The large issue that I take Wrathall to be raising concerns the possibility that the current background conditions may be such that there is just no way to imagine any serious accommodation with the requirements of the Humanist Inheritance, the requirements we take to be necessary for mutual respect and the dignity of human life, some sense that we can run some part of the show. (An assigned social status may be a necessary but still not a sufficient condition of any robust sense of agency.) I agree that that possibility cannot be ruled out a priori and that Heidegger’s bleak account of the “Age of the World Picture,” an era of complete self-forgetting, might be historically apt.

Eldridge does not address that issue because he seems to think the right response to the question is “no qualification is needed.” And he suggests two things that I am not sure how to think together: both that the status of an autonomous agent is an “all or nothing” issue (and, again, that the answer is “all,” that the core issue is rationality, and that it is a universal, ahistorical, acultural “default” status easy and unproblematic to assign) and yet also that modern agents seem to have a great deal of doubt and anxiety about actually seeing themselves as such agents, about “being” modern selves. They have “anxieties of selfhood.” Does this mean that “we moderns” know what agents are and know that we are such agents (autonomous rational agents) but worry that – what? – we cannot now be what we know we are, and so must seek consolation? If so, that is enough of an opening in the door for my concerns to enter.

I have already tried to say why I find the Kantian either/or unpersuasive and to suggest why the scope, power, and conditions of agency should be seen as “thick” concepts with an essentially historical meaning and so expanding or contracting “borders.” (“We” do not hold families responsible for what individuals or ancestors did; “we” once did.) And that point is relevant to Eldridge’s remarks about anxiety. His summary of the conditions relevant to agentive status raise a socio-historical question straightaway if we see evidence that it has become difficult, perhaps increasingly difficult, for persons to think of themselves as fulfilling those conditions, unable to identify, say, the content of their beliefs, the degrees of their commitments, cannot settle on the right act-description for their deeds or find themselves in endless controversies with others about the proper act-description, find themselves committed to maxims of action that they know conflict but cannot see a way of abandoning, find themselves doing what they “believe” they absolutely ought not to do, or come to feel that what they resolve to do in important cases is largely irrelevant, that their futures are shaped otherwise. Is Wordsworth (or Kleist or Tolstoy, etc.) speaking for himself, or is he some sort of voice for a historical moment, something one would not find in Homer or Sophocles, or Augustine or Shakespeare? I suggest the latter, and that that opens onto a question of how we’ve come to such a point that will inevitably have to make reference to the social form of life within which such issues surface. One could say that we will not understand the conceptual content of the conditions in Eldridge’s account of rational agency until we know a good deal more about what counts for a person as a reason to act, what are inherited as the relevant deliberative criteria, and what the relation is between that reason and the bodily movement we count as the deed. I am not sure that philosophy, traditionally understood, can help us much with those issues, at least not on its own.

And this does not amount to any vast concession to the anti-agent point of view, no “giving up.” The point was to resist the idea of the absolutely autonomous practical point of view, eternally definitive of agency, logically exempt from qualification. The history of the notion is full of qualifications and there is no reason to think that modern suspicions about agency and subjectivity and authorship and so forth are all to be understood as bad arguments, because none have understood the eternal unassailability of the Humanist Inheritance. There is also certainly no reason to concede everything and try to act like we are not subjects of our deeds. As I tried to say, we can’t.

On the issue of literature being able to show how aspects of various social and historical practices oppress, demean, and damage persons: of course. Nothing about the position suggested implies we are stuck with how we go on, and literature often serves as the canary in the mine when the crisis begins. How we go on is almost always falling apart. But its appeal is precisely in the terms accessible to its own audience and the presentation counts as convincing and a reason for resistance in a way very different than the “court of last appeal” understanding of philosophy. And philosophical attention to what is going wrong or missing in the form of life presented can, when so directed, count as another different but related sort of reason. As to the issue of examples of such historically inflected philosophical interpretation, I have tried to do that elsewhere. (Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2000) and Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (2010).

On Tolstoy: I meant to suggest that Tolstoy’s deep skepticism about the capacity of human beings to plan and direct the future should count as one of the reactions to Enlightenment politics and Hegelian and Marxist inspired revolutionary programs that could be seen as contributing to the emergence of some considerably more modest expectation about the implications of falling under the category of agent in modernity. My appeal was not to Tolstoy’s unfortunately extreme version of Christian piety (and so his contempt for secular authority) but to such remarks as
The more deeply we go into the causes, the more of them there are, and each individual cause, or group of causes, seems as justifiable as all the rest, and as false as all the rest in its worthlessness.. Tolstoy, War and Peace

The underlying question is: when is a formulation of a problem being convincingly dissolved rather than solved (or, more to the point in this case, how would we come to see that a putative explanation is not false but irrelevant) and when is a tough question just being avoided, or even begged? This is such a serious and deep question, nothing said in this context will be adequate, but I would suggest that the frame of the problem is still practical in some sense. In this case, that means that we need to understand what sort of question the question about adequate explanation is. When is an explanation satisfying? It is extremely unlikely that the explanations we need for a question like: “Why did John insult Mary yesterday?” or “Why did so many Latinos vote for Obama?” will be a neuro-psychological or evolutionary biological one. And there will remain a practical paradox in any thought of any such third-personal account serving as a deliberative reason for an agent trying to decide what to do. Hence the concession that the “practical impossibility” argument will bear some weight in this position.

I agree with Gardner that a lot more needs to be done to show that all of this amounts to “agency enough,” but I am skeptical that the status of agency is of a “different,” or “transcendental order” than other sorts of social institutings. We hold each other to account in all sorts of ways, under all sorts of social conditions, and I think it remains unlikely that around the time of the Renaissance liberal democratic, morality-based European societies discovered some in-principle-always-available fact of the matter that set us on the right course starting sometime.

Gardner’s last remarks about the rather dystopian character of modernist literature is also quite important and difficult to answer briefly. I think there are resources inherent both in the very possibility of such widespread dissatisfaction and in the form it takes as well as in the sort of modest humanism (and the persistence in the faith in love) in writers like James and Proust and Joyce and Faulkner and Yeats to answer such a question, but that is surely material for a book not a blog.

I don’t think it is at all controversial to consider thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx and Freud as naturalists, attempting to understand actions as bodily events subject to causal explanations, but I agree with Arata that they are multi-dimensional thinkers who are better understood as “offering re-descriptions” of what count as actions and motivations. Freud can even be understand as extending the scope of psychological explanations, not restricting them. (What might have appeared things that happen to us are really intentional doings, just unconscious intentional doings.) We would just have to hear more (from him and from me) about what counts as “an alternative picture of what human agency is really about” to have a sense of what is being suggested.

I appreciate the point about Kant wanting to say that we can “let ourselves” become the passive spectators of our lives, but that has always seemed to me at bottom a kind of circumlocution that does not get to the main point. We are still unconditionally responsible in such a tortured formulation of something we do (it does not happen to us, but we “let” it happen, decide to let it happen; just another action). Likewise with making our moral vocation a life project in itself. It is still the case hat we should do this because we are obliged to; obliged to develop our talents and be beneficent, to be on the watch constantly for the serpent of self-love rearing its predictable head. Not, I think, a persuasive picture of ethical life.

But I agree that it is above all doubt about the possibility of self-knowledge, and so the possibility of ascribing (sincerely) intentions to oneself that do not seem expressed in what we actually do, that is a more important source of modern skepticism about the requirements of agency. This does indeed emphasize the unavoidably belated relation we have to the meaning of what we did and why (“really”) we did it, both of which are often only apparent later. And it means that “gradations” of agency have something to do with degrees of self-understanding; greater agency does not mean greater causal power but a greater ability to identify with my deeds, to understand them as expressions of me. This is inevitably a socially mediated possibility since my claims about what I did and why are imbricated in what others take me to be doing and why.

It is difficult to use metaphors like “how we hold each other to account,” or “how we adjust what we take agency to require” without creating the sense of intentional, explicit negotiation. That is of course not true. There is no common practice which individuals or groups seek to influence or change by argument or strategy. In crisis or revolutionary situations, something like this happens, but such a description would still be too intentionalist. So it is difficult to answer Speight’s first two questions without a longer discussion of some example of specific social change.
I am not at all sure that philosophy itself can unite Tolstoy’s profound skepticism about human agency with his vivid picture of what agents are called on to DO from the first person perspective. It certainly cannot help if philosophy is conceived as assessor a priori of contested claims like these. On the issue Speight raises, perhaps Shakespeare would be of more use than Spinoza or Hegel.

One reason might be that the postulation of an inherent commitment in ordinary language to an ideal speech situation has raised even larger problems for Habermas’s attempt to demonstrated that there is such a commitment inherent in language itself, as a “quasi-transcendental” condition. If there is such a “commitment” at all, it seems most definitely one specific to a human community at a time, and so we are back with the same problem.

One (all too brief) way of looking at it is to begin by denying there is much of a “wholesale” position that we need to have on his issue, to adopt one of Brandom’s terms. All the issues are retail; they are claims connected to instances of breakdown (a central norm’s beginning to lose its grip) and analyses, retrospectively and not independently secured by any claim to a “logic,” that purport to show that we are doing somewhat better at a time at what we were trying to do somewhat more poorly at an earlier time. Underlying all of this there must be some story about what “we are trying to do” at all, but Hegel has a go at that one. If the claim is that the historicizing social status position is right, but relativistic historicism is only avoidable if we can secure any claim about any practice at a time only by a vast historical theodicy or logic of progressive development, then we are in some trouble. But why think that we need this, especially since we are not going to get it? Retail is fine, of there is no wholesale available.