we pay when our personalities are incoherent, when they do not fit together. The work of life, then, is to forge a coherent personality. It is to run a string through all the things you care about and fit them together in such a way that they do not contradict each other.
But, conflict is also an achievement. It is not only something to be overcome, but the very mark that we have something to work on: That we are not so singleminded in our interests that we lack a tapestry of desires—that we lack a personality—and that our lives are bright and vivid and complicated enough that they are unstable. Conflict is not a failure of our humanity, it is proof of it—and it sets us with the most human of all tasks. To pull ourselves together, to organize and forge a coherent tapestry of desires.