musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Is anything an island entire of itself?


For some reason, I find it interesting that we feel compelled to wrap ourselves in our own unique identity. I assume I am my named island, and forget -or don’t realize- that I am actually ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ as John Donne opined in his famous Meditation (XVII). I forget that I am as much acted-upon as acting; that all things, in their place, their function, their effects, have agency. I may think I am the one who chooses what I interact with, but that does not mean it does not also have an effect on me: that, to an extent, it exerts its own agency.

But does agency always have to imply intentionality? Do we have agency – the capacity to act – only insofar as we can represent our intentions and goals? ‘In classical Chinese philosophy, things like drinking vessels and dress attires, while not animate, have tendencies to behave in certain ways, and such behaviour affords certain possibilities for action.’ For example, ‘the emptiness of a house allows room for lodging…’ and  a tree ‘afford[s] shade in which to lie down. Such affordances can affect, inspire, encourage, invite, forbid, prevent and enable us to do certain actions. Whatever is entangled or related to an agent in a certain situation becomes a co-actor and participant in what is happening.’[i] So, can we ever act alone?

We always share agency with those things with which we interact. Simple things like a cup ‘allows’ us to drink from it; a pen, to write with it; a book, to read its contents. It’s simply a perspective shift -nothing magic, or woo-woo about that, although I have to say it was a hard sell to my friends at the pub, the other night…

I’m getting too old to spend much time in pubs anymore. I find the noise disturbing, and if I can’t see the person’s lips who is attempting to say something to me, I’m lost in the pandemonium of shouts and laughter swirling around me. There were only three of us sitting together that night, me, Daniel, and his wife Marketta, all of us similarly afflicted with age and hearing difficulties, all of us leaning across the table so we could see each other’s lips.

“You’d think they could do something about the noise,” Daniel managed to shout across the void, his lips exaggerating every syllable with an entertaining, but helpful cadence. “Maybe sound-baffles, or whatever they call those things they use in auditoriums…”

I shrugged, and attempted a careful sip of beer at the same time. “Maybe the shape of the room doesn’t allow baffles,” I yelled back.

“You can design baffles for anywhere, I think,” he shouted, just as there was a sudden diminution of sound as a young woman with a guitar, walked onto a little stage at the other end of the room and started to tune her instrument after positioning a seat.

“Maybe it’s just a question of getting the audience to co-operate, Dan…”

One of his eyebrows slowly raised itself. “Ah, but that has nothing to do with the room.”

But, when the woman began to sing, I could hear her words and the guitar as clearly as if I had put on a set of earphones. I smiled. “The room seems to have pretty good acoustics when it needs them, don’t you think?”

He shrugged, although reluctantly I thought.

“So maybe it just requires us to do our part for it to work,” I added.

Daniel fixed me with an inquisitive stare and rolled his eyes. “That has nothing to do with the room -only with us…”

My smile increased. “When we’re in here, we’re part of the room, eh?”

He nodded, reluctantly again. “But we’re the ones with agency, G -not the room. It’s merely a container.”

I stared back at him. “An empty room is a container, a full room is something else. It requires us to become an auditorium, or a studio, or a pub… it changes, don’t you think?”

Daniel just stared at me in silence, but Marketta smiled. “So… is it the room, or the people using it, who have the agency, G?” She seemed really interested.

“Well, if it’s empty, there’s probably no agency: nothing is acting on anything. But a full room allows us our agency… That, in itself, is a form of agency, don’t you think?”

“So by filling the room, we have been allowed agency?”

I nodded, uncertain of how to explain myself. “We humans each have agency of course, but what is it that allows us to have that power?” I had a quick sip of my beer. “It’s the thing we are using, the thing over which we are exerting our agency, Marketta. In this case, it’s the room that allows agency… and doesn’t that suggest that because it is necessary, that it has a sort of power -a sort of agency- itself?”

“But…” Daniel felt left out I could tell, and he was shaking his head.

 “But to have power -or agency– Dan, we have to have something over which we have power. We have to have a partner, as it were… We are as much acted-upon, as acting. It’s always a co-operative venture.”

Marketta grasped her glass as if she were going to drink, but put it back down as a thought occurred to her. “So, somebody who changes their mind about whether or not to bring an umbrella when they go for a walk is being influenced by the type of clouds in the sky…? Are you saying that clouds sometimes have agency then?”

“Would you have decided to take the umbrella if you hadn’t seen them, Marketta?”

“Still, it’s Marketta making the decision, G – not the clouds…” Daniel just wasn’t buying the argument.

I had to smile at that. “Well, if you had suggested she take an umbrella, wouldn’t you claim you were the one who convinced her?” I had another sip of my beer. “Wouldn’t that mean you had agency?”

She looked at her husband and smiled as she stroked his arm. “He’d just hand me the umbrella as soon as he’d seen the clouds as I walked out the door.”

Daniel nodded, as if he’d just been handed a pardon. “So, it’d be me who had the agency, after all, eh G…?”

Then she sent her eyes over to mine, and sighed. “It’d still be the clouds that made him do it though, wouldn’t it?”

I shrugged. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” I said, and lifted my glass in a toast.

And no, I obviously didn’t major in Philosophy in my long ago university days; the pub was clearly the real agent here… or was it the alcohol?

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/in-classical-chinese-philosophy-all-actions-are-collective

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