ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Frankfurt’s volition-based identification model, reinterpreted from the standpoint of enactivism, can help to make sense of how agents change what they care about and reconfigure their wills. Although habit modification often involves self-reflection, this is not the only agential skill that contributes to the plasticity of habit and allows agents to adapt to changing circumstances. Imagining things otherwise, adopting alternative perspectives, or viscerally sensing a mismatch between one’s professed concerns and actual behavior all play an important role. Through the formation and reconfiguration of habits and affective framings, sensorimotor organizations and patterns of attention begin to shift, and an agent can literally change their form of life. The enactivist notion of equilibration helps to conceptualize the way in which autonomous agents reconfigure their habits and affective framings in order to regulate their coupling with the surrounding world. Reinterpreting Frankfurt’s account from the standpoint of enactivism paves the way for an account of autonomous agency that avoids the “arbitrariness problem,” the “regress problem,” and the “manipulation problem,” makes sense of the relational nature of autonomy, and acknowledges the bodily and affective dimensions of agency.
