A Phenomenology of Hesitation

People who firmly believe in things are very good at performing actions.  They move around all the time.  They know other people.  They do not hesitate.

Hesitation is an expression of doubt, a subtle recourse to uncertainty, a sense of gravity toward inaction or inertia.  To hesitate is to create a gap in a natural stream of behavior and to find in that gap a subtle but uncomfortable consciousness of the structures underlying that behavior.  It is, in that sense, a kind of exegesis. 

Yet it takes us unawares.  We do not decide to hesitate.  There is something latent in our Background (W/Searle sense) that triggers a higher level interruption.  In that sense, hesitation seems more like a revelation.  It is as if it comes from without.

Those who do not hesitate are often the same sort of people who do not find discomfort in many kinds of social contexts.  They are the confident ones.  But confident in what?

Are they confident insofar as they do not seriously question their actions or the beliefs upon which their actions are founded?  Or perhaps they have occasion for questioning and doubt, but they are able to somehow cordon off this doubting into an isolated portion of their schedule, so that, at one time, they do not hesitate to act, but at another, they sit and do nothing except doubt.  This latter possibility seems unlikely to me.

Private doubters are public hesitaters.

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When we are easily startled, it is often because we have a “guilty conscience.”  We are afraid of being caught.

Hesitation occurs most of all in those who feel guilty about the state of their understanding of the world.  To hesitate is to be startled by a social state, and that startling is precipitated by a latent guilt on our part about the nature of things.

Hesitation, when it becomes too frequent, is diagnosed as a mental illness.  This is because it betrays a lack of social acuity, and an extreme lack of that kind just is “mental illness.”  (On the same token, one cannot become too confident, either.  The Golden Mean is an index of power:  The power that attempts to hem us in to a particular segment on this gradient I am describing).