Chiara Brozzo
Affiliation: University of Birmingham
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: transformative experience, epistemic transformation, personal transformation, different selves, authenticity, love
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 17:30
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Self-Knowledge
In this paper, I take issue with a standard assumption in the debate about transformative experiences—experiences that are both epistemically and personally transformative, such as having one’s first child (Paul 2014)—and with a recent insightful challenge to it. The standard assumption is that only new experiences are transformative. The recent challenge has been put forward by Randell (2023), who has argued that even familiar experiences can be epistemically transformative in the sense of teaching us something new. I argue against Randell’s proposal, trying simultaneously to retain her insight and to make an even more radical proposal: even some fully known experiences are transformative, because of the epistemic import of personal transformation. I start by providing some background about transformative experiences, to make sense of the rationale behind the standard assumption. I then expound Randell’s (2023) two routes to the idea that some familiar experiences are transformative, and take issue with each. Here is the first route: factors outside subjective character, such as the presence of a different context (e.g., supportive friends), can make it the case that we learn something new (i.e., gain epistemic transformation) from an experience of a kind we have already had (e.g., that of living alone), thus with a known subjective character. I argue that this is problematic if we assume a strong notion of epistemic transformation whereby the latter can only be obtained through a new experience. Here is the second route. The subjective character of an experience is so complex and multifaceted that, upon undergoing an experience with a given subjective character, we might become acquainted with only some aspects of the latter, and discover others (thus undergoing epistemic transformation) only through a subsequent token experience of the same kind—when, for example, we are more mature, or the context is different. I argue that this is also problematic. The idea that previous experiences of living alone might not have been fully taken in is closer to fulfilling the strong notion of epistemic transformation as requiring a new experience. This, however, also makes it less surprising that the latest experience of living alone could be transformative, if it is, in effect, new in some respects. I want to trace a different route to a more radical conclusion. Suppose Mimi is currently deeply in love with Oscar. Suppose, also, that she has previously fallen out of love before, and that there is nothing about the subjective character of falling out of love that she has failed to take in. Thus, falling out of love is a fully known experience. Yet, falling out of love with Oscar could still be transformative. A characteristic of transformative experiences is that their subjective value (i.e., the extent to which one cares about them) is inaccessible prior to their happening. Accordingly, Mimi might currently find it impossible to fully envisage caring very little about being with Oscar in a future in which she has fallen out of love with him. How? A first explanation (which I ultimately dismiss) is in terms of a straightforward failure of the imagination: Mimi finds it impossible to imagine herself out of love with Oscar while she is still in love with him. However, one may object that I am being too pessimistic about the power of the imagination: it has been assumed that we only have troubles (and then only to an extent—see Kind 2020, Ullmann-Margalit 2006) imagining new experiences, whereas we can imagine what it is going to be like to undergo a known experience. So how could Mimi have troubles imagining herself having a token experience of a kind that she has had before? A possible reply is that experiences relating us to different individuals might present challenges that rely, precisely, on involving different individuals. However, by the lights of the debate on transformative experiences, this just sounds too revisionary: in this debate, experiences are typed in terms of subjective character, that is, of what they are like. It can be argued that there is such a thing as the subjective character of falling out of love, enough to say that someone who has fallen out of love before, and who now undergoes that experience with a new person, will have a known experience. Indeed, this seems to be what Paul has in mind when she advises against typing experiences too finely (2014, pp. 36-37). And yet there is something to the idea that falling out of love is in some sense new every time. How could this work? The answer might lie in the underexplored epistemically transformative import of personal transformation. Despite having fallen out of love before, and therefore being acquainted with that subjective character, maybe Mimi, while in love with Oscar, cannot imagine falling out of love with Oscar while still being herself. Falling out of love with Oscar would strictly speaking be imaginable, but would strike her as inauthentic. Here a limit of the debate on transformative experiences emerges. Despite the fact that transformative experiences are defined as both epistemically and personally transformative, it is epistemic transformation that typically does the heavy lifting when it comes to challenging imagination, accessibility of subjective value, and therefore a kind of choice that is both rational and authentic. Laurie Paul’s paradigmatic example of having one’s first child is indeed special because it involves a previously unknown subjective character as well as a personal transformation. This has led to overlooking how even a known subjective character can interact with personal transformation to bring about limits on the imagination, and, thus, a special kind of epistemic transformation. When trying to imagine oneself out of love with a person that one is currently deeply in love with, what one is trying to imagine is a different self: one that is no longer deeply in love with that person. Having fallen out of love previously won’t help with this specific imaginative exercise. Herein lies the so far overlooked epistemic import of personal transformation.