A Question of Agency

May 1, 2009

Nature, properly speaking, is not an agent. Agency is a characteristic of persons. Persons are, amongst other things, those beings that can fit their means to their ends. Persons can choose their actions and thereby ennoble their goals. Not everything that acts, chooses. Nature and all strictly natural phenomena do not choose.

There is a tendency, consequent of our anthro-centrism, to think in terms of agency--even regarding nature and natural phenomena. A case in point: natural selection. To select is to choose, to scan a field and endorse one option over others. Selection is only available to agents. Yet, natural selection is one of the most commonly referenced attributes of nature. Linguistically, this houses a confusion. Nature does not select species to survive anymore than a trash can selects to be gray. A more proper term, free from agency baggage, would be natural action.

Only agents can be subject to questions of why. Nature, an object--the object, can only admit questions of how. When a person poses to herself the question, "Why me?" to whom is she addressing? Herself? No--selfhood is not a choice, it is a given. Nature? No--nature does not choose, it gives (and takes) solely in the sense that it does, not that it decides to do. Can there be any other appeal to this most interior of questions? Is the disavowal of any other subject--the Subject--liberating? Does a person, when they deny a greater agency, gain greater fulfillment? Is a victory worthwhile when it is thin--when one responds to the question, "Why me?" with "Don't ask,"? Ought we rebel against this natural questioning tendency, our disposition to address the wider world as an agent? Or does the persistence of this question suggest that there is something real that is at once real and not natural?