Diachronic Agency and Narrative Understanding

In this dissertation I develop an account of diachronic agency that involves narrative understanding. This mode of practical reasoning emerges from the complex interaction between emotional cadences, relevant social contexts and the motivational scripts of agents who lay claims upon us. Narrative understanding is (a) essentially retrospective, (b) couched implicitly in the cadences of our emotional life, and (c) dependent on occupying stances of different dramatic personae. Narrative understanding generates distinctive reasons for action and is irreducible to practical rationalities that aim to integrate agency synchronically or diachronically. Intellectualist forms of practical reason, namely those involving universalizing, inductive generalizing or the creation of increasingly coherent desiderative profiles, do not explain how historical self-understanding engenders reasons for action, and presuppose its proper functioning. Volition-based accounts of practical reason involve processes that structure agency diachronically. Some argue that the heart of agency is constituted by stable planning attitudes and related self-governing policies. But central cases of personal transformation over time do not sit well with this picture. Rather than the center of agency, plans and policies should be understood as mere expressions of deeper commitments to persons. These commitments and the temporal transformation they entail are explained by narrative understanding in ways they could not be by reference to the policies that codify them. Other volition theorists hold that our deepest commitments are traced by our diachronic loves. I point out two main limitations for an influential view of volitional love. I suggest that paradigmatic features of narrative understanding are essential for overcoming these limitations. Narrative understanding opens up the fruitful possibility of conceptualizing agency as a chorus of dramatic personae. While each persona can be conceived as a stable character that expresses an enduring emotional cadence, the agent must sometimes simultaneously occupy different and even jarring narrative stances. Practical deliberation then implies inhabiting different dramatic personae in mutual dialogue. Furthermore, essentially retrospective phenomena such as personal forgiveness (and atonement) not only accommodate, but they seem to require a model of dramatic-narrative agency.