A Greater Goal

In recent years Stoicism has had a revival, especially among young men online. Its message is often flattened into one idea: take control of your own life. Yet too often this agency is spent on indulgence as an end in itself: luxury, status, lust. Agency is a beautiful thing, and it can serve far greater purposes than the ones its modern gurus have found for it.

The modern version presents itself as a break with the idea that a life is simply something that happens to a man. But look at what its loudest figures actually do. They accept the game as given and use their agency to climb inside it. They never ask what agency is, or what it is for.

This essay is not about them. They only show that the question is still open. I want to answer both parts of it, in that order: first what agency is, and then what it is for.

What agency is

Agency is the capacity of individuals to act according to their own choices. It starts at a smaller scale than most people imagine. We tend to picture it as something done with the hands: building, buying, climbing. But that is an incomplete view of something whole, because agency starts in the mind.

Views of consciousness differ. Some hold that the mind is a soul acting upon the body, others that it is the activity of the brain itself. On either view the conclusion is the same. Choosing what to pursue, refusing what pulls at you, holding to a decision when it gets hard: these are things a person does, not things that happen to him. Before a single muscle moves, agency has already begun.

Some will object that neuroscience has shown otherwise. In Libet’s well-known experiments¹, a slow buildup of brain activity began before people reported the urge to move. But the task was to flex a wrist whenever the urge arose, a movement with no reason behind it and nothing to weigh. Closer to a fidget than a decision, it shows at most where an arbitrary urge comes from. It says nothing about how a person decides what to do with his life.

Nor does the question depend on it. Anyone who denies agency has to do so in an argument, and to argue is to offer reasons, hoping another person will weigh them and be persuaded. The denial is itself an act, performed by the one who denies it. A determinist may reply that he was compelled to argue as he did. Perhaps so, but then his words are only another force acting on us, like the wind, and no one reasons with the wind. We argue with people because we think they can judge what they hear and accept or reject it. To argue at all is to treat the listener as an agent.

I do not claim to have refuted determinism. But no one can decide what to do without weighing his options as if the choice were his, and no one can offer an argument without treating the listener as someone who can judge it. Agency in the sense that matters here, weighing reasons and acting on one’s choices, is something no argument can do without. It is not a conclusion the argument reaches. It is what the argument already assumes.

Why it matters

If agency cannot coherently be denied, the real question changes. It is no longer whether people have agency, but how much room they have to use it: how much of what they choose they can also carry out, and how much is decided for them. That question is not a private one. A civilization is the sum of what its people are free to attempt, and the more of that freedom is spread among many, the more it can build and correct. As Hayek argued, no planner can know what each person knows about his own circumstances², so every act of judgment that is taken from the person who knows and handed to someone who doesn’t is a loss. Coercion by other people is the plainest way that room shrinks, since it decides for a person what he could have decided himself. Those who bear the consequences of their choices learn from them, and a society of such people tends to learn faster than one where the consequences fall on somebody else.

Agency therefore operates on two levels. For the individual, it is the difference between living a life and being carried through one. For a civilization, it is the mechanism through which it learns and corrects itself. The two are not equally easy to secure, however. I can take agency over my own life simply by deciding to. I cannot decide it for anyone else.

What, then, is agency’s place in a good life? Many have tried to say what a good life is, and I will not settle that here. But most accounts share one requirement: whatever end goal a philosophy has chosen, a life has to be the person’s own. Imagine a machine built to do only good (assuming we could define this at all). We might admire the design, but we would not call the machine good, only its actions. We credit goodness to those who could have done otherwise and did not. Agency is therefore the condition of a good life, not the content of one. It decides who chooses, and says nothing about what is chosen.

What it is for

The easiest thing to do with freedom is to make life comfortable. Comfort is rest for the body and the mind, and rest exists so that we do not wear ourselves out. It is how a person is restored for effort, not what the effort is for. A life built around it has the order backwards, like a man who lives to sleep. He will never be short of recovery, but he has nothing to recover from.

None of this makes a life of effort a life of slavery. The slave works toward ends that are someone else’s, and rests only so he can be worked again. The man who builds what he wants to build rests for the same reason, but the end he is recovering for is his own. The effort is not taken from him. He chose it, and he can stop. What separates the two is who decides what the work is for.

But owning the end is not yet enough, because a man can own an end and still be steered by something else. There are two ways to want a thing. One is to want it for its own sake: the work, the craft, the answer. The other is to want it for what it brings: the money, the regard, the feeling of having arrived. The second man is moving, but the reward decides where, like a man following a carrot on a stick. A simple test separates them: offer a shortcut. The man who wants the reward takes it gladly. The man who wants the thing cannot, because taking it would cost him the very thing he wanted. A craft cannot be had without being practiced.

Greed is the plainest case of the second kind. The greedy man wants more than anything it could buy him, and since more is never the thing itself, nothing he gets can be enough. It only accumulates and asks nothing of him. The wants worth having are of the first kind, and they tend to demand something, because things worth doing for their own sake are usually hard: a craft that takes years to master, a business that has to be built, a question that takes a lifetime of thought. They need not be material. A man who spends years exploring the corners of his own mind is using his agency well and comes out of it changed.

Wants of this kind are not only good for the one who has them. They produce the theories, institutions and goods a society needs to progress. Much of it was not planned from above, and most of it could not have been. No one can know in advance which attempts will work, so progress comes from many people trying different things and learning from the results. A builder need not aim at society’s good for society to gain from his work. Society learns from the successes and the failures alike, since even failure produces knowledge of what does not work.

Agency makes a life your own, and it is best used on a want worth the effort it demands. The want is what sustains the effort, and sustained effort is what produces the results, which is why the reward, however welcome, cannot be the aim. Whoever takes control of his life and spends it on something he wants for its own sake improves his own, and the lives around him as a side effect. The gurus are right about one thing: agency is a must. But they climb a game someone else built, when there are wants worth far more, hard enough to change whoever pursues them. You can’t make others choose their own path, but you can walk yours where they can see it.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Benjamin Libet, Curtis A. Gleason, Elwood W. Wright, and Dennis K. Pearl, “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act,” Brain 106, no. 3 (1983): 623–42. ↩

2. F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30. ↩