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3 Taking an Interest in One’s Future
The aim of the previous chapter was to determine what counts as an answer to the question, “Is what I am doing with my life meaningful?”The quality of meaningfulness at issue here is one that attaches to particular activities or life courses, where it is assumed that some have more meaning than others. I argued that, if “meaningful” is to do distinctive conceptual work, we should not equate “meaningful” with “agent independently valuable.” I also argued that, if we are to have a single criterion of meaningfulness, we should reject agent-independent plus accounts as well. Your doing something meaningful with your life is not a matter of your engaging in pursuits that are both agent-independently valuable and toward which you have positive subjective attitudes. It is instead, I suggested, a matter of expending your life time on ends that, in your best judgment, you take yourself to have reason to value for their own sakes and thus to expend your life’s time on.
In this chapter, I turn from a focus on the evaluative conception of ‘meaningful living’ to the motivating interest we take—or sometimes lose—in our own futures. Taking such an interest is one of the basic ways we connect ourselves to our future. In the first two sections, my aim is to get clear on what such an interest amounts to and in particular on how evaluating the meaningfulness of activities is connected with a motivating interest in the future.
Having at least some interest in one’s own future appears to be critical to leading the life of an agent. In chapter one, I distinguished between “leading a life” in the narrow sense of deciding what characterizing features we want our life as a whole to have, and “leading a life” in the broader sense of deciding how to expend time, including making lowly decisions about how to fill time when we have no choice but to waste it. That we are motivated to lead a life in either of these senses would seem to depend on our taking an interest in our own futures and thus an interest in shaping our future lives. Absent a motivating interest in our own future, as for example happens in depression, we still might find reasons to forge ahead—perhaps out of a sense of duty to others or to God, perhaps by having no alternative short of suicide to forging ahead, or perhaps on the basis of hope that a motivating interest might later be recovered.However, losing an interest in one’s future, undercuts acentral motivation for taking ourselves into the future via our agential activities. The bulk of this chapter is devoted answering the question, “What conditions our motivating interest in the future and thereby enables us to be interested in the business of leading the life of an agent?” The aim is not to give an exhaustive account of those conditions but simply to bring into view some of the central conditions for taking such an interest.
Taking an interest in one’s own future and finding one’s life meaningful might naturally be thought to be connected. Indeed, one reason for including some subjective component in a conception of meaningfulness—whether by adopting an attitudinal subjectivist, an agent-independent plus, or a normative outlook conception of meaningfulness--is to capture that intuitive connection. People who find their lives meaningful care about, feel engaged by, and are satisfied by their present and prospective lives and thus take an interest in the future. But exactly how are meaningfulness and interest in the future connected?
One possibility, suggested by Richard Taylor, is that there is a basic creaturely interest in continued activity that itself makes life meaningful, independently of our evaluation of life pursuits, precisely because it give us an interest in our futures. A second possibility is that the very things whose value makes our present lives meaningful also makes us interested in our futures. A third possibility, and one I intend to explore in some detail later in the chapter, is that interest in our own futures additionally depends on both non-estrangement from our own normative outlooks, and the hospitability of the future to leading the life of an agent.
<1> Creaturely Interest
In the course of thinking about what sort of meaningfulness might survive the fact that, within a geological time frame, human activities produce only ephemeral goods and thus appear ultimately pointless, Taylor proposes that the pointlessness of human endeavors is nevertheless compatible with taking an interest in them. A motivating sense of meaningfulness comes from “within us,” and is a function of one’s taking an interest in, and deeply involving one’s will in, the activities with which one occupies one’s time.[1] In his view, our involvement in those activities does not depend on either the value of those activities or their having an ultimate point, but simply on a basic creaturely interest in activity itself. Taylor takes both humans and animals to have this basic interest in activity (and aversion to the boredom of having, finally, completed everything there is to do). This, in his view, suffices to make life subjectively meaningful independent from how we evaluate our activities. As he says of beings with this creaturely interest, “their endless activity, which gets nowhere, is just what it is their will to pursue”;[2] “it is the doing that counts for them, and not what they hope to win by it.”[3]
I agree with Taylor that the interest we take in our lives is independent of theoretical reflections on the point or pointlessness of our activities within a geological time-frame. His view nevertheless seems incomplete. Human interest in leading a life is surely more complex and conditional than Taylor suggests. Brute animal drive to be active doesn’t exhaust for us (and probably not for some animals) the nature of taking an interest in living. That interest is likely to be conditional on all sorts of things, including thoughts about whether what one is doing with one’s life is valuable and thus meaningful in an evaluative sense. (In chapter six’s examination of boredom, we will take a closer look at what conditions interest in present activities.) Moreover, while Taylor’s short answer to the question of what interests us in our futures explains our interest in our immediate future, it does not explain our interest in the future that falls beyond, and sometimes well beyond, present activities. Nor does it explain variations in the degree to which we take a motivating interest in our futures. Depressed people may, for example, have some kind of creaturely interest in continued living, but beyond that very little motivating interest in proceeding into the future. And those who are not depressed may take a greater or lesser motivating interest in their futures. “What conditions our motivating interest in the future and thereby enables us to be interested in the business of leading the life of an agent?” thus needs a more complex answer than just “a brute interest in activity.”
<1>Meaningful Living
Both agent independent plus and my normative outlook conceptions of meaningfulness suggest one way that we might connect the evaluation of how well we are disposing of our lives with our motivating interest in our own futures. Finding your life’s pursuits meaningful is intrinsically connected to your having positive subjective attitudes toward those pursuits. On Wolf’s agent independent plus account, the meaningfulness of your life depends on your being subjectively attracted to the agent-independently valuable things you spend your life’s time on—you care about them, feel engaged by them, and are satisfied by their pursuit. On the normative outlook conception, the meaningfulness of your life depends on your having your own reasons for valuing the ends you pursue. You have not only reasons-for-anyone to acknowledge that they are worthwhile ends for anyone to choose, but also additional reasons to adopt them as ends for yourself and thus to adopt an engaged valuing attitude toward them. Thus an appeal either to subjective attraction or a valuing attitude toward what you are doing with your life’s time might explain why you take an interest in your future.
While it may seem obvious that we will take an interest in our futures so long as their contents are valued by us, we might nevertheless wonder how that is possible. A personal valuing attitude toward some activity, say, ballroom dancing, is, after all, simply a pro-attitude. It is not a temporally-oriented attitude. So a bit more needs to be said about the connection between such pro-attitudes and temporally-oriented interest in the future. How is the valuing attitude taken toward ends connected to taking an interest in one’s future given that valuing attitudes are not essentially future oriented? In addition, if your valuing attitudes toward your ends is to interest you in going on in general--that is, to give you a motivationally global interest in your future--your valuing particular pursuits would have to have psychologically global motivational effects. In presenting her agent independent plus theory, Wolf assumes that subjective attraction will have these larger motivational effects, thus attaching us in a particularly robust way to our futures. In her terms, subjective attraction “roots us motivationally”[4] and gives us a reason to take an interest in the world and in ourselves in general, including a reason to live.[5]But how could valuing attitudes toward particular ends give us a motivationally global interest in our futures?
<2>Valuing attitudes and interest in the future
Our first question was: How is the valuing attitude taken toward ends connected to taking an interest in one’s future given that valuing attitudes are not essentially future oriented? Valuing attitudes toward ends can make the future attractive only to the extent that they are connected with an anticipation of, expectation of, or imaginative projection of oneself into a future in which the objects of those valuing attitudes have a place. We project ourselves into the future through future-oriented desires, hopes, aims, future-oriented practical reasoning (planning), and temporally-extended activity. To value ballroom dancing as an end, for example, is to be disposed to have a variety of future-oriented desires (for example, to sign up for the Rhumba class), hopes (for example, that there will be opportunities for ballroom dancing), and, aims (say, of entering and winning the next competition), and with those aims, plans for how to realize them and the execution, over time, of those plans.
Desires, hopes, aims, and plans are intrinsically future-oriented. Desires and hopes are for the materialization of some states-of-affairs in the future. Settling upon aims involves framing intentions to realize them in the future. Making good on the intention to realize an aim in the future requires planninghow to do so, plans that may be more or less complex and whose execution may extend over longer or shorter periods of time.[6] In desiring, hoping, aiming, and planning, we thus anticipate, have expectations about, and imaginatively project ourselves into a future in which desires or hopes have been satisfied, aims realized, and plans carried out. When valued ends are the object of desires, hopes, aims, plans, and temporally extended activity, valuing attitudes get connected to a conception of the future as one that is hospitable to our lives being bound up with what we take ourselves to have reason to value for its own sake and thus what would make future living meaningful. Valuing attitudes towards ends thus render the future attractive precisely because, and to the extent that, they are connected with a variety of psychological states in which one imaginatively projects oneself into—or in Wollheim’s terms, previsages--a future in which involvement with the valued end has a place.
That valuing attitudes towards ends get connected with an imaginative projection of ourselves into a future bound up with those ends explains why losing, or being cut off from things we value, or their being damaged beyond repair undercuts our interest in the future. To have such valuing attitudes, under conditions of loss, is to continue imaginatively projecting oneself into the future via now unsatisfiable desires and an acute sense of the loss of what one had hoped for, aimed at, and planned for as one’s future. The future that one now anticipates appears unattractive because of its lamentable difference from the future that one continues to imagine as what-would-have-been or what-one-had-hoped-for.
<2>A motivationally global interest in the future
Turning now to the second question: How could valuing attitudes toward particular ends give us a motivationally global interest in our futures? In having ends, we adopt valuing attitudes toward particular relationships, activities, and experiences. You have as an end, say, reading mystery novels. The most obvious motivational effect of your valuing reading mystery novels, is that you would be interested in reading mystery novels in the future. The fact that you value reading mystery novels would explain why you take a motivating interest in that bit of your future that involves reading mystery novels, say, the evenings that you’ve set aside for doing so. But the fact that you value reading mystery novels doesn’t, by itself, explain why you would take a general interest in your future, an interest that has psychologically global motivational effects. Why do we take a motivating interest in our futures in general, including all those bits of the future that are notthe focus of desires, hopes, aims, and planning, such as getting dressed in the morning, answering the phone, and chatting with the Starbucks barista?
In chapter one, I suggested one possibility. The future saturates the present both in virtue of our consciously previsaging what we hope or expect it to contain and in virtue of our nonreflective sense of the future. The future that saturates the present, I suggested, has not only a content but a qualitative character as a result of some of the contents of the future dominating one’s general sense of the future. This idea of the future is also unitary--a conception of the future rather than a part of the future. Taken together this would explain how the value attached to bits of the anticipated future, could interest one not just in that part of one’s future, but in one’s future generally. We get up in the morning, get dressed, and get the day’s activities underway under a background conception of a future in which there will be space, among everything else that the future holds, for involvement with what makes life meaningful. So one explanation of our interest in our futures—our being “motivationally rooted,” as Wolf says—is that we live in the present under the idea of a unitary future whose qualitative character is dominated by those bits of the future that constitute meaningful living.
A second, related explanation of our motivationally global interest in our own futures is suggested by deep normative identity views of the self. Normative identity is deep, it might be thought, when there are some valued attachments, projects, or self-conceptions that are so fundamental to one’s sense of normative identity that one couldn’t envision being oneself without them.[7] In Frankfurt’s terms, fundamental carings impose “volitional necessities” on us.[8] Acting against what we care most deeply about is unthinkable, something we could not bring ourselves to do. In establishing the boundaries of the will, such deep attachments determine one’s core normative identity as an agent. Korsgaard proposes that a, similarly deep, normative identity consists in the “description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.”[9] That self-conception gives rise to unconditional obligations the violation of which would mean being “for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead.”[10] And in Bernard Williams’ terms, deep identity consists in having some ground projects or commitments that are the condition for one’s having an interest in going on at all, and thus that are objects of categorical desires.[11]
Recasting this idea in terms of normative outlook: not everything in our normative outlooks is equally central to our self-conceptions. Some ends will be especially important to our sense of who we are, what we stand for, and what makes our lives meaningful. Our taking a motivating interest in the future—being “motivationally rooted” in our lives—often depends heavily on our being able to project ourselves forward in time via the network of desires, hopes, aims, and plans that flow specifically from what is most central to one’s normative outlook and deep self-conception. Our having a motivating interest in the future—and thus an interest in leading a life—may thus depend on our ability to live in the present under the idea of a future in which our deepest self has a place.
1>Volitional Disability
So far, I have suggested that our taking aglobally motivating interest in our own futures and thus leading the life of an agent depends on our living in the present under an idea of the future whose content and qualitative character is connected to our conception of meaningful living. Are there other things that condition our interest in the future? Since it is especially important that beings like us, who are agent-evaluators, be interested in leading the life of an agent, we might think of the conditions we are interested in locating as background frames of agency.