People who are on the lookout for ways to manage themselves—to stay in shape, get more sleep, eat better, be more patient with their loved ones, read more books, etc.—know what they want, but they are unsure how to achieve this goal. If these people turn to self-help books, online lists of rules, or personal advice, they will encounter a variety of systems for self-regulation in the relevant domain. The proliferation of these methodologies of living invites a carpe-diem backlash: why not just live your life instead of imposing rules everywhere? Eat what you feel like eating!
Suppose one is taking a conscious, reflective, improvement-seeking approach to some area of one’s own life, which is to say, one is exercising agency in relation to one’s self. One option is to manage oneself by way of some new rules; another is to let go of the reins and gravitate in the carpe diem direction. Either way, one is regulating oneself: “carpe diem” is the special case where the only rule is to follow no (other) rules. But those are not the only options, because not all reflective self-improvement takes the form of self-regulation.
My book Aspiration articulates a third way to exercise agency in relation to one’s self, one that is not regulative—not even in the thin, carpe-diem sense. Regulation puts into effect some conception— or lack thereof—as to who one would like to be. Sometimes one neither has, nor despairs of having, an answer to the question of who to be; instead, one is in the process of working one’s way towards an answer. I call this process “aspiration”: it is rational, agential value acquisition.
When I regulate myself, I am trying to bring my behavior, habits, desires and affective responses into line with where my understanding of value already sits. (In the book, I use the phrase “self- cultivation” for the special case of self-regulation in which what one is trying to change about oneself is a desire, but on reflection I find it more useful to invoke the broader category.) When I aspire, I am trying to acquire a new value, including the understanding in which the grasp of the value partly consists. Whereas self-regulation is a value-implementation process, aspiration is a value-learning process.
How does one plot a course to an unknown practical destination, and how does one motivate oneself to follow it? The aspirant faces difficulties unknown to the self-regulator, who can shape one part of herself while residing elsewhere, in a part not under construction. If we assume, as I do, that a person’s values are who she fundamentally is, then the aspirant, in some sense, creates herself.
My book tries to answer these three questions about aspiration:
What reasons do aspirants act on? Answer: proleptic reasons, which is to say, reasons that anticipate a grasp of value they do not yet possess;
What kinds of motivational conflict do aspirants experience? Answer: intrinsic conflict, which is to say, conflicts that cannot be adjudicated by deliberation.
How is self-creation possible? Answer: teleologically, which is to say, aspirants are guided by norms that are only grasped fully by the self that they are, at a causal level, bringing into being.
Perhaps even more important than providing answers to those questions is motivating the reader to ask them, by highlighting what makes aspiration so paradoxical. It is my contention that aspiration, on the most natural understanding of it, does not fit into the background frameworks that currently dominate academic philosophical work in the theory of rationality, moral psychology, and the theory of moral responsibility.
First: if we are internalists about practical reasons, aspiration will seem impossible, because the aspirant doesn’t act on an internal reason. Second: if we assume that the most fundamental conflicts are those between incomparable or incommensurable values, we will fail to get aspirational conflict into view, because the aspirant’s conflicts not only cannot be settled by deliberation, they cannot even be deliberatively posed.
Finally: when it comes to moral responsibility, consider the following dilemma: your values are either a product of forces external to you, or they are the results of self-regulation governed by some other value. If we accept the exhaustiveness of this dilemma, then there is no such thing as self- creation: in the first case because one is not creating one’s self but rather being created; in the second case, because one is not creating a self but rather bringing some subordinate aspect of one’s self into line with a prior conception of value that represents the core of the already-existent self.
To dwell on the last point: aspirants are to be distinguished not only from those who merely regulate an already established self, but also from those who acquire a self without authoring it: if someone’s values were entirely the products of her environment (via upbringing, peer pressure, brainwashing, etc.), then she did not arrive at them aspirationally. The fact that you ended up somewhere new doesn’t entail that you got yourself there.
Because aspiration is flanked by unparadoxical phenomena, there is a strong temptation to eliminate the paradox by way of redescription. The strategy of solving-by-redescribing should be familiar from discussions of akrasia or weakness of will (freely acting against one’s better judgment). The skeptic can say, of a purported case of akrasia, “she didn’t really believe that it would have been better to act otherwise,” or, “she acted under compulsion.” The case of the addict and of the person who changes her mind last minute may raise philosophical problems, but they aren’t the same as the ones the theorist of weakness of will was trying to address. For this reason, any novel or radical philosophical moves the theorist of weakness of will makes to address (what she takes to be) the phenomenon are bound to look unnecessary to the skeptic.
The theorist of aspiration is in a similar position: if a skeptic takes a case of aspiration and tweaks the details slightly, he will find himself faced with a case of self-regulation, or one in which the person fails to count as the agent of her own transformation. Neither of those phenomena require us to invoke proleptic reasons, or intrinsic conflicts between evaluative perspectives, or self-creation. The apparatus I invoke in my book will seem otiose to such a skeptic.
This lands us in something of an argumentative quagmire, because calling such a person a “skeptic” already prejudices the rhetoric unfairly in my own direction. The “skeptic’s” view is that she is not being skeptical of the existence of anything, because there is no third, distinctive, phenomenon of “self-creation” apart from, on the one hand, self-regulation and, on the other hand, being subject to forces one does not control. She might put her point this way: if there is a change, it must be the product of some forces or other. Either one subjects oneself to forces under one’s own control, or one is subject to forces one does not control.
The best way forward—both for defending against redescription and for getting a sense of the argument of the book—is to present a case of the (purported) phenomenon in enough recognizable detail to render those various redescriptions implausible. I offer up the following case, drawn from my own life:
I attended a college with a hefty physical education requirement: three gym classes. A physical fitness test administered in the first week of classes afforded students the possibility of testing out of all, two or one of those requirements, but I was one of the few physically unfit enough to be left with the full requirement. I had always hated gym class, and persuaded myself that the requirement was not serious. I was wrong. Midway through my senior year, my academic advisor informed me that unless I immediately replaced 3 of my academic courses with an intensive, 3-in-1 gym class, I would not be allowed to graduate.
I still remember the first day of the class, looking at the hostile, sullen faces of the students who were in the same position as I was. I was unsettled by the realization that my face must have looked just like their faces—so closed to the possibility that there was anything to be learned here. On the spur of the moment I decided not to be like them. Instead of ‘pretending’ to use machines, I made some effort; I jogged slowly, but I jogged rather than walking; I tracked my progress on log sheets somewhat less ironically than my fellows. At the end of the quarter, I still hated gym class.
I thought perhaps what I had hated was the “class” aspect of it, so in the following years I did a lot of exercising on my own: jogging, hiking, biking, swimming. I lived in a beautiful place, and it was nice to be outside, but I still didn’t like exercise very much. I wove back and forth between individual and group exercise—I joined a biking club, and I took a variety of classes both at the University gym and at yoga studios. Over time, I moved in the group-exercise direction: I found myself picking smelly, crowded gyms over beautiful landscapes in which I had to exercise solo.
20 years after having decided to try and appreciate “gym class,” I can say I do. In fact, I like all the things I hated about it as a child: the fixed time constraints, the externally imposed rules, the invidious comparisons of scantily clothed bodies, the locker room socializing, the fear of doing something ‘wrong’ and being ridiculous, and above all: the shared suffering.
Let us consider what we can learn about aspiration from this example of it. First, notice how this process started. The beginning of my aspiration was punctuated by a decision—“I am not going to be like them!”—but it was not very efficacious, intelligent, or motivationally sustaining. It was close to a whim, and one could easily imagine the story going nowhere from that point.
Second, notice how it proceeded. Most of the work was a matter not of deciding or intending or choosing to be some kind of person, but of doing. I changed my attitudes towards exercise by exercising—but, I should add, exercising in a distinctive way, namely, accompanied by the feeling that “this is not how I should be doing this. I am not doing it right.” In the early years, I was quite self-conscious in group exercise classes, I often felt silly, awkward, like I was faking something. Also relevant was the way in which I conducted not exercising—there were long stretches in which I did no exercise, but I didn’t feel ok about that. I felt I was missing something.
Third, how it ended: Nowadays, when I’m dancing around in a smelly gym, I don’t feel at all as though I’m pretending. I am all in. It feels natural. But I worked hard for that “natural” feeling. I’ve noticed, over the years in locker rooms, that the young women with perfect bodies are the ones who contort themselves so as to undress behind a towel; we middle-aged ladies stroll around naked, comfortable in our skin. But we’ve had decades to get there!
If you had asked me, early on, what I was working for, I wouldn’t have been very articulate in explaining what I was after. Now, however, I am in a position to tell you the answer: There is a beauty in synchronized movement on which no demands for aesthetic value are placed, and in pushing your body to its limits under the command of another. There is deep camaraderie in the experience of shared pain, suffering and exhaustion. I learned, over the years, that the animality of exercise frightens me somewhat, and this fear emerges most pointedly when I am alone; the temporal and spatial confines of group exercise blunt and contain the danger. “We are animals” is a safer thought, to me, than “I am an animal.” Even the element of competition, serves, for me, to humanize the activity. I like being naked with other women in the locker room after class: we have done all we can, we have ‘used ourselves up.’
Although exercise is a classic arena of self-regulation, I don’t think my story fits that mold. I didn’t have some independent conception of the value of exercise—health, weight loss, stress-relief—in the service of which I was trying to “drag myself” to the gym. I wasn’t trying to inculcate habits in myself, for the simple reason that I didn’t take myself to be in a position to know which habits to inculcate: I was exploring, experimenting, learning as I went along. This was an active process, so it would also be inaccurate to characterize the change as one that just happened to me. I didn’t somehow, passively, “end up” appreciating something. I was trying to see what was to be said for (and felt and wanted in) a certain domain—I was acting under the suspicion that there was more to the thing I hated than met the eye. I was trying to wise up.
If having a reason for action means knowing why you are doing something, then there is a sense in which, for a long time, I did not have a reason for engaging in exercise. Or at least: I did not “have” that reason as much as I (could see that I) would later, once I had wised up. In a case of aspiration, the point of what you are doing is something you are in the process of learning, and therefore do not yet (fully) know. This is how aspiration contrasts with self-regulation, in which you know full well why you are doing what you are doing.
But it would also be wrong to say I had “no reason” for exercising. At the outset I had a very flimsy reason (“don’t be like them!”), and as I went along, I grasped more and more of the answer I am now in a position to articulate. And it is important that I understood myself to be actively engaged in reaching for a better answer. Not even at the outset did I feel that “to be different from the other physically unfit college seniors” was the real or complete reason to exercise. Even at the time, I would have been somewhat ashamed to present that as my reason—though I would also have been unable to offer more. My own understanding of what I was doing was insufficient, and that fact itself did not escape my notice.
In such a case, an account of my motivation cannot restrict itself to “a desire to be different”; it must also include a kind of placeholder spot for the understanding I would later acquire. My name for the kind of reason someone acts on where (she sees that) part of her rationale is as yet ungrasped is “proleptic.” Her action outstrips her current valuational understanding and points towards her future one. The divide between the two ‘faces’ of her reason—e.g. exercising in order to be different, and exercising for its own sake—is a deep one. The ‘inward’ face captures what she can already grasp about the value of exercise, and the ‘outward’ face represents the evaluative perspective she will have on exercise once her aspiration is completed.
These points of view cannot be reconciled by deliberating. To illustrate: suppose ‘wanting to be different’ is not a strong enough reason, in the face of physical pain, to exert myself in using the weight-lifting machines; but I also feel that once I become someone who values exercise for its own sake, I will view that pain as in some way good. For the person I aspire to be, the balance tips readily in favor of weightlifting. (Or so I believed at age 21. As a matter of fact, I never ended up warming to the machines.)
The aspirant has not quite succeeded in acquiring a new value system, or in losing her old one. For this reason comparisons that straddle these value perspectives are difficult: how do I weigh a consideration that dominates a point of view I am trying to lose against one that is central to the point of view I do not yet have? The fissure contained in a proleptic reason is not one the aspirant can heal by reflection or deliberation. Instead, aspiration affords her a diachronic path to unity: over time, she comes to more completely inhabit the second point of view. But this only works if, at a given time, when she must decide between lifting weights and slacking off, she regularly manages to proleptically ‘overreach’ her current grasp of the value of exercising. The value of being different might not, by her current calculations, outweigh the disvalue of the pain; she does it anyway.
Let me end with one final moral from this story: aspiration is self-creation, and selves are quite particular and idiosyncratic. Part of why I’d always hated gym class was that, as a cerebral, asthmatic, clumsy and friendless child, I was terrible at every aspect of it. Over the years, I’ve improved only somewhat: I still fall more often than the people around me. The solution to this predicament preached at me for years was becoming less competitive: stop measuring yourself against others, ignore them, just do your personal best, focus on being healthy, etc. Those were values put forward by gym teachers, as to the meaning of exercise for them, but they failed to provide a kind of meaning I could ingest. I am a very competitive person, and looking around me at what others are doing was helpful in sustaining my attention in physical activity; moreover, considerations of health are not very motivating for me. Instead, I have found ways to revel in the group dynamics, in the suffering, and in my own lowly place in the athletic hierarchy. I’ve found the meaning of exercise for me.