I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
To what extend in personal transformation do you choose who you might become? Or do personal transformations unfold through unexpected journeys?
In her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, philosopher Agnes Callard proposes the term proleptic reasoning to describe aspirational rationality, in which you aspire to be a kind of person that you are not yet. Proleptic means anticipating or foreshadowing — bringing a future event into the present. Callard uses it to describe decision-making and action-taking when you have only a vague and possibly incorrect notion of the possible value you will experience once your decisions and actions have played out:
In these cases, you do not demand that the end result of your agency match a preconceived schema, for you hope, eventually, to get more out of what you are doing than you can yet conceive of. I call this kind of rationality “proleptic.” The word “proleptic” refers, usually in a grammatical context, to something taken in advance of its rightful place…. Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better. Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.
The question I want to explore this morning is to what extent we choose transformation with some (albeit vague) notion of the values we’ll acquire versus underoing transformations that are, in some sense, thrust upon us and turn us into people we did not aspire to become.
Perhaps many transformations do not involve rationality — decision-making and action-taking according to some valid reasons, proleptic or not — but rather unfold in unexpected, contingent, non-chosen ways.
Many transformations occur when something bad or unexpected happens, and we respond. In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank writes that in quest stories, which is one form in which people suffering illness can narrate what happened, they are challenged by some physical interruption:
In quest stories, the interruption is reframed as a challenge. The self-story hinges on William May’s question, “How did I rise to the occasion?” The genesis of the quest is some occasion requiring the person to be more than she has been, and the purpose is becoming one who has risen to that occasion. The occasion at first appears as an interruption but later comes to be understood as an opening.
Many meaningful transformations occur in this way when someone is challenged by life and they respond to that challenge, but without any specific concept, vague as it might be, of who they will become in meeting the challenge. Thus there is no reasoning involved, proleptic or otherwise.
My own transformation(s)
Looking over the past fifteen years in which I transformed from being married and wanting to be married to where I am now: being single and wanting to be single, there was no aspiration involved, other than to find a good life. I had little to no recognition of the value of committing to singlehood. I didn’t know that over these years I’d become more capable and more autonomous, more adult than I ever had been before. I didn’t know that I would have to, in effect, stand up against society’s pressure to couple up. I didn’t know that I would start to cherish my solitude and independence so much.
Divorce was an interruption, and then I went on a quest and “rose to the occasion,” to use Frank’s words.
So not all transformations involve Callard’s aspiration and proleptic reasoning.
However, I do find in my current transformation — from managing my money in a routine and conventional way to becoming a “trader” instead, to spending my days learning complex options strategies and enacting them, to tracking my profit and loss daily, monthly, yearly — aspirational. I have a vague notion that not only will becoming a trader support my financial hopes and needs but it will also change me as a person, one with more acceptance of life’s volatility, one with more mental flexibility, one who takes risks not out of impulsivity but with better calculations of possible outcomes and better ideas about what to do under various such outcomes.
Callard discusses the choice to become a parent as aspirational, in that people choose it with some notion of who they might become through it: someone more patient and loving, someone more giving. But I didn’t take on parenthood with anything aspirational; I chose it because i wanted to get and be pregnant. Becoming a mother did change me but it was more in a Frank-style life-interrupted quest than an aspirational drive from within myself.
Midlife transformations
I imagine a midlife transformation could be more consciously chosen (Callard-style) or more interrupted-to-unfolding (Frank-style).
But where do Callard-style wishes for aspirational change come from anyway? I’d argue they arise from Frank-style interruptions and challenges.
I left my corporate technology career not entirely voluntarily (and not entireily involuntarily). And then I had to rise to meet that challenge. Eventually I found something to aspire to. So maybe these two paradigms interact with one another?