Abstract

I develop an account of the nature of improvisation, as a distinctive form of temporally extended agency. In contrast to the standard view, which says that agents perform extended actions by means of planning them in advance, I argue that improvising involves planning one’s actions contemporaneously with their performance, or equivalently, planning these actions after one has already begun performing them. >> Improvisation is psychologically distinctive because it involves the adoption of backward-looking intentions, or retroplans, which represent the actions that an agent has already performed as to-have-been performed under new descriptions, in relation to how these actions constitute parts of the larger action into which they are subsequently improvisationally incorporated. >> Improvisation is metaphysically distinctive because it involves exercising a special kind of diachronic agential control over the temporally extended action that one is performing. By means of continuing to act, as guided by a holistic improvised plan with backward-looking components, one can genuinely incorporate one’s previously-performed actions into a larger temporal whole, and thereby retroactively determine that these actions were (intentionally) performed under new descriptions. This is possible because of the temporally emergent metaphysical nature of the action-types that are improvisable. >> Improvisation is normatively distinctive because it enables new possibilities for temporally extended action, such as flexibly responding to unpredictable information in the course of acting and the retainment of a distinctive kind of self-curiosity during action. The progressive temporal structure of improvisation also raises a number of distinctive deliberative constraints that can be fruitfully modelled in general terms. >> Finally, improvisation is existentially distinctive, in the sense that an agent’s entire life can be understood as one grand-scale improvisational performance, where they gain existential unity and responsibility for the entire shape and meaning of their life by means of the successful improvisation of a self-constituting project over the course of their existence. Applying the account of the nature of improvisation at the level of a whole human life enables us to improv(is)e on existing existentialist and narrativist treatments of meaningful unity in life, and also to give a novel, systematic account of a series of existential crises and challenges.