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.
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Notes
I am using ‘unchosen’ transformative experiences to refer to experiences in which events that are not chosen by the agent are epistemically and personally transformative. Carel and Kidd (2020) distinguish between nonvoluntary and involuntary transformative experiences, defining a nonvoluntary transformative experience as one that is imposed on the agent by external circumstances and an involuntary transformative experience as one that is an unintended consequence of a choice taken by the agent. In relation to this distinction, my analysis is of nonvoluntary transformative experiences, though it is applicable to involuntary experiences as well (see also Section 6 below).
The problem of agency I discuss refers to how one's agency and sense of self are disrupted during a transformative experience. I am not referring to a disruption to one’s “identity” in the sense of numerical identity (see Crone, 2021).
Here I am referring to the agent's experience of themselves, in particular as an agent with certain values, projects, and relationships. The possibilities for thought and action that the agent experiences in their environment correspond to a sense of oneself as an agent, and are reflective of the agent's practical identity (McQueen, 2017).
More precisely, these experiences fit the definition as well as the cases discussed in the literature. With respect to epistemic transformations, one might object to the claim that an agent cannot gain “what it’s like” knowledge third-personally, at least in principle (see Paul, 2014, p.9 fn.7).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). I am tremendously grateful to Evan Thompson for extensive feedback on previous drafts of this paper, and Carrie Jenkins, Jasper Heaton, and two anonymous reviewers for discussion and comments.
Funding
This work was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
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Markovic, J. Unchosen transformative experiences and the experience of agency. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 729–745 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09753-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09753-y