The Pleasure of Agency

This morning I completed a relatively complex task relatively efficiently; I was pleased with myself. But I was actually doing the task for someone else, as part of my research assistance duties for a Fellow at another college. Sure, I'd spent two hours on it, so I'd earned a certain amount of money, but there was a sense of achievement too. In fact, quite possibly a stronger sense of satisfaction than if I had been doing a similar task for myself.

I suppose it's pretty obvious. Doing something for someone else, we don't have to worry if it's really the right thing to do, or if it's a waste of time, or how it will affect the broader project. Or rather, we do think about those things, but we don't have ultimate responsibility for them: we are only agents. The pleasure of agency is the pleasure of surrendering one's will while remaining active in the world. It's not the same as giving up on life and staying in bed, but it does have similar roots.

There are many relationships that confer this pleasure of agency, active subordination to another's will: the army, or employment in any other hierarchical organisation, but also things like activism in a movement, and perhaps in a quite different way, love. Religious faith is another ('Islam', I remember from school, means 'surrender'); granted there's a difficulty in receiving clear instructions from the higher will, but that is also - by degrees - true for the other things too.

We seem to be wired to take pleasure in our own will: independence, the ability to set our own goals. Nobody wants to be told what to do all the time. But it seems equally true that we can have great pleasure in surrender, in performing tasks and aiming for goals set by others. What are the moral and political implications? Maybe Randian libertarians think that the pleasure of agency is a form of moral weakness; on the other hand Christians (and Buddhists) think we should entirely surrender personal will.

On a simple level it seems to me that a human nature which combines a critical will, capable of independent thought, with an inbuilt desire to serve the will of others, is a human nature we can build something on.