5 - Plans and irrationality
from II - TEXTUAL MODELS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2009
Summary
Emile Zola's characterization of Lazare Chanteau in La joie de vivre (1883–4) provides an excellent context for a discussion of the rôle of plans in the constitution of an agent's rationality. Quite simply, Lazare is someone who cannot ‘make up his mind’, and this incapacity has many undesirable consequences for him. Taking up and abandoning a number of different large-scale career projects, Lazare fails to carry any one of them to completion and ends up an abject failure. At first glance, then, the story of this character's failures would appear to stand as a simple and straight-forward illustration of an equally simple and uncomplicated norm: given certain types of goals – such as Lazare's desire to be a great composer – the ability to organize one's actions in function of complex, temporally extended planning is a necessary condition of rational agency. This first appraisal of the story's significance in relation to the theory of agent's rationality is certainly not wholly incorrect, but once we have explored it in more detail, it will become apparent that Lazare's transgression of norms of rational planning and deliberation is much more complex than this first impression allows.
At the centre of the story of Lazare's inconstancy is his inability to devote himself to a single career (and in this respect, Lazare has a direct literary antecedent in Richard Carstone of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–3)).
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- Information
- Literature and RationalityIdeas of Agency in Theory and Fiction, pp. 150 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991