Agentic

In my recent roundup, I recommended Cate Hall’s advice to be more agentic. In this post, I offer disjointed reflections on her idea of radical agency.

Agency, more or less

Agency is a matter of degree. You can have more or less of it, and you can improve. Hall writes:

Over the years, as I’ve gradually grown dumber relative to my peers through a combination of aging and making smarter friends, one of the main ways I’ve compensated has been through dialing up my agency, which I think of as something like “manifest determination to make things happen.”

As a first pass, “determination to make things happen” is not a bad definition of agency. I’m not sure what role “manifest” is playing here, but maybe “conscious” and/or “deliberate” are what she has in mind. Either way, agents make things they want happen—they are efficacious and purposive. Human agents, in particular, do so by way of desires, preferences, intentions, planning, and coordination—these constitute what I take the “determination” part to be. Finally, such determination will often explicitly appeal to reasons to do certain things and to do them a certain way. Typically, though not always, such reasons will be “manifest” to us—we access, weigh, evaluate, choose, and endorse them through a deliberative process that results in intention and execution. And we humans do this more reflectively and consciously than other animals, at least as far as we can tell, thanks to our abilities to not only consider our reasons but to reject them, dispute them, exchange them with others, and recursively reflect on such a process, and so on. Moreover, as Michael Bratman has long explained, human agency isn’t just purposive—so is animal agency—it is distinctively organized and embedded in planning structures, which require complex, higher-order, temporally extended representations and social coordination. I’ll discuss those differences in a future post.

However, much agency depends on “subpersonal” processes—instincts, drives, emotions, habits, routines, reflexes, and biases shape our behavior in ways that we typically only appreciate in hindsight and partially, if ever and at all. Human agency often happens much less explicitly, less consciously, and much too quickly, for conscious processing and deliberate reasoning. More often than we like to admit, the whole process is quite messy and opaque. This makes our agency often a lot more similar to animal agency. Still,