Concern and control in human agency

The agential control problem

I begin with the observation that views of human agency in psychology almost always follow from premises about the nature of the world, either explicitly or implicitly, leading to what might be thought of as a world-first bias. Here I use the term world to refer to the structures, forces, or phenomena taken to surround agential action, possibly also including the human body itself, depending on how one theorizes. ³ This prioritizing of world is discernable throughout the psychological literature of agency, seen perhaps most clearly in views that assume a broader context of forces impinging on the agent, as in self-regulation (e.g., Bandura, 2006; Burnette et al., 2013; Carver & Scheier, 1981; Mischel & Mendoza-Denton, 2003), self-determination (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2002; Ryan & Deci, 2017), and metacognition of agency (e.g., Metcalfe et al., 2010; Moretto et al., 2011); or sense of agency (Braun et al., 2018; Moore, 2016) literatures, as well as a variety of other, theoretically distinct positions (for reviews, see Baumeister et al., 2010; Martin et al., 2003; Sappington, 1990). In this respect, agency has typically been treated as a secondary phenomenon—even if it is the main subject of theorizing—and as such, bears what might be thought of as the burden of fit. Whatever one may theorize about agency, given its secondary status, it is almost always expected to cohere with what is already assumed about the world in which it is situated.

With regard to world itself, a naturalistic view is typically presupposed in psychological theories of agency (as can be seen in reviews e.g., Martin et al., 2003; Sappington, 1990; Yanchar, 2011). In terms of its order and structure, naturalism offers a conception of world fundamentally preoccupied with control by causal forces, for example, control of matter in motion by Newtonian laws, control of bodily functions by biological mechanisms, control of ecosystems by chemical processes (e.g., photosynthesis), and so forth. ⁴ In describing this naturalism, Guignon (2012) stated:

The “default setting” of contemporary naturalism is a thoroughgoing physicalism, the view that all that exists in the universe is physical substance in the sort of causal relations countenanced by the best natural science of the day (or, alternatively, by the ideal natural science toward which all current research approximates). (p. 98)

Furthermore, it is commonly assumed that the only alternative to this determinant order of control is randomness (i.e., disorder, chance, or luck; see Kane, 2005; Williams, 1992). With this assumption in place, there appears to be only one viable option for understanding the world in which agency is expected to fit, namely, a determinant world structured and controlled according to the forces of natural science. And given the predominance of control-oriented naturalism, it should come as no surprise that the prevailing scholarly discourse surrounding agency would be cast in like terms, what might be thought of as a discourse of control. This is a discourse in which the field’s vocabulary, categories, concepts, ways of picking out phenomena, forms of explanation, and rhetorical style all reflect the assumption of a determinant, control-oriented order. From within the limits set by this discourse, there are no conceptual resources for articulating agency as anything other than a basic matter of control and countercontrol.

With control-oriented naturalism treated as the default setting, efforts to theorize agency face a considerable challenge: showing how humans qua agents exert some efficacy among the postulated forces, structures, and influences of the surrounding world, whatever their source may be. There is more to this challenge, however, as any form of control associated with agency must fit a certain model of explanation; it must be devoid of concepts not entailed in, or coherent with, the default setting; it must be, in this sense, free of “ontic bulge” (Dennett, 1969, p. 5) such as mysterious “extra factors” (Kane, 2005, p. 39) or some kind of “special capacity” (Pink, 2004, p. 67). The problem facing agency theorists, then, concerns how agents can exercise some degree of control (or countercontrol) without invoking ontic bulge, given the determinant–causal structure inherent in naturalistic accounts of the world. This might be referred to as the agential control problem.

To be sure, a number of libertarian and compatibilist positions have offered sophisticated responses to this problem as I describe it here. However, no significant convergence on the most viable way forward, besides a general leaning toward compatibilist views, has been achieved (see reviews by Griffith, 2013; Kane, 2005; Martin et al., 2003; Smith, 2015). Notwithstanding the creativity and sophistication of scholarly work in this area, it has been beset with debate and criticism, suggesting significant conceptual weaknesses in efforts to provide solutions and a general lack of discernable progress (Dennett, 1978; Guignon, 2002; Robinson, 1985; Searle, 2007). Thus, while numerous positions have been advanced, none has received anything like a groundswell of support, suggesting that it is not clear how agential control can be possible in a world of determinant, controlling forces.

A hermeneutic, agency-first strategy

Why is the agential control problem so stubborn, so seemingly insoluble? Here I briefly mention what seem to be the three most viable possibilities for answering this question. First, the problem is highly complex, which suggests that more work is needed; but a solution will come with continued scholarly effort. Second, the problem has no solution, as human agency does not actually exist, which in turn renders efforts to theorize agential control unnecessary. Third, the framing of the problem itself is problematic, set up in a way that obviates the possibility of a compelling solution; thus, a different way of looking at agency and world is required. Clearly, the first two of these possibilities have their advocates. Taking an unorthodox turn, I wish to suggest that the third of these possibilities warrants serious consideration. But to contend that the agential control problem is framed erroneously in the first instance is to imply another possibility, namely, that alternative framings of agency and world—ones that do not hinge on matters of control and countercontrol—may lead to a more workable space for theory in this area. I offer one such alternative here.

In presenting an alternative way to conceive of agency and world, I begin by suggesting a two-pronged strategy that would, in effect, turn the theoretical tables on the tradition. The first tactic is to prioritize agency over world, that is, to adopt what might be thought of as an agency-first theoretical approach. ⁵ Redirecting the conversation along these lines, I suggest, can lead to new possibilities for taking account of agency as a central phenomenon within psychology as a human science. The second tactic, after—or accompanying—the formulation of some adequate notion of agency, is to not abstain from theorizing straightforwardly about world itself as something other than a colorless matrix of controlling forces against which agency must strive. Indeed, some background notion of world will surely be involved in theorizing of this sort, but it need not lead to an image of the agent cast in the image of world, especially a naturalistic image of world. The goal of this second tactic, then, is to reconsider world in ways that show its genuine relevance without reinvoking something like the agential control problem. This means that whatever one might theorize about world, it should be consistent with what is already taken to be the case about human agency as the primary, though not solitary, consideration. In this way, the two tactics I advocate can be seen as interrelated aspects of a unified conceptual strategy: offering a single, theoretically coherent account of agential action in the world.

Going further toward a reframing of the issue, I suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology—or what I will refer to more simply as hermeneutics—provides a useful set of ideas for engaging in this two-pronged strategy. It does so, first, by offering a noncontrol-centric view of agency, and second, by offering important implications for how world might be retheorized to match. The hermeneutic viewpoint I present is based primarily on the early work of Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) and scholars who have developed his analyses in various ways (Dreyfus, 1991, 2014; Guignon, 1983, 2002, 2012; Wrathall, 2013, 2014). Heideggerian hermeneutics is broad, complex, and extends well beyond the scope of what I present here. In offering a way to retheorize agency and world, I will first elucidate Heideggerian concepts most relevant to this task and, second, indicate how they constitute a unique account of agency.

In broad terms, Heideggerian hermeneutics advances a meaning-oriented perspective focused on what is sometimes referred to as concern, and by extension, concernful involvement, “concernful absorption” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 101), or “concernful dealings” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 96; see also Dreyfus, 1991; Guignon, 2012) in the world. As a central hermeneutic concept, concern has to do with meaning in the sense of mattering, which is to say that humans encounter life and living with respect to how things matter—that is, in terms of the significance of relationships, interactions, problems, solutions, events, objects, and so on, within specific cultural contexts. Concern, in this Heideggerian sense, is not ephemeral or temporary, as in, for example, a transitory mood state. Rather, concern characterizes how people fundamentally exist in the world.

From this hermeneutic standpoint, concern is a multifaceted human phenomenon that occurs in different ways and at different levels. It is intrinsic to the quotidian affairs of life in which people are concerned with things going smoothly, goals and expectations being met, work getting done, time spent wisely, and mistakes avoided. Concern of this sort is often tacit, not explicitly analyzed unless some kind of breakdown occurs in the flow of ordinary activity (for more on “breakdown,” see Dreyfus, 1991; Guignon, 1983; Heidegger, 1927/1962). In a different sense, people are, at least at times, concerned about the purpose and quality of their lives as they consider what kind of person they are or hope to be, and perhaps more reflectively, what their life activities and projects have amounted to. In this respect, it might be said that people show concern about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, or stated more narratively, where they’ve been and where they’re going in life’s journey. Perhaps most abstractly, but not unimportantly, concern shows up with a particular philosophical relevance as people consider grand questions regarding the meaning of life and the nature of human existence. Such philosophically oriented concerns may be pondered privately, but have also invited much scholarly theorizing over the centuries regarding the human condition in general.

In each of these ways, concern points to a core Heideggerian theme regarding human existence, namely, that “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 32). Hermeneutics thus emphasizes a key characteristic of what it means to be human: that being in general, and one’s own being in particular, constitute the fundamental—if often tacit—matter of concern. To speak of concern in this way, however, is not necessarily to speak of caring ways of being, as in thoughtful, kind, or generous conduct. Concern, from this perspective, entails mattering, and what matters to people does not necessarily reflect care in a virtuous sense. Consider, for example, a person who values personal gain above all else—even if it involves exploitation of others—and never engages in serious self-examination of this mode of engaging in the world. This focus on personal gain may involve egregious conduct, such as criminal acts, but it might also involve ordinary activity that evinces a largely tacit preoccupation with selfish interests. A self-focus of this sort would lack consideration for the welfare of others, but it would also reflect concern in the general hermeneutic sense that I have described here; it would constitute a mode of engagement in which certain things matter more than others, perhaps forming a kind of life theme. In this respect, concern refers to a unique way of being in the world—the kind of being that works out its own being in the midst of living, even if moral conduct is never treated as a serious consideration.

Moreover, from this hermeneutic standpoint, concern is fundamentally actional. To speak of concern in this hermeneutic way is to point to the participational and fully embodied ways in which humans are involved the world, namely, as the kind of beings who take stances on what matters—and indeed, on their own being—by virtue of their engagement with others, tasks, equipment, nature, and so on. In this sense, concern is an intrinsic, defining characteristic of human practical involvement in the world, or put the other way around, practical involvement in the world is fundamentally concernful involvement in the world. Treating concernful involvement as actional provides a departure from traditional psychological theorizing, in that its conceptual basis for understanding human phenomena emphasizes the meaningful conduct of whole persons in context. This emphasis can be contrasted with that traditionally placed on latent constructs assumed to control overt human phenomena, as in hypothesized laws of behavior, cognitive mechanisms, psychodynamic forces, or causal variables of whatever type (for critical analyses of psychological theorizing in this regard, see Gantt & Williams, 2014; Robinson, 1985, 1986; Slife & Williams, 1995; Westerman, 2006; Yanchar, 2011).

Seeing human existence as characterized by concern, and concern as fundamentally actional, places a focus on possibility as it is encountered in the ongoing affairs of life. Focusing on possibility, as opposed to the determinant order of the default setting, has implications for agency and world that I will address later. To clarify the basic connection between concern and possibility here, however, it is necessary to see concernful involvement as temporally situated within an open-ended life trajectory (Heidegger, 1927/1962; see also Guignon, 2002). From this perspective, one’s involvement in the midst of everyday living is contextualized not only by prior events, which both limit and set up what might be done in the present, but also by an anticipated future that endows present activity with a sense of meaning and direction. A person’s courses of action are concernful, in this sense, by virtue of how they follow out of a meaningful past, but also by how they relate to possible, meaningful futures. Thus, the stance one takes by way of concernful involvement matters temporally in that it is understood as movement toward a possible future whose course it has some role in shaping. Concern is, in this actional-temporal sense, a concernful “pressing into possibilities” (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 191; see also Heidegger, 1927/1962; Wrathall, 2013). As with concern in general, this orientation toward future possibilities in the midst of concernful involvement is often tacit. Even when one makes plans, the fundamentally future-oriented nature of being planful is rarely a matter of conscious consideration, just as possibility in everyday concernful involvement is taken for granted. In this sense, concern and possibility are lived in the ordinary flow of life before they are analyzed and theorized about. ⁶

Agency as concernful involvement

Given this hermeneutic starting point, I wish to suggest that concern bears directly on the issue of agency by way of the following implication: if concern is fundamental to human involvement in all of its actional expressions—routine activities, skillful practice, moral (or immoral) conduct, deliberate choice, detached reflection, or even inaction—then concernful involvement is a description of the forms of conduct that constitute agential human action in general, which is to say, from this hermeneutic perspective, that concernful involvement is agency. And since concernful involvement qua agency is fundamental to human action, there are no other, nonagential modes of human existence, although there are various ways to be an agent (e.g., through routine activity, skillful practice, deliberate choosing, inaction), which may show up differently in different situations (e.g., responsibly, irresponsibly, generously, selfishly). This means that the general term agency, from this hermeneutic perspective, does not refer to a few specialized forms of conduct such as those associated with deliberate decision making or efforts to transform social structures; rather, those specific forms of conduct are instances of agency as the concernful, human way of being involved in the world.

Theorizing agency in this way presents unique implications. Perhaps most significantly, treating agency as concernful involvement in the world, and thus meaning and possibility as fundamental to human action, obviates the need for postulating deeper levels of psychological explanation. Agency, from this perspective, requires no underlying determinant account, no more-basic control story; there is no need to explain agency in more fundamental control-oriented terms because concernful involvement is most basic. This means that taking account of agency, from this hermeneutic perspective, requires something other than the discourse of control, which is no longer applicable because human beings are no longer conceptualized as natural objects controlled by lawful forces of whatever type. Rather, humans are viewed as concernfully and temporally involved agents, taking stances on their own being by virtue of how they engage in what matters in the affairs of life, thus calling for something like a discourse of concern. ⁷ This kind of discourse offers a basis for exploring human action in terms pertaining to agency, meaning, and possibility in the midst of practical activity. While scholarly inquiry will inevitably involve a reinterpretation of phenomena in order to produce novel insight beyond what is known in an average everyday way (Heidegger, 1927/1962), a discourse of concern does so by using concepts that provide insight into what and how things matter in a given context.

A related implication concerns the agential control problem. As should be clear, avoiding a world-first strategy obviates the need to fit agency into a determinant world, as theorizing that does not start with a view of the world cannot, ipso facto, start with a determinant view of the world. This means that, from this hermeneutic perspective, the agential control problem is an artifact of one particular assumption about world and agency, an assumption that should be open to scrutiny as much as any other. This is an implication of considerable significance, as it frees theorizing about agency from the burden of fit and the need to render an account expressed in naturalistic terms. How to conceive of world when adopting an agency-first, concern-oriented strategy, on the other hand, is an important question in its own right. As I will suggest later, Heidegger and other hermeneutic philosophers have offered ways in which this issue might be addressed.

From a traditional standpoint based on the default setting, this hermeneutic view might be seen as merely affirming what should be rightfully established through rigorous analysis and creative explanation. To merely assume that concern is fundamental, it might be said, does not prove it to be so. But the grounds of this criticism are themselves assumptive. Only when the default setting is taken for granted, as it commonly is, do the premises and conclusions of a hermeneutic view appear to be problematically circular. As others have observed (Dennett, 1978; Wiggins, 1973; Williams, 1992), traditional ways of framing the “problem” of agency beg the question by affirming premises from which only two equally problematic options can follow—determinism or randomness. It can be argued, based on this observation, that the agential control problem results from circular reasoning rooted in a commitment to the default setting. In this regard, the central issue in this debate concerns the assumptive starting point one adopts and how it sets up subsequent theorizing. Those who begin with the default setting encounter the agential control problem in some form; those who begin with concernful involvement do not, though, as I have suggested, they must offer some reasonable conception of world that coheres with an agency-first strategy.

Treating agency as concernful involvement may also raise questions regarding this position’s apparent emphasis on the ordinary. Here it might be wondered what genuine insight can be gained by treating agency fundamentally as something already known and experienced (at least tacitly) on an everyday basis by laypersons and social scientists alike. Does treating concern as the basic issue merely replace the mechanistic with the trivially true? In response to this potential concern, I suggest that there is something important to be gained by beginning with a metaphor such as concern that falls within the ken of ordinary human action and experience. As critical histories of psychology have shown (e.g., Leary, 1990; Robinson, 1985, 1986; Slife & Williams, 1995), an abundance of nonhuman metaphors—for example, those based on natural forces, machines, and infra-human species—have led theory and research in problematic directions, one of which was uncritical acceptance of the agential control problem. In this regard, there is little evidence regarding what theory and research might produce when based on metaphors that are much closer to, or inherent within, lived human experience. Moreover, it seems reasonable to suggest that ordinary concernful involvement is sublime in a certain way; it is vastly complex with respect to its layered meanings, subtleties, dynamics, tensions, ironies, paradoxes, and even absurdities. The challenge then, is to study this human complexity—understood hermeneutically and concernfully—in ways that do it justice and yield genuine insight.

An agency-first account of world

As I have suggested, some background notion of world will surely be implied in an agency-first, concern-oriented theoretical strategy. But what kind of world is it that accommodates human agency conceptualized in this way? What is perhaps most fundamental to this hermeneutic account of world (in conjunction with agency) is its postulation of a meaningful space in which to engage in forms of practice, which is to say, a space of pursuits, opportunities, affordances, complexities, limits, and obstructions to be concernfully navigated (Brinkmann, 2011; Dreyfus, 1991; Taylor, 1985; Westerman, 2006; Yanchar & Slife, 2017). Much of this meaning is provided by culture. It is against a backdrop of historical cultural practices, customs, mores, and institutions that one encounters possible ways of being and is invited into them in various ways (e.g., through family life, formal education, and community involvement). This is an extant cultural backdrop into which agents come to participate, as enculturation involves taking up culturally available possibilities regarding how one might live one’s life and what can possibly matter, which in turn offers a basis for being concernfully involved in the affairs of life. In these respects, agents concernfully dwell in an historical–cultural world—or historical–cultural worlds (such as the world of higher education, the world of literature, the world of finance, the world of one’s profession, etc.)—that are replete with patterns of involvement already underway and laden with meaning. Any such world, then, is an immanently meaningful space with which humans qua agents become familiar through concernful involvement.

Borrowing from the lexicon of Heidegger (1927/1962, 1977b), this notion of world—or more particularly, any cultural context within the world—might be metaphorically thought of as a clearing, that is, a space in which the meanings of entities (e.g., objects and equipment) become unconcealed through concernful involvement and, it might be said, brought into the light of cultural understanding. For example, a gathering shows up as a birthday party, rather than, say, as meaningless or confusing qualia, due to a particular configuration of objects (cake, candles, balloons, presents) and activities (playing games, blowing out candles, opening presents) brought together for a specific, culturally familiar purpose. These objects and activities show up as meaningful by virtue of their interconnected relevance to a certain kind of participation within a cultural context. In this regard, world, as a clearing, refers to a horizon of intelligibility against which particular actions, events, and entities can be said to make sense in the course of everyday living.

And in keeping with Heidegger’s (1977a, 1977b) formulations, outside of the clearing lies no deeper network of causal forces or controlling structures. Rather, ontologically speaking, outside of the clearing there is nothing, as in no more fundamental reality or structure that determines how entities must show up. There is only an ontologically groundless plenitude of possibility—what is inexhaustibly yet-to-be; and this ontological groundlessness provides the basis for a central hermeneutic insight: that any unconcealment will offer a kind of profile of some aspect of the world, and as a profile, it will necessarily be partial and perspectival. Not everything can be unconcealed simultaneously, as one can only see what a certain stance or perspective allows, which is to say that other profiles are always possible as different stances or perspectives are taken. In this sense, the world is replete with possibility, it is ontologically open and not finalizable in the flux and welter of human action. Ontological groundlessness thus provides a worldly background condition of possibility for agency that differs fundamentally from the determinant control structures of the default setting (Heidegger, 1977a, 1977b; see also Guignon, 1983; Yanchar, 2018; Young, 2000).

The groundlessness of world holds an important implication for how specific entities show up in everyday concernful involvement, namely, that they are multiexpressive; and how they show up is made possible, or disclosed, by the cultural, concernful ways in which agents participate in practices. Because there is no deeper control structure that irrevocably fixes the meaning of entities (e.g., how they can be known and used), there are nothing like static, underlying essences to provide a kind of ontological armature for existence. Rather, entities can show up differently in different contexts of use; and how they are revealed will be a reflection of the situation itself and an agent’s concernful involvement within it. This means that entities in the world have possibilities; and those possibilities are real; they exist in the world itself, brought into presence in certain forms and with certain affordances by concernful participation in cultural practices (for more on this way of theorizing possibility, see Yanchar, 2018). Heidegger (1927/1962), for instance, offered the example of using a hammer in familiar and unreflective ways; but given the groundlessness of world, how a hammer shows up will depend on concernful involvement in contexts of practice: it may show up as typically used (i.e., as a way to pound in nails), but it may show up as a paperweight, as a means of dismantling broken furniture, as a door stop, or as a reminder of the past handed down through many generations.

Moreover, equipment such as hammers always shows up as parts of a superordinate gestalt of relations within which agency is situated: tools such as hammers are needed to fasten pieces of wood together, which are combined into furniture such as tables, which are used in conjunction with other equipment, for example, pens, pencils, and paper for writing, and so on. Thus, hammers are intelligible, or have meaning, in light of how they fit in relation to other equipment and practices in their surrounding context. It is in this sense that a piece of steel with a handle, shaped in a certain way, can be a hammer as originally intended in one setting and a paperweight in the next. This suggests that the meaning of any entity (such as a hammer) is not self-contained but contextually relational; and world can be seen as a “referential totality” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 99) in which various kinds of equipment obtain their purpose and significance from their interconnectedness within larger, integrated contexts of practice that, as stated above, are already underway and predate agents as they enter into a given space of participation. Such integrated contexts—for example, a carpenter’s workshop, with its interrelated roles, processes, equipment, and tasks—are sometimes thought of as spaces of dwelling, that is, spaces in which one is (or can become) “at home,” living in accord with familiar patterns, using equipment in largely unreflective ways, and often engaging in routine forms of conduct (Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1927/1962; Young, 2000).

World, understood this way, will constrain agential action, as cultural institutions are often inflexible or limited in the possibilities they provide. Similarly, any equipment that one might encounter will be limited in how it can show up and in the kinds of uses it affords. For example, a hammer may show up as a paperweight, but it will not show up as a type of food with significant health benefits. In this sense, the world is not infinitely adaptable and does not entail unlimited possibilities. Although agency is a concernful pressing into possibilities, as I have contended, it is also contextual and situated; possibilities that show up and matter in the midst of concernful involvement will be limited to what a cultural clearing generally affords. But the world also enables agential action, from this hermeneutic perspective, by providing contexts of possibility and meaning for concernful involvement in practices. The practice of carpentry, for instance, presupposes a configuration of objects and equipment that fits into a meaningful totality and affords possibilities for building furniture, houses, and so on. In this sense, world meaningfully situates agency, as there would be nothing about which to be concerned without this backdrop of cultural possibilities and patterns regarding ways of being. This general observation may seem obvious in some sense, but it is nonetheless theoretically significant given that, from the standpoint of the default setting, world is theorized not as an enabling condition of meaning and possibility (or agency) at all, but rather as a determinant control structure.

In making this hermeneutic claim, I wish to simultaneously advance a corollary claim about the nature of world (Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1927/1962), namely, that there is no necessary reason to take the physical, determinant account of the default setting as ontologically deeper or more fundamental than the hermeneutic world of immanent meaning and possibility that I describe here. From this hermeneutic perspective, the default setting is not truer than others because it is expressed in natural science terms such as mechanisms, forces, or laws. Indeed, from this hermeneutic perspective, the default setting has no intrinsic authority that demands it be viewed as the most real or correct basis for offering psychological accounts. A natural science perspective and language may seem appropriate for some endeavors, but its historical dominance alone hardly justifies its use as a default setting for the study of all phenomena, especially uniquely human phenomena. As hermeneutic thinkers have argued, the world shows up variously, based on one’s ways of seeing and participating; and some ways of seeing and participating—for example, those implicated in a discourse of concern—reveal the world as something other than a collection of fundamentally controlling forces (Dreyfus, 1991; Guignon, 1983; Heidegger, 1927/1962). Thus, hermeneutics, in its account of the world, offers what the default setting cannot, namely, a space of meaning and possibility that coheres with agency qua concernful involvement and, as I have contended, an escape from the agential control problem.

Control revisited

In ways that I have outlined here, hermeneutic thought provides an account of agency and world not predicated on a basic struggle between controlling forces in opposition. However, this hermeneutic view should not be seen as attempting to remove questions of control altogether from consideration. Agents of the sort that I have described will undoubtedly go about everyday involvement variously—giving, taking, working, nurturing, cultivating, and even forcing aspects of the world in ways that enable participation in practice. Issues of control are inescapable and, in this sense, still relevant in hermeneutic explorations of agency. Indeed, there is nothing about agency qua concernful involvement that runs counter to these basic realities of human life. Intervening in the world in some way, for human ends, is technology according to one prominent account (Heidegger, 1977c; Simon, 1996), and it would seem that humans will be technologically involved in the world under any description of agency or personhood. ⁸

To be sure, the issue of control in human affairs is complex and multifaceted; it shows up in myriad ways, and the term itself is elastic and polysemous, even ambiguous, as it is used in diverse contexts. As a general concept, control may refer to control over oneself and one’s own actions, control over aspects of the world, control over others and, at the same time, being controlled by others or by aspects of the world. Instances of control range from the mundane to the momentous, and will often vary according to context, as a mundane act in one situation (e.g., routinely unlocking the door to enter one’s house) can be momentous in another (unlocking one’s door after being locked out in freezing weather). In the agency literature of psychology, the term control is often used in connection with how agents determine their own actions (Baumeister et al., 2010; Braun et al., 2018; Martin et al., 2003; Moore, 2016; Sappington, 1990), and since agents are acting in the world, this is often simultaneously exercising control over some aspect of the world. Given widespread acceptance of the default setting in psychological theory, efforts to theorize what agency involves, or how it is possible, are efforts to solve the agential control problem.

Treating agency as concernful involvement, on the other hand, provides a unique perspective on what control might mean. Rather than being the essential feature of agency, control is entailed within one’s concernful involvement and thus will be a reflection of what matters in a given context. That is, how one is concernfully involved in the world will show up in various ways, including how one seeks to exercise control (or not), which is to say that agents seek to exercise control over aspects of the world in certain ways, or tolerate being controlled, or push back against control, based on what matters in the midst of concernful involvement. There is, in this sense, an important connection between control and concern: what one does as an agent will involve forms and degrees of control, and this control will be relevant because of its fit within meaningful contexts of participation. Thus, how—or whether—one exercises control in particular ways is bound up with how one is as an agent; it is bound up with the stance one takes in the affairs of life, from the mundane to the momentous.

As an example, someone may seek to exercise control over others through various kinds of manipulation or force, which would say a good deal about how that person is concernfully involved in the world. But this person is no more an agent, from this perspective, than those he or she seeks to control or those who do not seek to wield control in this way. Alternatively, a person may decline opportunities for significant exercise of control, or relinquish control of some sort, possibly yielding it up to someone else. Such an act would be agential not because it involves the exercise of control, but because it involves its opposite in some meaningful sense. Based on traditional assumptions, to give away control in this manner would be, in effect, to give away one’s agency (at least in a particular situation or context); but from the hermeneutic perspective that I advocate here, to give away such control, and to function without it, would be to take a meaningful, agential stance.

To consider the matter more concretely, consider a work supervisor who leads through fear and intimidation. This individual might be considered a micromanager seeking maximum control over situations and employee conduct. This individual might even exert control in verbally and emotionally abusive ways, which they would consider to be of little consequence given that they are rewarded by higher level management for their effectiveness in accomplishing corporate objectives. Such draconian exertion of control would constitute one way of being concernfully involved in work situations, that is, one way of being an agent in the midst of practice. As a contrasting case, consider a supervisor who actively seeks a balance between the exercise of too little and too much control over employees—a balance that, in some cases, fosters collaborative partnerships in which control is given up and turned over to others in order to complete tasks. This less controlling or more balanced management style points to a way of being an agent as much as a controlling style does, even as control is yielded up. Moreover, it is possible, in this scenario, that control could largely cease to be a significant issue for the workers involved, as co-operative efforts to achieve best practice eclipse issues of who is in control of whom or what. These examples suggest that underlying anything like management style as a way of engaging in practice is the hermeneutic agency that I describe here. Indeed, on this hermeneutic account, concepts such as management style are specialized, practice-specific ways of talking about agency as a concernful way of being in the world. Moreover, these examples offer a sense of what agency might entail when control is not treated as its defining characteristic, and more specifically, that relinquishing control, or acting in ways that do not prioritize its importance, reveals as much about being an agent in the midst of practice as do exertions of control.

Of major concern here is how the exercise of control in particular ways facilitates or hinders one’s efforts to live up to what a given practice demands if one is to achieve its purposes. How might control, in various ways, enable an agent to rise to the challenges of practice in certain situations and bring about its most significant contributions? The opposite question is equally relevant: how might the exercise of control, in various ways or to varying degrees, disrupt practice and impede whatever contribution it might produce? Consider, for example, the practice of parenting. How does a parent virtuously exercise some form of control (or not) among children of a particular age in certain contexts? How is an appropriate balance between structure and leeway achieved in efforts to pursue an appropriately nurturing relationship? While answers to these questions will surely need to be context specific, this kind of analysis offers an important general insight regarding the relationship between agency and control: to the extent that exercise of control thwarts the agential pursuit of competence or excellence in practice, it is a matter of concern that demands critical attention.

Clearly more could be said about control from a hermeneutic perspective. Perhaps most importantly, when theorizing along these lines one must be willing to acknowledge the realities of life as lived, whether or not those realities are in some sense appealing. Even if one rejects the default setting, it is apparent that worldly forces can, at times, appropriate concernful involvement such that possibilities are greatly reduced and social life is encountered as a considerable challenge. This is an acknowledgment that even if the default setting is rejected in psychological accounts, some aspects of the world—structures, processes, policies, traditions—can nonetheless function as contingently controlling threats in various ways. Obvious historical examples of particularly egregious control include slavery, exploitation of workers, segregation, unequal voting rights, and institutionalized lack of access to resources and opportunities.

Given the historical connection between control and problems of this type, it is hardly surprising that a large number of philosophers and social scientists have addressed contingent issues of power as a way of speaking about problematic controlling forces in cultural life (see, e.g., literatures informed by the writings of Habermas and Foucault). Scholarship in this area has performed the important function of theorizing and questioning ways in which human relations reflect power structures of many types. And further analyses along these lines are surely needed. From the hermeneutic perspective I present, however, concernful involvement is what makes sensitivity to issues of power and their meaningful implications possible in the first place. Thus, control may not be the fundamental, defining characteristic of agency from this hermeneutic perspective, but how control shows up in the lives of agents will matter in significant ways, suggesting that both concern and control be treated as sustained topics of inquiry.

To date, however, there has been relatively little research on control in human affairs from a hermeneutic standpoint. While much of the history of psychology evinces a preoccupation with control—for example, methodological prediction and control, behavioral shaping, social engineering, psychic determinism, self-regulation, self-determination, and even “sense of control” laboratory research paradigms—there has been little attention paid to the experience of control, however it may show up, in the ordinary, concernful strivings of agents as they press into cultural possibilities.

Given the ability of hermeneutics to reframe human agency, I suggest that research informed by this perspective could offer useful insight into the issue of control in many contexts of practice. The primary objective of such inquiry would be to understand how control is experienced and dealt with in whatever ways it manifests, for example, in terms of its complexities and tensions, its challenges and benefits, or its potential to improve people’s lives. For instance, how might subtle forms of control, or struggles for control, create challenges in marriages? How might these challenges be productively addressed from a hermeneutic standpoint that treats control as an explicitly concern-related issue? Efforts to answer questions such as these could clarify the nature of control-related phenomena in diverse settings, but not in ways that reflect the determinant control structures of the default setting; rather, they would be concerned with how issues of control fit into meaningful contexts of practice in which agents meaningfully participate. This focus on concern, then, would provide a general perspective for investigations of control-related phenomena across psychology’s subdisciplines.

Investigations such as these could surely be conducted using a variety of research strategies, possibly including some not yet developed. But qualitative approaches designed to explore the meaning of human experience and phenomena, such as forms of hermeneutic (Fleming et al., 2003; Packer & Addison, 1989; Stigliano, 1989; Yanchar & Slife, 2017) and phenomenological (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003; Wertz, 2005) inquiry, would seem to offer suitable methodological resources in this regard. For example, one recent hermeneutic study of student question asking in a graduate course suggested that concern and control were often connected with how, or whether, students asked questions in class (Gong & Yanchar, 2019). While the explicit topic of this study was student question asking as a kind of moral–educational practice, and the term “control” was not explicitly mentioned, the relevance of control became clear as some participants tended to dominate class time through their questions while others felt a kind of duty to avoid such domination or sought a balance between exerting too much and too little control over class discussion. Moreover, how some students tended to control discussions—often in indirect, subtle, or even tacit ways—was connected with what mattered in regard to their professional and personal aspirations; and what mattered was often complex and multifaceted, leading to complex class interactions. In these ways, this study (Gong & Yanchar, 2019) offered a novel account of student control via question asking in the classroom.

Conclusion

Historical debates about agency suggest that all positions bring with them strengths and weaknesses. Views based on the default setting enjoy a kind of intellectual security, buttressed by an assumed scientific credibility. At the same time, the default setting provides what appear to be intractable grounds for developing a suitable account of agency, manifesting most visibly in the agential control problem. Hermeneutics, on the other hand, theorizes a different kind of agency, one that avoids the agential control problem by virtue of its commitment to concernful involvement in a world of meaning and possibility. But adopting the concern-oriented approach of hermeneutics comes at the cost of rejecting the default setting and its taken-for-granted plausibility. Indeed, if one demands a control story in the form of something like material-efficient causal explanation, then hermeneutic views will surely be judged as unsatisfactory. Given these tradeoffs, and a lack of certainty regarding which conceptual starting point is actually correct, I have attempted to show that the agency-first approach of hermeneutics is at least as reasonable as the world-first approach of the default setting. While further development of this alternative position and its implications is surely required, it provides a meaning-rich way to move beyond the agential control problem, which would seem to be a significant contribution. On these grounds alone, efforts to further develop this kind of alternative appear to be warranted.