“An Extreme Sense of Destiny”: Bob Dylan, Affect, and Final Causation

Bob Dylan has explicitly suggested on numerous occasions that he possessed “an extreme sense of destiny,” which has been the primary driving force in the development of his music and his identity. This article traces Dylan’s and his milieu’s articulation of final causation in its various inflections and demonstrates that this causal mode is intimately connected to an affective epistemology in Dylan’s experience. Through abstract philosophical reflection (shown here to parallel closely the ideas of philosophers like William James and Henri Bergson) and the relation of particular occasions of final causation, Dylan suggests a worldview that offers an alternative to what he perceives as the “madness” produced by “pure materialism” (2004).