A&E/Intro
Introduction: Three Selves—Objective, Subjective, and Reflective
Hi, Robbie, the author, here. I should speak up before we really get started to prevent misinterpretation and make explicit something important about "my story:" It is not a Sargent Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am story. "I-Robbie-me" has three distinct roles in the text. The first performs the central role, the subjective, intentional Robbie. He's the one the generates the story. He proposes and initiates the action. However central and significant, the intentional Robbie will often seem elusive, not because he's trying to hide, but because he is the subjective, inward Robbie, continually anticipating his circumstances, as best he can. The entire world as defined by his unique relations to all it contains determines his circumstances. The intentional Robbie lives an inner life, much of which doesn't appear outwardly because it consists in his efforts to understand circumstantial possibilities and to judge on that basis what to try to do, how, when, where, with whom, and why. Intentionality pushes the vast array of possibilities that have not yet occurred through the filter of present time, consigning most to the limbo of nothingness, passing some on into the realm of actuality, some warped and others unperturbed. Here among the actualities bubbling forth, the second Robbie keeps showing up, like Zelig, doing things at the center of the action. He's the objective correlate of the intentional Robbie. The objective Robbie is Friday's guy, just words and deeds; what he does and says declares the facts of the story, whereas the wanting and the meaning that moves the intentional Robbie are always undeclared, motivations that conditionally activate Robbie in his circumstances. The third Robbie is me, the Robbie writing this text late in life, 86+, from a privileged vantage, partially knowing what the two other Robbie's have inwardly thought and felt and outwardly said and done. I wasn't always well informed and my memory stinks, but that imperfect knowledge enables me to be a reflective Robbie who will, at opportunities like this, burst in to raise questions, frame contexts, and suggest interpretations. I want to make the significance of the story as clear as possible so that when we coalesce in the minds of readers, they will find us useful in their thinking, wherever and whenever it may take place.
With that purpose, I want at the outset to state what may be at stake in the whole story, for it won't be self-evident at the outset. I want to better understand how a sense of agency emerges for living persons as we repeatedly find ourselves having to act, finding ourselves ignorant in the midst of actual circumstances about what to do, how to do it, why, with whom, when and where. I think this emergence of agency in its unique set of circumstances takes place inwardly. It's a subjective phenomenon: the cook stirs the pot, attending to many conditions impinging on the dish she intends to make. Her skill in cooking emerges as she, herself, attends to all these conditions that constitute her circumstances. I'm not interested in recording the objective features these circumstances—listing ingredients, measuring their quantity, describing the various operations she performs in order to codify a recipe and a set of instructions for a cookbook. Instead, I want to understand how she developed the skill to choose among possible ingredients, to judge between too much, enough, or too little of each, and to acquire the facility to choreograph and perform the operations needed to actually cook such dishes.
[Fill out. . . . do this reflecting on my own case, seeking to understand how my own sense of agency, the ongoing emergence of what I can and should seek to do while immersed in the actual circumstances of my life, has come about. I do this cognizant that the lifeworld which became actual with me on August 17th, 1939, was unique to me and remains so as I in interaction with it have continued to develop. My reflections on this process give rise to no transmissible or reproduceable model. But the reflective effort may stimulate similar efforts by others, leading to more refined purposes, greater skills, and deeper insights. And as numerous reflections on how a sense of agency emerges in unique and different lives accumulates, insight into common resources and pitfalls may build, leading not to normative models, but to more helpful support and counsel to persons seeking to foster the ongoing effort by distinctive persons forming their abilities to act purposefully within their unique set of circumstances.