How to rationally approach life's transformative experiences

Abstract

In a widely discussed forthcoming article, “What you can't expect when you're expecting,” L. A. Paul challenges culturally and philosophically traditional views about how to rationally make major life-decisions, most specifically the decision of whether to have children. The present paper argues that because major life-decisions (such as bearing a child) are transformative, the only rational way to approach them is to become resilient people: people who do not “over-plan” their lives or expect their lives to play out “according to plan”—people who understand that beyond a certain limit, life cannot be rationally planned and must be accepted as it comes. I show that this focus on resilience—on self-mastery—stands in direct opposition to culturally dominant attitudes toward decision-making, which focus not on the self-mastery but on control and mastery over one's surroundings. In short, I argue that if Paul's general point about transformative experiences is correct, it follows that we rationally ought to adopt a very different approach to self-development, and to the moral education of our children, than today's culturally dominant approaches. Finally, I argue that future empirical research may reveal that resilience itself could clarify specifically which type of decision to make in cases of transformative experience.

Keywords::

• Experience
• Resilience
• Transformative

Acknowledgements

I thank L.A. Paul and two anonymous referees for insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

^[1] Paul's argument has already begun to receive discussion in the philosophical and psychological literature. See, e.g., Brase (2014) and a forthcoming special issue on transformative experience in Res Philosophica.

^[2] I thank two anonymous reviewers for raising these concerns.

^[3] If this is the case—if one cannot specify likely outcomes on the basis of expected future experience—one might wonder why the choice to have children would ever even occur to people. One obvious, and intuitive, answer is that human beings tend to be “biologically programmed” to want children, whether it is rational or not. Another intuitive answer is that we are socialized to want children, and/or face social pressures to have them. I thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify this.

^[4] I leave it an open question whether there may be other additional psycho-behavioral dispositions that are rational to develop for handling transformative experiences. Also, I do not mean to imply that non-resilient people can never handle transformative experiences well. I merely mean to say that resilience is a rational way to handle transformative experiences well more reliably.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcus Arvan

Marcus Arvan is Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa.