Extract

The fact of ambivalence is familiar enough. We want the extra piece of pie, but we also don’t want it. We love someone, and yet find ourselves unable to completely commit. We discover feelings of immense relief at the passing of an elderly loved one who had a rough go of it at the end, but can’t help but to feel deeply ashamed by these feelings.

Despite this, the keen awareness most of us have to the phenomenon of ambivalence brings little succor. It is deeply unsettling to be ambivalent—to be torn between mutually incompatible commitments, or courses of action, or ways of being. Conflicts of these sorts seem to reveal that there is some deep and perhaps irresolvable incoherence in our selves. For this reason, many have regarded it as an especially serious kind of agential failing. How can we be healthy as agents if we cannot successfully excise psychological elements whose presence threatens to pull us apart?

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