The Living Conditions that Make Freedom of Agency Possible

Introduction
Every act of agency begins not in the mind but in the living body. Before thought, there is movement; before choice, there is responsiveness. Life itself acts to preserve its coherence, sensing and adjusting to remain whole amid change. We tend to imagine agency as freedom detached from circumstance—a matter of will as if it were a static property—but in truth, agency is always grounded: in the body that moves, the environment that affords action, the freedom that resists coercion, and the relationships that affirm our participation in a shared world.

When these conditions are stable, we act fluidly and with purpose. When they fracture—through exhaustion, fear, or exclusion—our capacity to act narrows. Agency contracts. To live coherently, then, is to sustain the delicate equilibrium of these interdependent domains in harmony where each supports the possibility of self-directed action.

At Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, this philosophy is not abstract—it is practiced. Every stance, every movement, every breath trains the alignment between internal order and external engagement. Through disciplined embodiment, students learn how integrity of posture supports clarity of intention; how awareness of environment shapes response; how freedom of action depends on restraint and structure; and how mutual recognition—teacher and student, partner and opponent—stabilizes confidence and respect. Kung Fu thus becomes a living study of agency itself: an art of maintaining coherence in motion, of meeting vulnerability with adaptive strength.

This essay explores those conditions—the vulnerabilities and dependencies of agency—and shows how understanding them illuminates both the science of autonomy and the spirit of martial practice.

Living Foundations of Agency
Every form of agency is conditioned by the circumstances that sustain it. Because living systems act through and within their own embodied organization, agency is inherently physical in form, powered by metabolic energy, attuned to environmental affordances, and constituted through social relations.[1] The capacity to act autonomously therefore presupposes the integrity of four interdependent domains: the body that enacts,[2] the environment that affords and constrains,[3] the freedom from overwhelming coercion,[4] and the social field of recognition that stabilizes participation.[5] When any of these foundations is compromised—through injury, deprivation, threat, or exclusion—the scope, precision, and reliability of agency contract.

The Four Domains of Support
Several theorists of human agency emphasize that autonomous action depends on multiple, interdependent domains of support—bodily or physiological regulation, environmental affordances, freedom from coercion within institutional and social structures, and social recognition.[6] For example, Albert Bandura’s model of triadic reciprocal causation highlights the continuous interplay among personal, behavioral, and environmental systems. More recently, Maija Laitinen and Erik Sahlgren have proposed a multidimensional model of autonomy that explicitly integrates material, institutional, relational, and capacity-based elements.[7] Together, these converging frameworks show that the enabling conditions of agency are not solely psychological but systemic—extending across biological, ecological, social, and normative dimensions of human life.

Bodily Integrity: Coherence Through Regulation
Agency depends on the coherence and viability of the body that enacts action. Physiological unity provides the substrate for perception, movement, interoception, and self-regulation; disruption of that unity narrows the range of viable behavior. Contemporary physiology frames this in terms of allostatic load—the cumulative strain on adaptive systems that erodes flexibility and responsiveness.[8] Interoceptive neuroscience further shows that predictive models of bodily state underpin affect regulation and decision-making; dysregulation of these feedback loops degrades initiative and volitional control.[9] Because all forms of agency arise through the living body, the integrity of physiological regulation forms the first condition of autonomy—without bodily coherence, there can be no coherent action. Bodily integrity is therefore not merely a background condition for survival but the dynamic substrate of intentional and affective life.

Environmental Dependency: Affordances and Adaptation
Agency is calibrated to a niche of affordances—possibilities for action specified by organism–environment coupling.[10] When environmental stability deteriorates (through scarcity, noise, or volatility), organisms shift regulatory priorities toward immediate defense, reallocating resources from exploration to preservation. Predictive physiology characterizes this as a re-setting of allostatic parameters under uncertainty, with energetic reserves and control precision rebalanced toward short-horizon, risk-averse responses.[11] In this sense, agency is an ecological achievement: it emerges from continual calibration between internal regulation and external viability. As the bodily system regulates itself internally, it does so in continuous reciprocity with an environment of affordances that defines what actions are viable. The agent’s capacity for coherence therefore depends not only on internal regulation but on the stability and richness of its ecological niche—the quality of affordances that make meaningful action possible.

Volitional Capacity: Freedom Under Constraint
To act intentionally, an agent must retain the freedom to choose among alternatives without paralyzing external constraint. Chronic threat, subordination, or uncontrollability induces learned helplessness and impaired executive regulation through dysregulation of medial prefrontal control over stress responses.[12] Experimental and field studies show that coercive contexts compress exploration and flexible problem-solving, shrinking the predictive horizon and biasing choice toward habitual, risk-averse, or compliant patterns.[13] Even when biological viability is preserved, coercion deforms autonomous regulation into reactive compliance, reducing the capacity for foresight and deliberation. Freedom from coercion thus preserves the generative structure of agency itself—the ability to project action into possible futures rather than remain trapped within imposed immediacy.

Social Recognition: The Relational Ground of Agency
Human agency is sustained by participation in networks of reciprocal recognition and attunement. Social neuroscience identifies alignment through mentalizing, mirroring, and affiliation as the basis for cooperative coordination, motivation, and self-efficacy.[14] Exclusion or humiliation activates neural circuits overlapping with physical pain and, over time, erodes executive function and emotional regulation.[15] Recognition therefore functions as a stabilizer of agency: it affirms the individual as a participant whose actions count, preserving coherence across affective, cognitive, and social dimensions. In this way, recognition anchors the sense of self in shared meaning, transforming biological regulation into social participation.

Interdependence and Fragility
These domains are not separate layers but interlocking conditions of viability. When one system falters—through injury, deprivation, or exclusion—others must compensate, increasing metabolic cost and reducing control precision. Human agency is therefore a dynamic equilibrium, sustained through continuous adaptive regulation and defensive maintenance of its enabling structures. Because these interdependencies link the biological, ecological, and social dimensions of life, they form the living scaffolding upon which reflection and moral evaluation later emerge. It is this fragile continuity between survival and meaning that the next section examines in its reflective and normative dimensions.

From Regulation to Reflection
The analysis thus far has traced agency as the dynamic realization of autonomy—a self-organizing system acting within its environment to sustain coherence, viability, and adaptive balance. At the human scale, however, this same regulatory architecture deepens into a reflective dimension. The capacities that govern regulation and response also enable reflection, evaluation, and choice—the ability not merely to act, but to act for reasons that can be articulated, recognized, and shared. In this way, moral agency does not emerge apart from natural agency but as its reflective extension—life becoming aware of its own order and responsibility. Agency, in this sense, becomes moral when the agent can interpret and guide its own actions in light of values, norms, and obligations. The mechanisms that preserve viability in all living systems—self-regulation, adaptation, and defensive maintenance—become, in human beings, the enabling architecture of moral life.

Conclusion: The Practice of Coherence
Agency is a living balance—a continual act of coherence. It draws strength from the body’s integrity, from the stability of environment, from freedom safeguarded against coercion, and from the recognition that binds individuals into a field of shared meaning. When these supports align, action becomes effortless; when they erode, even simple intentions falter. To act well is to care for these foundations—to cultivate the systems that make autonomy possible.

This is what Kung Fu trains in embodied form. At Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, the practice of movement becomes a practice of self-regulation. The body learns stability under pressure; awareness extends to the shifting affordances of space and timing; will refines into clarity through discipline; and recognition flows between partners in the shared rhythm of practice. Through such training, coherence becomes strength, discipline becomes freedom, and vulnerability becomes the very condition through which authentic agency grows.

To study Kung Fu in this light is to study oneself—as an organism in relation, sustained by body, world, and community. Mastery arises not from domination, but from harmony—the art of remaining whole in motion.

 

 

About The Author

Nathan A. Wright
Nathan is the Managing Director and Chief Instructor at Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, and Chief Representative of Luo Guang Yu Seven Star Praying Mantis in Canada and China. With over 25 years of experience living in China, he is deeply committed to passing on traditional martial arts in its most sincere form. As part of his passion Nathan regularly writes on related topics of self-defense, combat, health, philosophy, ethics, personal cultivation, and leadership. Email Nathan if you have questions on this article, or if you have interest in learning more about studying traditional Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu.

 

 

 

End Notes
[1] Albert Bandura, “Human Agency in Social Cognitive Theory,” American Psychologist 44, no. 9 (1989): 1175–1184.
[2] Hugo D. Critchley and Satoshi Nagai, “Interoception and the Autonomic Neuroscience of Emotion,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 20, no. 10 (2019): 559–571.
[3] Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology 26, no. 4 (2014): 325–352.
[4] Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior,” Psychological Inquiry 11, no. 4 (2000): 227–268.
[5] Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995).
[6] Maija Laitinen and Erik Sahlgren, “AI Systems and Respect for Human Autonomy,” AI & Society 37, no. 3 (2021): 857–873.
[7] Markus Laitinen and Erik Sahlgren, “AI Systems and Respect for Human Autonomy,” AI & Society 37, no. 3 (2021): 857–873.
[8] McEwen, Bruce S., and Peter J. Gianaros. 2018. “Central Role of the Brain in Stress and Adaptation: Allostasis, Homeostasis, and Resilience.” Physiology 33 (3): 185–197.
[9] Critchley, Hugo D., and Satoshi Nagai. 2019. “Interoception and the Autonomic Neuroscience of Emotion.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 20 (10): 559–571.
[10] Rietveld, Erik, and Julian Kiverstein. 2014. “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.” Ecological Psychology 26 (4): 325–352.
[11] Sterling, Peter. 2020. “Allostasis: A Model of Predictive Regulation.” Physiology & Behavior 222: 112–122.
[12] Maier, Steven F., and Linda R. Watkins. 2010. “Role of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Controlling Stress and Behavioral Responses.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2): 141–150.
[13] Hirsch, Joye B., and Raymond A. Mar. 2012. “Coercion, Control, and Creativity: Neural and Cognitive Correlates of Restricted Agency.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7 (2): 134–142.
[14] Frith, Chris D., and Uta Frith. 2021. “The Neuroscience of Mentalizing.” Annual Review of Psychology 72: 519–545.
[15] Eisenberger, Naomi I. 2015. “Social Pain and the Brain: Empirical Insights and New Directions.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24 (2): 152–160.