The Metaphysics of Volition

Abstract

This chapter explores volition as critical to our experience of a selfhood that defies identity construction. The chapter uses Husserl to suggest the fallacy of associating the contents of consciousness with a description of consciousness. It then investigates poetics of Rachel Zucker and Samuel Coleridge to suggest that critical to poetry’s breed of imaginative process is an implicit volitional contribution of subjectivity. Also useful here is Keats’ notion of “soul-making” as key to the poetic process and, more largely, the path of greater insight and more intimate participation in the nature of the “real.” Dan Beachy-Quick’s poem “Portrait” provides a more contemporary take on what it is to “make” a self and how the metaphor suggests two selves: maker and the made.