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Kant’s image of this moral autonomy, like his vision of the mind as an elegant composition of
faculties capable of an ethereal, disembodied kind of action, is quite arresting. My guess,
however, is that few non-philosophers recognize themselves to be practitioners of such fantastic
agency, which is as indifferent to sense-perception as it is to the social consequences of an
action.
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The focus of more recent philosophical accounts of agency is on intentionality and
decision, more than obedience and submission. The regulative ideal operative here is agency as
the accurate translation of ideas into effects. This approach too chafes against everyday
experience -- where it seems that one can never quite get things done, where intentions are
always bumping into (and only occasionally trumping) the trajectories of other beings, forces, or
institutions. But its advocates acknowledge this: the extensive literature on intentionality is full
of subtle and refined accounts of the conditions of possibility and complexities of intentionality -
- conditions that are of course absent in the ideal case.
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And so challenges to this approach must
do more than charge that the ideal is unrealizable in practice. The issue for me, rather, is whether
figurations of agency centered around the rational, intentional human subject -- even considered
as an aspirational ideal -- understate the ontological diversity of actants.
A phenomenological conception of agency, in the tradition of Heidegger or Merleau-
Ponty, cautions against placing more weight on intellectual reason than it can bear. Instead, a
theory of agency must begin by acknowledging the essentially embodied character of human
action and the inter-subjective field of all human acts. This is because, as Diana Coole puts it,
“the operation of agentic capacities ... will always exceed the agency exercised by rational
subjects,” even as these subjects “acquire differential agentic capacities depending upon their
Convention