Quotes about Agency

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will--namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

"There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe." — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The person in peak-experiences feels himself, more than other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities and of his perceptions. He feels more like a prime-mover, more self-determined (rather than caused, determined, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, bossed). He feels himself to be his own boss, fully responsible, fully volitional, with more “free-will” than at other times, master of his fate, an agent.

KW:  Fred's first criticism had to do with the four drives of any holon.  In SES, I listed these as agency (horizontal individuation) and communion (horizontal linking), and self-transcendence (vertically moving up) and self-dissolution (vertically moving down).  Fred pointed out that the first three drives were, correctly, the healthy version of those drives; but for the fourth drive, I had incorrectly given the pathological version of the descending drive.  The healthy downward drive -- the drive of the higher to embrace and enfold the lower, which I call agape or compassion, or what might be called self-immanence (the dialectical opposite of self-transcendence) -- I actually gave as thanatos, which is not the embrace of the lower by the higher but the dissolution or regression of the higher to the lower.  When it came to vertically moving upward, I had correctly given that as Eros or self-transcendence, seeking out higher and wider wholeness.  The pathological version of Eros is phobos, which is not the transcendence of the lower but the repression of the lower.  But when it came to vertically moving downward, instead of giving the healthy agape -- where the higher embraces, enfolds, and "loves" the lower, as a molecule embraces its atoms -- I inadvertantly gave the pathological thanatos, where the higher merely dissolves into the lower, dies or decomposes (e.g., the molecules dissipate into their constitutive atoms).  So the four drives should be agency and communion, and self-transcendence and self-immanence (not self-dissolution).

This is a brilliant criticism, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who went over those ideas, only Fred spotted it.  (Incidentally, I still sometimes list the fourth drive as self-dissolution, simply because that is so much easier to understand in an introductory statement.  But my actual position should now be clear, thanks to Fred...