own sake, in a self-fulfilling manner. We callmotivationally marginalthose
needs or affective goals that subjects address only as means for attaining
something else.Affective goalscorrespond to organismic processes that cause
the well-recognized concept of needs and stem from the activity-directing
function of affects (or instincts). Spinoza called these organismic causal proc-
esses conation (conatus—Deleuze, 1990; Spinoza, 1995); and today they are
called conative effects of affect (Fredrickson, 2001; Greenberg, 2002; Pas-
cual-Leone, 1991). These distinctions are important, because praxis is often
more motivating than practice, and central motives are often more motivat-
ing than marginal ones. In contrast, extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation is
subject to individual and developmental differences (Eccles, Wigfield, &
Schiefele, 1998; Koller, 2000). We shall use this terminology to emphasize
that actual goals always involve an affective–emotive component that is ex-
pression of the organism’s infrastructure (essential internal constraints) and
dynamism.
Motivation interfaces or intertwines the organism’s affects–emotions and
knowing functions with the nature (constraints or resistances) of external–in-
ternal reality and the person’s activities in this environment. We think of the
reality-out-there as a universe of species-specificresistances(i.e., kinds of re-
lational perceptual patterning or of experiential outcomes) that emerge in the
individual’s activity, both praxis and practice, within a given context–situa-
tion. These resistances often are found to have dependency relations among
themselves. Thus reality is populated with packages of interdependent
resistances that are relative to each species. These packages can be inter-
preted, without falling into empiricist excesses, as indexingreal invariants(cf.
Gibson, 1979; Nakayama, 1994; Nozick, 2001; Ullmo, 1967); that is, rela-
tional aspects of reality that the individual can cognize and, in a nonem-
piricist but constructivist way, learn to re-present to himself or herself (as al-
luded by Kagan in the epigraph). Furthermore, these packages maintain with
each other fairly invariant interdependencies, which are exhibited by human
activity (praxis–practice) and are experienced as reality supports for activity
(these are Gibson’s affordances), or as hindrances that reality opposes to us
(obstacles or proper resistances). Motivation (which functionally intertwines
affect–emotion, cognition, and reality) leads the person tointernalize(learn)
these packages and their interdependencies, thus acquiring some, schematic
and actively modeled, re-presentation of what Tolman and Brunswik (1966)
called thecausal texture of the environment.
From this bio–psychological causal perspective, it is appropriate to recog-
nize that internalization (learning) of these reality packages, and the learning
of how they change conditional to our activity, necessarily implies three dis-
tinct categories of invariant, packaged resistances: (a) those that stand for the
targets of the person’s praxis or practice, which we shall callobs, to empha-
size that they are not objects but are dialectical-constructivist substrata for
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