Unchosen transformative experiences and the experience of agency
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences July 1, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s11097-021-09753-y via Springer Nature
Summary
Unchosen transformative experiences, such as grief or religious conversion, disrupt an agent's core projects and sense of self. Drawing on William James and Matthew Ratcliffe, this philosophical analysis describes such experiences as a restructuring of systems of practical meaning. Using the enactivist concept of sense-making, the author argues that agents rebuild meaning through new patterns of bodily and social interaction, thereby reconstituting themselves as intentional agents under precarious conditions.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Agents reconstitute their intentional agency after unchosen transformative experiences by establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction that alter practical meanings. |
Abstract
Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion ( 1917 ) and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief ( 2018 ), I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent.