Olivia Bailey (UC Berkeley), "What must be lost: on retrospection, authenticity, and some neglected costs of transformation"
Synthese, 2023
As a child, I adored all things baroque and rococo. Anything gilded, encrusted, or otherwise bedizened struck me as exceptionally beautiful. My current sense of beauty is oriented in an entirely different way. Once, I could not get enough of Fragonard, but now that sort of frilly romanticism just gives me a toothache. My love is reserved for symmetry and stark forms. Looking at The Swing, I wonder: How could I have ever felt that frivolous nonsense was the height of aesthetic excellence? It is not that my new sense of beauty inhibits my ability to explain my old sensibility in third-personal terms. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast came out in 1991; it is hardly surprising that a 90s girl with a library of (moderately faded) Abrams art books at home would fall in love with 18th century frippery. Nevertheless, there is an important sense in which my childhood aesthetic sensibility is now mysterious to me, and this sort of bafflement is, I think, quite common: bemused wonder at our old taste in jeans, in music, or in partners is a staple of growing up, familiar fodder for both jokes and lamentations.
Considerable philosophical attention has been devoted to the question of what experience alone can teach. The focus has naturally been on the epistemic impoverishment of inexperienced subjects, subjects who have not yet, say, tasted a durian fruit, or lived as a bat. But we can also ask what is at stake, epistemically speaking, when we cease to experience the contents of the world in a particular way. Reflecting on the phenomenon of bemusement I’ve just described leads me to the question: What epistemic goods (if any) do we risk or lose when we undergo a change in sensibility? What exactly is the cost to our knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of the world and of ourselves?
A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, a world orientation that ultimately manifests in one’s patterns of emotional evaluative apprehension. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly impact our overall experience of the world. I suspect that exploring the epistemic impact of sensibility change might ultimately be worthwhile in several respects. It seems apt to illuminate phenomena like nostalgia and schwellenangst, and perhaps even to inform our theorizing about personal identity. In this paper, I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the ‘intelligibility’ of one’s prior emotional apprehensions—where ‘intelligibility’ amounts to apparent fittingness. So, for instance, the dramatic re-keying of my aesthetic sensibilities has made it harder for me to remember just how it felt to love rococo. It has also prevented me from seeing or even picturing The Swing as beautiful, which is what I would need to do in order to grasp my prior admiration for it as intelligible.
I also make the case that these observations provide grounds to challenge some assumptions embedded in the ongoing conversation about transformative experience. That conversation has, by and large, assumed that if there is a special problem about authentically choosing to undergo a radical reorientation of our values and preferences, it is a problem that arises because, having not yet lived as our future selves, we don’t know or understand what that will be like. If I am right, though, the scope of the putative problem should actually be understood differently. Given the respects in which experiences colored by our old sensibilities are mysterious to us, the putative problem of authentic choice cannot fundamentally be a problem about inexperience. True, the choice to try and develop a totally new sensibility involves pursuing an evaluative orientation to the world that does not now make total sense to us. But if that sort of epistemic alienation is inimical to authentic choice, well—evaluative orientations that were once our own also fail to make total sense to us now, despite our prior first-personal experience of them.
This paper touches lightly on some reasons we might have to regret a sensibility change, but it does not delve into ethics of sensibility change. I do think the ethics of sensibility change merit their own investigation. The question of whether I should hope or try to restore my former rococomanic sensibility is not particularly toothsome fodder for moral reflection, to be sure. But how about my moral sensibilities, my dispositions to emotionally apprehend situations or agents as cruel or fair, blameless or unforgiveable? There is a robust tradition of thinking that moral sensibilities contribute to our moral excellence by effecting an improvement in our epistemic condition: they free us from evaluative misapprehensions or expand our appreciation of real moral properties. I agree that changes in our moral sensibilities can free us from evaluative misapprehensions and expand our appreciation of real moral properties, and I agree that these epistemic changes are morally important. However, I also want to explore a gloomy possibility that has not yet received its due, to wit: even sensibility changes that effect these epistemic improvements may also characteristically involve morally significant epistemic costs. For one thing, becoming better (developing a more accurate, clear, and comprehensive sensitivity to real moral properties) naturally risks our appreciation of what it is like to struggle with moral temptation and confusion, and that appreciation is plausibly itself a significant epistemic-cum-moral good.
An open-access link to “What must be lost: on retrospection, authenticity, and some neglected costs of transformation”:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04179-2
For access to a draft of the related “Growing up and getting better: the moral price of moral sensibility change,” please email me at obailey@berkeley.edu.