works of art as products of thought and action, need not replicate or match
any isolated“inner,”“private,”mental object, plan, intention, or meaning.
Second, actions are normallyoverdeterminedby a number of reasons and
motives, both conscious and latent but articulable. Why did McEnroe serve a
slice serve wide in the ad court? In order to draw his opponent wide, to force a
difficult return, to win the point, to even the match, to win Wimbledon, to
acquire the number one ranking, to win the admiration and respect of others,
to make money, to exhibit a certain stylistic flair, because for a left-hander it is
the most comfortable serve that is effective in that situation, because Borg has
had trouble with that serve all day, because the position of the sun makes the
toss for that serve the most reliable one available. All of these may reasonably
be regarded as among McEnroe’s reasons for serving as he did, insofar as he
forms his intentions and plans and carries out his action within a larger
institutional, social, and conceptual framework. Though none of these reasons
need occur to him explicitly in the moment of action, any of them could,
depending on the context in question, be acknowledged by him as a reason for
doing what he did. While McEnroe has a certain first-person authority as a
master of the conceptual repertoire of English (and of tennis) in reporting his
own reasons for action, there is often not any single, decisive, governing reason
occurring in consciousness to be reported, but rather an indefinite set of
considerations that can help us to understand or make sense of his action,
depending on the context of questioning. With less isolatable, more complex,
and temporally sustained actions, the overdetermination of actions by reasons
only increases. Why does one have children, or buy one house rather than
another, or practice the cello?
These complexities of overdetermination by reasons apply also to the
making of art. Shakespeare may be reasonably taken to have done many
things for many reasons in writingHamlet: to work out his thoughts about
modern individualism, to give expression to his ear for language, to develop a
successful play and make some money, to depict interactions between men
and women, to please James I, and so on. When we undertake to understand
what Shakespeare did, we may turn to any one of a number of reasons–
publicly intelligible and available strategiesin a problem context– that
Shakespeare may be supposed either to have entertained explicitly or to be
capable of accepting as characterizations of his enterprise. We need not
worry over which is the single, governing, decisive, occurrent reason in his
private mind for his complex action, for there is none.148 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art