25
Action, the Scientific Worldview, and Being-in-the-World
The nature of action becomes a special problem for philosophy in the modern era, largely as a result of the influence of the sciences. In a modern scientific view of nature, each event is the unique causal product of past events. This appears incompatible with a view of human beings as purposeful agents, whose actions have meaning. Causal events have no direction, but rather are pushed along by necessary laws. Purposeful events seem to be aimed at some end; their past matters less than where they are going and if they arrive there. In analytic philosophy, where some kind of scientific naturalism is usually assumed, this clash of perspectives is particularly acute, and has led to a number of perplexing and resistant difficulties. In the tradition of existential phenomenology these difficulties have not arisen. In part this has sometimes been a matter of focus; Heidegger, for example, is concerned foremost with ontology, and is not sympathetic to scientific naturalism, and so did not often stray into these questions. In part this has sometimes been a matter of stipulation; for Sartre (1956), the for-itself, the kind of being of human beings, must act, and is unconstrained in its action. Free action is a primitive feature of such beings. But in part this is also sometimes a matter of insight. The notion of being-in-the-world, which plays its most prominent role in the thinking of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, forms the principal element of an attempt to break radically with the modern divisions that lead to some of the most difficult problems of action.
In this chapter, my goal is to show how the notion of being-in-the-world is not only a break with modern views of the subject that solves epistemological problems, but by offering an alternative to the subject/object division it can solve, or more often escape, some of the central problems of the philosophy of action. This is done through the attempt not to reduce a purposeful consciousness (in this context, subjectivity) to a deterministic world of objects and their causal interactions (objectivity), nor vice versa, but rather to find something more fundamental which underlies both and makes them possible. On such grounds, kinds of activity might be possible which are neither a sui generis feature of an isolated subject, nor solely a product of external and purposeless laws.
I proceed as follows. First, I review some dominant themes of action theory, using action theory in the analytic philosophical tradition as my example, and identify what I believe are the central problems, including a neglected problem, for these approaches. Second, I consider these problems from the perspective of the early Heidegger, with some brief exploration of how these themes develop in Heidegger’s later work. Third, I argue that the problems are avoided, but in a different way, in the work of MerleauPonty. I conclude with a brief observation of the continuing insight that existential phenomenology and the notion of being-in-the-world offer to contemporary action theory.
Scientific Naturalism and the Problems of Purposeful Activity
The nature of human action becomes most acute as a phenomenon in need of philosophical explanation with the modern division between a free and rule-following mind and a mechanical world, a division most clearly articulated in the philosophy of Descartes. The need is older than this division, however, arising as the early sciences displace a teleological view of nature with a view that nature follows deterministic causal laws. In such a nature, human actions, which appear to have meaning and goals, and thus in some sense to be fundamentally teleological, seem to have no place. There is both a challenge of explaining how such actions are possible, and also explaining how they differ from other kinds of events, including behaviors of nonhuman animals. These challenges have been most extensively addressed in analytic philosophy, where a scientific naturalism is typically assumed, and many philosophical questions are approached from the perspective of reconciling potential solutions with the presumptions of a general scientific outlook. As such, analytic action theory provides many of the clearest examples of the difficulties involved. My discussion, however, will seek to remain more general than in most contemporary action theory, since it is possible to identify underlying common presuppositions across a range of seemingly incompatible views.
Consider three events, prima facie of three different kinds:
1 After Jones trips on a crack in the sidewalk, she falls down.
2 Jones blinks.
3 Jones announces her plan to balance her checkbook, adds up the total value of the checks she has written, and writes down this sum.
The first appears to be a mere event. The second appears to be behavior, something distinct from mere events, but of a kind with behaviors seen across the animal kingdom. The third kind of event appears to be a special kind of behavior, unique in the terrestrial sphere to humans: an action.
A successful science of mechanics allows us to describe the first kind of event with great accuracy. If we know the mass of Jones, the mass of the earth, her height, her center of mass, the rigidity of her legs as she falls forward, and so on, we can compute a trajectory for her and describe such things as how long it will take her body to fall to the Earth, and how much energy (heat) will dissipate when she impacts the sidewalk. This prediction depends upon a description of a current state of affairs, and the application of natural laws to this description to derive some future state of affairs. Here the past, and lawlike relations over time, determine the future. There is no need to describe, as Aristotle might have done, some telos to the events, such as a natural inclination for the body to seek the earth. The things which occur are not going toward some goal, but rather they are pushed along.
The second event appears special because prima facie it has a purpose. Jones blinks, even unconsciously, in order to moisten her eye, or to remove some irritant. The third kind of event has not only a purpose, but it seems plausible that there is something special about this purpose. It may be conscious and in some sense under volitional control, for example. Also, in this example, the accomplishment of this purpose requires the following of explicit logical rules that Jones could explain to us if she needed to do so. It appears that only humans, or at most humans and other complex animals, are capable of such actions. We describe such events in a terminology of intentions or intentional states. We say Jones balanced her checkbook because she desires to know the remaining balance, or because she fears that she may make an overdraft. Such terminology of beliefs, knowledge, desires, fears, and other mental states is distinct from the kind of analysis a mature predictive science like physics offers of more simple events.
The first task for a theory of action, the basic task, is to distinguish between mere events (events of type 1) and behaviors (events of types 2 and 3). Given the success of some sciences in explaining some mere events, this task would also seem to require that we explain where, if anywhere, purposive behavior fits in a scientific worldview. In practice, analytic philosophy of action has neglected the question of what distinguishes behavior from mere events, and generally tried to distinguish mere events from actions (that is, distinguish events of type 1 and 3), ignoring the other kinds of behavior. Most accounts hold that actions are distinguished either by special mental states or special kinds of descriptions.1 There are many problems with these approaches, which have resisted solution and have spawned a vast literature.2 However, as a group they share, even if only implicitly, the goal to explain how such purposeful behavior can be reconciled with a strong form of scientific naturalism that forms a background assumption for these discussions. This naturalism typically includes the conviction that science will ultimately yield sufficient causal explanation of all events.
Given this conviction, one might argue that purpose is a superfluous notion, and that in principle we could eliminate from our discourse talk of purposeful behavior.3 The effects of sincerely adopting such a view are unknown but appear to be potentially devastating, since most, perhaps all, of our social conventions depend upon our view of ourselves as purposive agents. Furthermore, it seems that such a view is practically impossible at this time; we cannot make sense of ourselves and our world without conceiving of each other as purposeful agents. If such an eliminativism is rejected, an explanation of action appears to require either proof that we can explain purposes in terms of causes in the causal theory (this is to reduce purpose to elements in our scientific discourse), or proof that purposes are irreducible and survive somehow alongside the mechanical explanation.
These two options dominate contemporary discussion of the basic task of action theory. Some philosophers are trying vigorously to reduce purposes to mechanical explanations (e.g., Millikan 1984). Others have argued that purposes are irreducible: Donald Davidson’s highly influential paper “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” (1963), posits various irreducible mental states that cause actions.4 A long-standing alternative is that irreducible purposes are not causes but rather kinds of explanations; this is a view inspired by the work of the later Wittgenstein, and has been developed, for example, by Wilson (1989). But for any of these approaches, it remains vexing that the faith of those committed to the scientific worldview is that a physical explanation will provide sufficient explanations of all events, including human behaviors. But if this were so, purposes, whether reducible or irreducible, whether explanations or causes, would be superfluous. The central difficulty was well stated by Norman Malcolm, a student of Wittgenstein. Comparing the view that purposes are irreducible because they are a different kind of explanation, with an assumption of a sufficient scientific view, he observes:
It is true that the two kinds of explanation employ different concepts and, in a sense, explain different things: but are they really independent of one another? Take the example of the man climbing a ladder in order to retrieve his hat from the roof. This explanation relates his climbing to his intention. A neurophysiological explanation of his climbing would say nothing about his intention but would connect his movements on the ladder with chemical changes in body tissue or with the firing of neurons. Do the two accounts interfere with one another? . . . I believe there would be a collision between the two accounts if they were offered as explanations of one and the same occurrence of a man’s climbing a ladder. We will recall that the envisaged neurophysiological theory was supposed to provide sufficient causal explanations of behavior. Thus the movements of the man on the ladder would be completely accounted for in terms of electrical, chemical, and mechanical processes of his body. (Malcolm 1968: 52–3)
The basic task of action theory is to explain what distinguishes purposeful behavior from mere events. Coupled with an assumption of scientific naturalism, this gives rise to the basic problem of contemporary action theory: the role of purpose in human being appears certain to be superfluous, but it is purpose that makes certain events behaviors or actions.
It is not clear that an explanation satisfying this basic task will also distinguish simpler purposeful behaviors from rich human actions (events of type 2 and type 3). Common sense seems to find that something separates the automatic or limited behaviors of many other kinds of animals, or some human automatic behaviors, from certain complex behaviors of which humans alone appear to be capable. A spider builds a web, a fly moves toward the light, and a human blinks – these are behaviors, they have purposes, but they appear of limited flexibility. In contrast, actions might be behaviors that fulfill a plan, or are motivated by conscious and complex cognitive states, or are guided by explicit rational rules. Jones blinks often without being aware of it, and sometimes without being able to stop it or otherwise control it even if she tries. A fly moves toward light, we assume, without any kind of deliberation or choice. But it would seem that Jones can also decide not to add together a list of numbers, or not to write them down. Jones has some kind of control over some behaviors, and perhaps she has a special experience of deliberation also when she undertakes them. The notion of control is mysterious, but we can identify some indications of it. For example, in some cases Jones can say, “I will (not) do this,” and then (not) perform the behavior. Since action theorists have tended to suppose that what distinguishes actions from both mere events and mere behaviors is that actions are intentional (i.e., they are caused or partly constituted or best described by intentional states of the appropriate kind), this leaves the distinction between behaviors and mere events mysterious, and few have addressed this distinction.5
The difficulty of distinguishing behavior from action can be illustrated by consideration of a kind of situation that is an important part of the discussion of action in the tradition of existential phenomenology, although it is largely ignored or denied in the analytic tradition.6 A difficulty for the view that actions require some special mental state (such as volition, will, conscious or direct awareness, plans, or explicit rules) is that many of the most uniquely human activities, which demonstrate our greatest skills, are themselves activities that we seek to make, in some sense, automatic. In seeking to make them automatic, it seems that we seek to make these behaviors independent of such special mental states. I will appropriate an example from MerleauPonty to which we will return. Suppose that Jones is an organist of some note. She has just received the sheet music for an experimental new composition that she will debut. The piece is difficult, and also includes a number of unusual directions. As Jones sits down to practice, she reads the music over and reads the special instructions. She makes a number of decisions, such as which portions she will practice first, and how she will perform certain additional actions required. At this point, Jones is conscious of what she is doing, she could describe it to us at any time if she were interrupted, she could justify her actions using rational arguments, and in fact if we had asked her to think aloud and describe her actions to us as she prepares her study, we can expect that she would have come to the same conclusions in roughly the same way (which is to say, her ability to justify her actions is plausibly not just an interpretation added on after the actions). Her actions appear to be guided by a plan, and to have a conscious goal that she could describe for us (this goal is to master the music for the performance). Thus, her activity up to now will satisfy any of the standard criteria for being action.
Suppose that Jones now acts on her plan. She practices the music as she intended to do, until she masters it. What is mastery? It amounts to being able to play the piece correctly and automatically. What the expert seeks, what typically constitutes expertise, is the acquisition of capabilities which have all the characteristics of mere behaviors: they do not require deliberation, they are fast, we cannot accurately report upon each step of the behavior, there is no reason to believe the behaviors are in any simple sense governed by plans or discrete rules or rational norms, and the behaviors can be resistant to conscious control. The athlete, the musician, and the craftsperson all seek to acquire their most important capabilities as expert skills that do not require the kind of capabilities that many philosophers posed as necessary for action. In fact, what distinguishes the expert from the amateur is the progression from behavior that fulfills the leading and diverse criteria for action, to behavior that appears not to do so. This phenomenon is one studied in contemporary psychology and neural science, where there is now recognized a clear and measurable difference between explicit declarative memory, and a non-declarative “implicit memory” that amounts to the acquisition of skills.7 Jones’s practice develops special learning for the acquisition of implicit memories for skills, and it appears that distinct regions of the brain are dedicated to the acquisition and storing of these skill programs. This seems to lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the master organist is engaged in mere behavior, of the kind we might attribute to a nonhuman animal, whereas the amateur is the paragon of free activity.
Thus, although there is significant initial plausibility to many of the candidate explanations for the distinction between action and behavior, a new look at the phenomenon reveals a problem. The assumption that conscious control, or some similar standard, is the distinguishing factor between action and behavior does not cut in any clear way between the blink of the eye and the mastery of an organist. In fact, it would seem that on most such views, only amateur activity is capable of being action. Once we have mastered a task, its performance lacks many of the features that seem to distinguish actions from mere behaviors. But this contradicts the basic motivation for the distinction: that there is something special to human action in contrast to mere behaviors of a kind we share with other species of animals. The second task for action theory, to distinguish between actions and mere behaviors, should also address a second problem: it should either explain how the mastery of skills by humans is still an action, or explain away our common-sense prejudice that things like playing the organ are uniquely rich human actions.
Action raises then at least two special problems for contemporary philosophy. A commitment to a sufficient scientific naturalism appears to render notions of purpose superfluous. A commitment to distinguishing action from behavior (by way of being caused or explained by one or more of a range of candidates for uniquely human mental states) faces substantial difficulties, including that most candidates for such states are inconsistent with the actual practice of expertise.
Action and Heidegger’s Critique of the Subject/Object Distinction
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927; cited as Heidegger 1962) provides the most extensive and radical attempt in recent philosophy to find an alternative to the division we inherit between a causal and objective external world and a purposeful and subjective inner world. For this reason, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology provides not only the possibility of reformulating the classical problems of epistemology, but also of action. These opportunities arise as corollaries of his more general task: Heidegger’s goal is to seek to formulate and answer the question of the meaning of Being. As a first step toward accomplishing this task, Heidegger reformulates phenomenology in the direction that we can call existential phenomenology: he focuses upon an analysis of the everyday activity and experience of human being, or Dasein, with the goal of discerning how an understanding of beings and Being is possible for Dasein. This analysis requires him to deconstruct many of our prejudices, and to attempt to develop more radical alternative explanations of Dasein and its understanding. These alternatives allow us to formulate a distinct perspective on action. However, it must be stressed that explaining action in the sense of contemporary action theory is never Heidegger’s concern; nor is Heidegger ever concerned to reconcile our view of ourselves with any form of scientific naturalism.
Dasein, Heidegger observes, is fundamentally being-in-the-world. As such, Dasein cannot be separated from the world, and the world cannot be separated from Dasein: “Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1988: 297). Here world is a technical term, and does not mean the collection of physical objects in space. Rather, for a particular Dasein, world is the system of purposes that determines the actual and potential interactions this particular Dasein can have with things or other Dasein, and also the actual or potential interactions this Dasein can understand. Dasein is “in” this world by acting appropriately for these purposes. Describing world more fully is difficult, and at first the concept is elusive. World is neither occurrent nor extant, that is, it is not the kind of thing that is an object of scientific theory. For this reason, it cannot be fully defined or described. But Heidegger believes he can indicate what it is, since by way of phenomenology he can observe it, partially describe it, and so help us observe it.
The notion of world, and of being-in-the-world, provides a bold way to avoid the traditional problems of the subject/object division. The most obvious such problems are epistemic: if the world is out there, external to me, and communicated to me by way of some kind of representations or other sensory data, then there is always a remove of myself from the world. As a result, I can always doubt that my knowledge of the world is accurate. I can even rightly doubt that there is any external world. But Heidegger asserts that world in this sense of extant, present objects external to me is derivative from world in the sense of being-in-the-world. World in the sense of being-in-the-world is not external, but includes essentially the interaction of myself with things, and I am essentially defined by these interactions, as are the things with which I interact. There is no gulf to cross, no wall between two worlds that requires a window.
The classical epistemic problems are closely related to the problems of action. Many of us have inherited a superficial theoretical belief that we have both an experience of a causal natural world external to ourselves, and a purposeful world of consciousness internal to ourselves. In breaking down this distinction, Heidegger finds something more fundamental that allows for a new perspective on action. Here again, being-inthe-world is the guiding concept. As world is in part encountered in terms of the things with which we interact, revealed first and most often through the ways in which we interact with them, world is the horizon of possibilities for Dasein. This is a feature that is ultimately to be explained in terms of Dasein’s temporal nature. Dasein projects itself onto its possibilities. Unlike a stone or a magnetic field, Dasein can question what it is. It inherits its past, but the future is present for it as a range of possible ways of being. With this characterization of Dasein’s potential, Heidegger works to avoid either a notion of Dasein as a passive object, like a scientific object pushed along by laws, or a totally free subject, spontaneously choosing options. He seeks to indicate something else: Dasein is confronted with possibilities and it is the very nature of Dasein to be aware of these possibilities in some sense, and to realize some of them and reject others. This is not, however, solely a way of choosing options, but rather the actual constitution of Dasein: “the projection is the way I am the possibility” (Heidegger 1988: 277).
This projection into possibilities, which are themselves the future, is part of what Heidegger calls transcendence. Since Dasein is not, like a Cartesian subject, removed from the world and observing it as through a window, Dasein is out in the world encountering beings. Being-in-the-world literally means that Dasein is, compared to the traditional idea of the internal subject, outside. This transcendence of being-in-the-world makes possible intentionality. But “Transcendence, being-in-the-world, is never to be equated and identified with intentionality” (Heidegger 1992: 168). Rather, Heidegger introduces a new term, comportments, for this way that Dasein is mixed with and directed toward its possibilities, which typically means directed toward beings (objects). Mental states like knowing are comportments, but comportments need not be mental states of a subject, and some comportments make possible mental states by preceding them and grounding them. For example, comportments might include perceptuomotor skills – “automatic,” but important ways we have of interacting with our environment that in turn are essential to many other capabilities that we have. World is essentially revealed and so constituted through Dasein’s comportments. These comportments arise because of the temporal nature of Dasein: Dasein cannot, as it were, sit still, but must interact. It is thrown into the world from its past, into its future, and this makes it possible for Dasein to have comportments.
This projection into possibilities of Dasein in turn makes possible understanding, and this includes also activity: “Understanding as the Dasein’s self-projection is the Dasein’s fundamental mode of happening. As we may also say, it is the authentic meaning of action” (Heidegger 1988: 277). Dasein has activity,8 its being-in-the-world depends upon Dasein being concerned, or directed in a “toward-which,” with the world. This way of viewing Dasein breaks down the cause/purpose division traditionally associated with object and subject. The projection of Dasein upon its possibilities is a fundamental feature of Dasein, which actually makes it what it is. Thus, Heidegger attempts to reappropriate the notion of freedom: “we also have to remove freedom from the traditional perspective where emphasis is placed on self-initiating spontaneity, sua sponte, in contrast to a compulsive mechanical sequence” (Heidegger 1992: 191). This notion of freedom is meant to escape the problems that arise when freedom is defined as an alternative or even denial of (physical) determinism. By defining freedom as an essential part of Dasein’s projection upon its possibilities, Heidegger can claim that “Being-in-the-world is accordingly nothing other than freedom, freedom no longer understood as spontaneity but as defined by the formulation of Dasein’s metaphysical essence” (Heidegger 1992: 192). This freedom cannot be escaped. Even when we give into a kind of passivity, we are really realizing a possibility that Dasein is projected upon:
The essence of freedom, which surpasses every particular factic or factual being, its surpassing character, can also be seen particularly in despair, where one’s own lack of freedom engulfs a Dasein absorbed in itself. This completely factical lack of freedom is itself an elemental testimony to transcendence, for despair lies in the despairing person’s vision of the impossibility of something possible. Such a person still witnesses to the possible, inasmuch as he despairs of it. (Heidegger 1992: 193)
Heidegger’s notion of freedom can perhaps be made more compelling by way of an analogy with the analytic notion of agent causation. We have noted that when we presuppose the eventuality of a sufficient scientific theory of behavior, we are confronted with the difficulty of finding a place for purposeful action in a world that presumably will be sufficiently described in terms of purposeless causes. One approach to this challenge is to suppose that some causes either are, or can be described as, intentions. When analytic action theory is concerned with freedom, the problem is redoubled, because such causes, if they are fully explained by natural laws and past events, are explained ultimately by events that occurred before I was even born. Such causes seem, in some sense, not to be mine. Some have argued that what is needed to explain human action and also human freedom is the idea of agent causation, of causes that are essentially identified with the agent (examples include Chisholm 1976, Taylor 1966). The idea is compelling: if the agent is a cause of some action, then we can say the agent was the source of her actions, and we may even say that she was “free” in her actions. If the agent has some prior cause, this does not change the fact that her agency is her own. That is, it seems plausible that we can retain something of what we mean by saying the agent caused an action when the causes in question are constitutive of who and what the agent is, and so cannot be made alien to the agent. Even if these actions can be explained by prior events, it would seem that these actions are owned by the agent because they are literally identical with (part of) the agent. For Heidegger’s Dasein, something analogous to this is argued here. Dasein is its projection upon its possibilities. As such, it is free and an agent in the sense that this projection is not outside of or something other than Dasein.
Heidegger’s approach to action partly eludes, partly asserts the basic problem of action theory. Dasein has activities essentially, as part of its projection upon its possibilities. When we look at Dasein in its most fundamental understanding of Being and beings, we see this freedom that precedes all other kinds of understanding. Dasein is not a scientific object, a thing occurrent or present-at-hand, which appears both purposeful and also amenable to scientific reduction. Rather, Dasein is revealed in a radical critique of what makes other views of the world even possible, including the scientific view. In part, this means that what distinguishes the activity of Dasein from mere events is that the activity of Dasein is part of what it is to be Dasein, and mere events have no such ownership (but this can be a deceptive way to put the distinction, since from the perspective of some phenomenological analyses of Dasein’s everyday experience, we may not see mere events). Heidegger then does not reduce Dasein to being a physical object, nor posits irreducible intentions that are had by a subject (which he would see as just another kind of object), but rather he claims that the scientific worldview is derivative of a more fundamental relationship between Dasein and Being. A scientific explanation of how bodies act should then not be expected to reduce, eliminate, or otherwise conflict with a view of human being as purposeful. However, the basic problem of action theory is not solved by this move: we are surely able to see our bodies as occurrent, extant objects, which can be described by science. As such, these bodies may present a scientific challenge to us – we may describe organisms and their organs as having purposes (e.g., the purpose of the heart is to pump blood), while maintaining a conviction that a causal theory will ultimately sufficiently explain these objects. This is no doubt a problem for the scientific worldview. But when we look at the human organism in this way, we are not observing Dasein. That is, in taking the scientific worldview, we are taking a derivative perspective which already excludes an understanding of Dasein in its essential nature as free and having activity. Such a worldview may ultimately be sufficient for its own purposes, and Heidegger later (1977c) seems to suggest that there is a real danger that we will come to see ourselves solely in this way, but this view can never be complete.
This points us toward how Heidegger answers the question of the difference between what I have called mere behaviors and more complex purposeful human action. A brief discussion of the beings we encounter in the world is required first. In its world, Dasein tends to encounter beings as available equipment, as ready-to-hand objects (Zuhandenheit). These are beings understood as elements of the ongoing projects of the Dasein. The hammer is experienced not normally or first as an external object, but rather via the role it plays in the activity of hammering, which in turn is understood in terms of the role it plays in building a home, and so on. These different roles together are aimed at what Heidegger calls a for-the-sake-of-which (1962: 118/86ff.). However, Dasein sometimes encounters objects as external, independent, even recalcitrant objects, as things occurrent or present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). This can happen, for example, when a tool breaks. We look at the hammer with the cracked handle, and suddenly it is set before us as something other than us, an object that we can describe with objective features, perhaps even find a little strange.
These two ways that beings can be revealed to Dasein are part of Heidegger’s recasting of the distinction between a subjective and objective world. In first and most typically encountering things as pragmata, practical objects (Heidegger 1962: 96/68), these things are revealed to us as they fit into our projects. Again, this leaves no gulf to be crossed between subject and object. It is tempting to read Heidegger as suggesting that seeing the beings of our world as equipment is in some sense a more accurate way that Dasein encounters its world, and that when we encounter the beings of the world as occurrent or present-at-hand we are somehow deceived or confused or at least seeing these beings in a reduced way. If we could resist the theoretical attitude, we would, for example, avoid the problems of action, since the causal worldview would not intrude into our experience of ourselves as purposeful. The way Heidegger describes these matters in Being and Time can encourage such a reading,9 but his later clarifying comments show that he was eager to reject this kind of reading. In his 1929–30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger is explicit:
I attempted in Being and Time to provide a preliminary characterization of the phenomenon of world by interpreting the way in which we at first and for the most part move about in our everyday world. There I took my departure from what lies to hand in the everyday realm, from those things that we use and pursue, indeed in such a way that we do not really know of the peculiar character proper to such activity at all, and when we do try to describe it we immediately misinterpret it by applying concepts and question that have their source elsewhere . . . It never occurred to me, however, to try to claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram. (Heidegger 1995: 177)
If our view of beings as occurrent is not wholly deceptive, then there must be some truth to the view of, say, our bodies as occurrent things, perhaps fully determined in their behavior by causal laws. Here Heidegger’s discussion of the difference between human being and the being of nonhuman animals, and therefore of the difference between action and mere behavior, arises.
Nonhuman animals have purposeful behavior, but, as noted, it seems that they lack the ability for some kinds of complex behaviors. Heidegger accepts this common-sense observation:
The specific manner in which man is we shall call comportment and the specific manner in which the animal is we shall call behavior. They are fundamentally different from one another . . . Being capable of ____ means being capable of behavior. Capability is instinctual, a driving forward and maintaining oneself in being driven toward that which the capacity is capable of, toward a possible form of behavior, a drivenness toward a performance of a particular kind in each case. The behavior of the animal is not a doing and acting, as in human comportment, but a driven performing. (Heidegger 1995: 237)
So far, this seems a rather simplistic acceptance of the common-sense idea of nonhuman animals driven along by instincts, and of humans having something more than instinct. But Heidegger’s analysis turns out to be more subtle than that. He argues that nonhuman animals can, in one sense of “world,” be said to have a world, but that these animals are world poor. He draws here upon the ideas of the biologist Jakob von Uexkull, who argued that organisms have a lifeworld, or worldview, that reflects their capabilities (von Uexkull 1926). What then makes our world complete or rich, and the world of the nonhuman animal poor – or, put differently, in what sense of “world” do nonhuman animals lack a world? Heidegger’s answer is striking. The bee, for example, “is not governed by any recognition of the presence or absence of that which it is driven to engage with . . . the bee does not comport itself toward the blossom as something present or not present” (Heidegger 1995: 243). This lack of such comportment arises because the nonhuman animal is incapable of interpreting beings. Ultimately, this means that the nonhuman animal is incapable of understanding beings as occur-rent, as present-at-hand. Its relation to beings “is not an apprehending of something as something, as something present at hand” (Heidegger 1995: 247), thus “The behavior of the animal, contrary to how it might appear, does not and never can relate to present-at-hand things singly or collectively” (Heidegger 1995: 255).
Heidegger does not formulate a distinction in human activities between mere behaviors and actions, but he does tell us what makes a human world different from the nonhuman animal’s “world,” and thus shows how our activities can have something lacking to nonhuman animals even though both human and nonhuman animal behavior are purposeful. Our world is in part constituted by our ability to encounter beings as occurrent, as present-at-hand objects. But I argued above that the view of beings as occurrent is consistent with a scientific worldview, where we might suppose that a causal explanation will be sufficient. When we look at a human body as occur-rent, for example, we cannot see in it Dasein or Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Is Dasein, or the world, in the sense of being-in-the-world, then nothing? Heidegger would say that in fact Dasein must be able to confront this possibility of conceiving of its own nothingness, and that the world can slip away from us. This is because Dasein must be capable of seeing its purposes as tentative – as, from a certain perspective, evaporating. This is one of his points in the elusive 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?” where Heidegger describes the “nihilation” that occurs in severe anxiety, when “All things and we ourselves sink into indifference . . . We can get no hold on things” (Heidegger 1977e: 103). Anxiety can reveal the world as threatening to become all alien objects, fully occurrent and lacking any availableness. Such a world threatens to become meaningless for us, and thus threatens to be in this sense nothing.
This insight into a perspective under which meaning threatens to disappear underlies Heidegger’s notion of authenticity. For Dasein to be authentic, it must choose resolutely its own possibilities. To do this means that Dasein must recognize that there is no absolute grounding to its choices among its possibilities. Viewed from, say, a faith in a complete or sufficient causal scientific worldview, Dasein’s possibilities may disappear, they may be nothing, they may be seen as purposeless. Resoluteness arises when we confront such a way of seeing ourselves. We are authentic when we recognize that there is no way to secure our purposes from all doubt, no way to finally ground our purposes so that they cannot ever threaten to be meaningless, to be nothing. Heidegger thus in part casts the distinction between action and behavior not in terms of some special causes, but rather in terms of the ability to confront the otherness of beings, including even some aspects of our own being (such as our bodies), and confront their potential to be resistant to us and even be purposeless and absurd, and still undertake activity.
This way of distinguishing action is consistent with the case described of the organist. When Jones first began to study the organ it would be a strange and recalcitrant object, occurrent for her, resisting her. As she masters it, she acquires a thing available as equipment, something ready-to-hand. When she is confronted with a new musical piece, the same thing happens: if the piece is difficult, she may have to reflect on it, make choices about it, and she may see it as frustrating and question the purposes of the composer. As she masters the piece, she will no longer see it as occurrent. But one thing that distinguishes her expertise from the behavior of nonhuman animals is that she can always turn to any decision of the composer, or any decision she makes in performing, and see it as something, and this means that she can also possibly see the composer’s choices as nothing (that is, as arbitrary). This also holds out the possibility for authenticity. She can ultimately recognize that she cannot absolutely secure the purpose of her choices – each could always appear nearly meaningless or purposeless. In practice, she strives to make her performance automatically live up to very high standards she has adopted. But she can at all times look at what she is doing and see that there is ultimately no standard which cannot be questioned, which cannot be seen as arbitrary. To play the organ this way and not that way comes down ultimately to something like, this is just how others have done it or others think it should be done. As a master organist, she strives for perfection, but if she is authentic in this activity, she sometimes recognizes that there is no absolute standard for perfection. She has then chosen, resolutely, her standards. Human activity is distinguishable from mere behavior not in the nature of its causes, but in the possibility that it can be questioned and accepted.
This view of action that we can reconstruct from Heidegger’s early work is compelling but not fully complete. Heidegger did not develop a complete analysis – or, perhaps it would be better to say, he did not develop as complete an analysis as he aimed to provide – of the nature of our understanding. As a result, we do not have a complete analysis of activity. We may well wonder, for example, how our experience of being-in-the-world will stand against the progress of human sciences, or how it might answer concrete questions about responsibility and freedom in contexts such as legal proceedings. In his later work, after the Kehre or turn toward more radical methods and concerns that occurred in the 1930s, this incompleteness is more explicit. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger in part responds to Sartre’s brief paper, “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946; cited as Sartre 1988). Heidegger begins the essay with the statement
We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough. We view action only as causing an effect. The actuality of the effect is valued according to its utility. But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere. (Heidegger 1977e: 193)
In the new terminology here and in other later works, Heidegger increasingly speaks of the activity of Dasein in more passive terms. This is also part of his growing focus upon Dasein’s historical role. This surely is a change of focus for Heidegger, but it is one that is arguably a natural outgrowth of his implicit views on Dasein and its activity in his earlier work, especially in terms of Dasein’s freedom and its facticity. As we saw, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s freedom is meant to resist the notion of Dasein as acting spontaneously. But our tradition, and our common-sense view of ourselves, encourages us to interpret all talk of freedom and activity in such terms. In exploring the nature of Dasein’s projection upon its possibilities, Heidegger may have felt that he failed to reveal sufficiently the understanding he asserts of a kind of being between passivity and spontaneous activity. His later work can be seen, then, in part, as returning to the projection of Dasein upon its possibilities, its activity, with the goal of revealing them in a more original light.
Heidegger does this in at least two ways. First, Heidegger identifies thinking as a kind of action. This is first clear in the “Letter on Humanism,” where he argues that thinking is the most important kind of action that Dasein can undertake. We do not typically consider thinking as exemplary of action; we even distinguish, for example, a “man of action” from a “thinker.” Second, Heidegger struggles for a terminology that sounds less spontaneous and is more concerned with a letting happen. Examples of this occur throughout his later works. I will cite just a few examples. In “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger argues that truth requires freedom, but now describes freedom differently: “Freedom for what is opened up in an open region lets beings be the beings they are. Freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be” (Heidegger 1998: 127). In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger describes the “highest dignity of the essence” of human beings, which may allow humans to escape the dangers of an all-consuming technological worldview: “This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment – and with it, from the first, the concealment – of all coming to presence on this Earth” (Heidegger 1977e: 313). Also during this period he frequently uses the term “releasement,” explaining “Releasement lies – if we may use the word lie – beyond the distinction between activity and passivity” (Heidegger 1966: 61). In his last interview, Heidegger concluded despairingly that the being of Dasein was in danger, and that “only a god can save us,” but said that we can actively wait for this god, and “awaken the readiness of expectation” (Heidegger 1991: 107). In all of these cases, a charitable reading is that Heidegger strives for a poetic way of asserting the freedom of Dasein in a manner that moves away from notions of spontaneity by using increasingly passive language, but without asserting ever that Dasein is passive.
Merleau-Ponty and a Concrete Being-in-the-World
Heidegger’s view of action rests upon a critique of understanding that is both radical and highly abstract. Furthermore, he had neither sympathy for, nor interest in, scientific naturalism. As such, his views seem to have little immediate bearing upon the confrontation of the scientific worldview with a view of action as purposeful. In the work of Merleau-Ponty, the notion of being-in-the-world offers a solution to the problems of action, but does so in a philosophy that seeks to integrate science with a phenomenological understanding, and which sees human being as essentially bodily. For these reasons, Merleau-Ponty’s views on action are of special relevance to contemporary theory of action.
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has several important features that distinguish it from Heidegger’s. Heidegger believes that an analysis of Dasein of a highly general and abstract kind is possible, and seems open to the possibility that there can be other kinds of Dasein, even perhaps Dasein without a physical body. Merleau-Ponty is instead not engaged in any abstract or general kind of analysis, but is concerned specifically with human beings. Heidegger rarely discusses the body, and appears to see it as a factical contingency of Dasein, akin to other features of the inherited situation that a particular Dasein finds itself in. Merleau-Ponty sees humans as essentially bodily – they are their bodies – and he believes being-in-the-world is only possible through a body. This more concrete focus of Merleau-Ponty has an important consequence regarding science. Heidegger does not suggest that science without phenomenology will somehow fail. He seems to consider it possible that we could become fascinated by what technological science can do, and ourselves fail to see – perhaps even get ourselves into a situation where we are unable to see – where such science is incomplete. MerleauPonty, instead, identifies or predicts concrete failures in science caused by false beliefs that really are prejudices arising from a failure to undertake phenomenology. These failures can be identified, even scientifically demonstrated, and also they can be overcome with the right phenomenology. For example, in the opening of his magnum opus, The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes concerning perception:
Inevitably science, in its general effort towards objectification, evolved a picture of the human organism as a physical system undergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by their physicochemical properties, and tried to reconstitute actual perception on this basis, and to close the circle of scientific knowledge by discovering the laws governing the production of knowledge itself, by establishing an objective science of subjectivity. But it is also inevitable that this attempt should fail. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 12)
Merleau-Ponty makes the same assertion about action (see Merleau-Ponty 2002: 127ff.). Since phenomenology can reveal these failures, there is a direct interaction possible between phenomenology as he practices it and science. For this reason, his claims about action are particularly relevant to contemporary action theory.
For Merleau-Ponty, being-in-the-world is the unreflective skills and experience of human being that ground all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. MerleauPonty does not seek something so radical as an understanding of the meaning of the question of Being, but rather he is concerned to explain how we perceive, understand, and act. Furthermore, he is not concerned with perception, understanding, and action in the abstract – he would doubt that they could be studied abstractly. He specifically addresses concrete examples of human perception, human understanding, and human action (and of the failure of these capabilities in illness and disability). Each of these is essentially related for Merleau-Ponty. “Perception” is his term not only for our usual notion of perception, but more specifically for our experience of the world pretheoretically – that is, the experience of being-in-the-world. Perception and intentionality are essentially related to action: we perceive things not in terms, say, of a construction of sense data, but rather as opportunities for action.
The abilities of human being rest, then, on skills and on experiences that come before knowledge. Because scientific knowledge both characterizes our age, and is the paradigm of theoretical knowledge, Merleau-Ponty is particularly concerned to assert that science depends upon this experience. Phenomenology describes, or points out to us, this experience: “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: x).
Merleau-Ponty’s first major work, The Structure of Behavior (1942; cited as MerleauPonty 1983), addresses the problems of both distinguishing behavior from mere events, and actions from behavior. Merleau-Ponty reviews numerous scientific results, with the goal of showing the inadequacy of both the causal “realist” view of the phenomena, and of idealistic alternatives. Throughout his review of scientific results from psychology and ethology, Merleau-Ponty discovers that scientific approaches to the phenomena of learning always take for granted some of the purposes of the organism as a whole. For example, organisms often will achieve a task that we can recognize as the same kind of task they learned to achieve before, but which they perform in different ways. To choose a simple case: “A cat, trained to obtain its food by pulling on a string, will pull with its paw on the first successful trial but with its teeth on the second” (Merleau-Ponty 1983: 96). A scientist studying such a phenomenon might be pleased to say the cat learned the task, a fact that can be measured (the cat pulls the string). But of course, there is no one kind of series of causal events shared by two such behaviors. If we were to track out a physical explanation in terms of neurons, and muscles, and so on, it would be very different in the two cases. What makes them the same? Although there is something measurable here (the pulling of the string), the scientist surreptitiously recognizes that the cat is behaving with this as a purpose, and grants that these are the same kind of behavior because of this purpose (the scientist, for example, would not count the cat as pulling the string if it became entangled in it and fell).
Another example includes the developments of what Merleau-Ponty calls “habits,” and what above I described as implicit memory of skills. In habits, Merleau-Ponty claims, we acquire a skill that moves from being a conscious undertaking to being part of our pre-reflective or unconscious background of skills. “Habit expresses our power of dilating being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 166). There is no need for reflection or interpretation in habitual action, but rather it relies upon the more fundamental background of understanding that we have and which is not any kind explicit knowledge; the formation of a habit shapes and alters this background of understanding. Habit is thus, “knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 166). This latter claim is particularly important: Merleau-Ponty is not just asserting that the background skills of being-in-the-world are unconscious but otherwise like our conscious actions; rather, they cannot be formulated as a declarative set of plans or instructions because they are qualitatively different. Presumably the skills so exercised cannot be correctly formulated as embodying any of the standard criteria for being actions (caused by intentional states, fulfilling represented plans, etc.).
Returning to an example that he first used in The Structure of Behavior, MerleauPonty describes in The Phenomenology of Perception the skill of an organ player. This organ player, when asked to play on a new organ, is quite capable. “It is known that an experienced organist is capable of playing an organ which he does not know, which has more or fewer manuals, and stops differently arranged, compared with those on the instrument he is used to playing” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 167–8). This organist may have to practice for a short while to determine the placement of the pedals, or of the stops, but is otherwise able to exercise his capability fully. This reveals something of great importance. For although the player’s ability is surely in some sense nothing more than an ability for kinds of movements, these have to be understood dynamically, as a whole, with their specific purpose in mind. A very naïve understanding of motion, for example, of the kind we find in early work in AI, might take the skill of playing the organ to amount to the ability to move this limb to this place at this time. But if that were so, one would develop the skill to only play on one particular token of one kind of instrument. But as Merleau-Ponty observes, we know that you can move the stops and pedals, put the keys higher and farther apart, and the organist can still play. The motor ability is therefore a whole dynamic capability, and the actual specific movements are malleable. We will need therefore to understand action, including complex habits, as whole capabilities, which in turn only can be understood in terms of their purposes.
To explain behavior, Merleau-Ponty argues, we must recognize what actually looking at the phenomenon will reveal: that there is a form or structure to behavior that is not reducible to causal discourse. These irreducible forms include essentially an observation of the purposes of the organism, purposes which we attribute to the organism as a whole autonomous entity, and which are evident to us as we watch the organism as a body interacting with the world. This is Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the first and primary question of action theory: the difference between behaviors and other kinds of events is that behaviors cannot be recognized or explained without reference to their form. To even identify a behavior as a kind – feeding, fleeing, seeking a mate – we must recognize the organism as a whole with purposes. In his later work, this idea of the irreducible form of behavior is subsumed into the idea of being-in-the-world, but although he expands on the view of The Structure of Behavior, it remains unchanged.
About his convictions that we must understand activity as a dynamic whole, Merleau-Ponty is indisputably correct. His more general claim, that we see this dynamic whole as an irreducible form, is more debatable, but progress in the study of behavior has so far been consistent with this conviction: in contemporary sciences concerned with organisms, there is simply no avoiding teleological talk. The doctor must speak of the heart as having the purpose of pumping blood. The ethologist describes a particular call as serving to warn other organisms. A neural scientist describes the activity of ion channels as opening so that a neuron may fire. And so on. Of course, we can construct an experiment and our discourse about one particular kind of biological event in such a way that we avoid such talk, but Merleau-Ponty’s claim is that this is never more than an incomplete effort artificially restricted to a small, reduced domain, where our understanding of form or being-in-the-world is pushed back until we can pretend our understanding in the case is not dependent upon the pre-theoretic understanding we have of what is happening.10 In part by drawing upon these very insights of Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus was able to provide a strikingly prescient critique of traditional AI (Dreyfus 1972) that has remained relevant to this day in an otherwise rapidly changing technical field.
Merleau-Ponty also addresses in The Structure of Behavior the differences between behavior and more complex kinds of action. He does this by distinguishing three kinds of behavior: syncretic, amovable, and symbolic (Merleau-Ponty 1983: 104ff.). Syncretic behaviors are the simplest. Although they can be difficult to distinguish from more complex forms of behavior, they are behaviors triggered by some complex of stimuli and result in simple behaviors. Amovable forms of behavior are the most complex behaviors that we see in other kinds of animals. They include learning, and flexible uses of different kinds of behavior to achieve the same end. Their only distinction from those most special cases of human intelligence is that they are not symbolic. Symbolic behavior appears to be unique to humans. In such behavior, the systematic nature of a behavior can become evident through our explicit recognition that there is a kind of isomorphism between the understanding that underlies our practice and the world itself: “The true sign represents the signified, not according to an empirical association, but inasmuch as its relation to other signs is the same as the relation of the object signified by it to other objects” (Merleau-Ponty 1983: 121–2). This allows us to recognize ourselves and objects and abstract away from our situation, in order to conceive of different perspectives or situations.
It is this possibility of varied expressions of a same theme, this “multiplicity of perspective,” which is lacking in animal behavior . . . In making possible all substitutions of points of view, it liberates the “stimuli” from the here-and-now relations in which my own point of view involves them and from the functional values which the needs of the species, defined once and for all, assign to them. (Merleau-Ponty 1983: 122)
In contrast, nonhuman animals that are capable only of syncretic and amovable behaviors are limited by what Merleau-Ponty calls the “a priori of the species.” Because of our ability for symbolic behavior, in which we can see a skill from different perspectives, we have additional power to act. There is not some special mental state that distinguishes action from behavior, but rather we have capabilities that give us profound additional flexibility and thus enable us to undertake special kinds of activities. The exercise of an expertise, what Merleau-Ponty calls a habit, is therefore as capable of being symbolic activity as is any other kind of human behavior. In symbolic activity, we can consider different possibilities, and chose among them. The organist, for example, can reflect on the relationships between the activities he undertakes in playing the organ, and the relationships between the sounds he makes, and so consider transcribing the music for different instruments. Since for Merleau-Ponty our perceptions, and so our world, are determined by the capabilities of our bodies for action, this means symbolic behavior is a recognition of alternatives for action. But, conversely, since our abilities for action shape perception, which is how we experience being-in-the-world, our abilities for symbolic action make us capable of, to some degree, changing our world and what we are in that world.
Merleau-Ponty presents a bold theory of action. He is open to the results of scientific naturalism, but he asserts that we can demonstrate that when applied to animal behavior, including human behavior, such naturalism is demonstrably insufficient. As a result, he claims, we must accept what phenomenology reveals: that our being-inthe-world provides us with irreducible structures or forms of behavior. Explaining the behavior of humans and other animals requires essential reference to purposes had by the organism as a whole. In light of contemporary philosophy, especially contemporary analytic philosophy of action, this view remains a little-pursued path. It is all the more remarkable, however, that so far Merleau-Ponty has been right: the science of behavior today must always refer to irreducible actions, attributed to the organism or organs being studied as a whole, and it remains only a matter of faith of the stronger forms of scientific realism that such references will eventually be reduced away.
An Opportunity
Action theory as an independent endeavor, practiced with the presumption that a causal scientific account of events will be sufficient, is confronted with a number of apparently intractable problems concerning the distinction between behavior and events, and action and behavior. This suggests that there are fundamental problems lurking in the presuppositions of this philosophical discipline, which, if ignored, shall cause continued stagnation. The concept of being-in-the-world, essential to existential phenomenology, offers an important alternative to the dominant formulations of the problems of human action. Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world is part of a radical alternative to scientific naturalism that can allow us to reflect upon the presuppositions of contemporary philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of being-in-the-world presents a concrete, apparently even falsifiable, set of alternative presumptions about the sciences of behavior. Both alternatives have been insufficiently explored in the theory of action.
Acknowledgment
I owe special thanks for Ingo Farin and Mark Wrathall for helpful comments.
Notes
1 For example, philosophers have struggled with the question of what makes some kinds of behavior intentional, arguing that this is sufficient to characterize action. A range of answers have been proposed: that intentions are other kinds of states (beliefs and desires) which cause actions (Davidson 1963); that there are states which can be identified as intentions (through logical analysis) and which partly constitute the action (Searle 1983); that intentions appear to be causes but are convenient fictions which explain human action (Dennett 1971); or that intentions arise in intentional explanations, which as explanations are explicitly not physical states that act as causes (Wilson 1989).
2 Most discussed have been concerns of wayward causation (see Chisholm 1964): if actions are caused by special kinds of mental states, such as intentions, it is easy to conceive of situations where a causal chain gets diverted, but the sought goal is still realized. In such cases, the causal explanation breaks down, but the purpose seems satisfied. Describing causal accounts in such a way that this problem is avoided has proved difficult for many of the existing approaches to action theory. Other concerns include identifying the ontology of events, so that one can distinguish actions from other things. When we imagine a subject that generates intentional states which cause actions, we imagine a chain of causes from this mental state through a series of events. It becomes natural to ask questions like, “If Jones acts to kick the ball, is the neural message from her brain or spinal cord to her muscles an action, or is the contracting of her leg muscles an action, or just the impact of her foot with ball, or all of these, or is something else the action?” Every answer to this question has proved to give rise to challenges of its own.
3 I know of no one who explicitly endorses such an approach, although Daniel Dennett can be interpreted as offering a variation on it (Dennett 1971; see Stitch 1983: 242ff.).
4 Davidson’s irreductionism is complex, and illustrative of the difficulties involved in reconciling the scientific causal view with one of purposeful agency. Davidson argues that the mental states of an agent can in fact only be recognized from a perspective of interpreting the agent as a purposeful agent, and as such these mental states are irreducible, but these mental states are otherwise physical (1970, 1974). He supports this view by arguing that mental states, including the causes of intentional actions, are not type reducible, although they are token identical with physical events. For those unfamiliar with this position known as anomalous monism, Davidson is claiming that although each individual mental state is some physical (e.g., brain) state, there is no neat correlation between a kind of mental state and a kind of physical state. Roughly, not all fears of a particular kind, for example, will be instantiated in a recognizable fear structure in the brain.
5 Exceptions occur largely in the philosophy of mind, and include Millikan 1993 and Dretske 1988.
6 An important exception is Searle, whose notion of the background of skills seems to address the seemingly-automatic nature of expert skills (1983). Searle denies that expert skills require self-aware mental states, but he otherwise characterizes them as like other kinds of actions, including the most obvious cases of the kind contrasted below with expert behaviors. (A valuable discussion of these issues is to be found in Searle 2000 and Dreyfus 2000.) This leaves it unclear, however, whether there is a difference between mere behaviors and actions, and if so, what such a difference is.
7 Some dramatic early evidence for this distinction came from a famous patient, HM, who as part of a treatment for epilepsy had portions of both temporal lobes removed. HM could form no new declarative memories, but he acquired motor skills like a normal person (Scoville and Milner 1957; Penfield and Milner 1958).
8 I follow Dreyfus (1991: 57) in using “activity” as a neutral term to avoid confusion with the formal notion of action described above. As such, the term includes behaviors, but could also refer to events described in alternate ways where the distinction between behaviors and mere events may not arise.
9 Another temptation encouraging such a reading, especially for American readers, is to interpret Heidegger as a kind of American pragmatist, since the pragmatists are the preeminent figures of English language philosophy who stressed the primacy of activity. However, in this regard it is important to recognize that there were other traditions that singled out the control of bodily activity as significantly distinct from other kinds of mental activity. Bergson, to pick one example, promoted in his 1911 book Matter and Memory (Bergson 1919) a unique dualism in which bodily activity was controlled by the physical body, and perception was essentially a relation to possible activity, but certain forms of conceptual understanding required some secondary kind of explanation not reducible to physical explanation. This work is also notable as a potential influence on existential phenomenology for its struggle to avoid the options of idealism and materialism by way of positing a space and time of experience that is distinct from the space and time posited by science.
10 Just as Merleau-Ponty argues that the logical empiricist project of assembling perception out of sense data atoms is always possible in a very limited case, but only because we have pushed back the pretheoretical understanding that we depend upon: “the empiricist can always build up, with psychic atoms, near equivalents. But the inventory of the perceived world will increasingly show it up as a kind of mental blindness” (2002: 29).
References and Further Reading
Bergson, H. (1919) Matter and Memory (trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer). New York and London: Macmillan and George Allen & Unwin (original work published 1911).
Chisholm, R. (1964) The descriptive element in the concept of action. Journal of Philosophy, 61, 613–25.
—— (1976) The agent as cause. In M. Brand and D. Walton (eds.), Action Theory (pp. 199– 211). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Davidson, Donald (1963) Actions, reasons, and causes. Journal of Philosophy, 60, 685–700.
—— (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
—— (1974) Psychology as philosophy. In S. C. Brown (ed.). Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Macmillan.
Dennett, D. (1971) Intentional systems. Journal of Philosophy, 68, 87–106.
Dretske, F. (1988) Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dreyfus, H. (1972) What Computers Can’t Do. New York: Harper & Row.
—— (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
—— (2000) Reply to Searle. In M. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2 (pp. 323–37). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). New York: HarperCollins (original work published 1927).
—— (1966) Discourse on Thinking (trans. J. M. Anderson and E. Freund). New York: Harper & Row (original work published 1959).
—— (1977a) Basic Writings (ed. D. Krell). New York: Harper & Row.
—— (1977b) Letter on Humanism (trans. F. A. Capuzzi). In Basic Writings (pp. 193–242) (original work published 1947).
—— (1977c) What is metaphysics? (trans. D. F. Krell). In Basic Writings (pp. 95–112) (original work published 1967).
—— (1977d) The question concerning technology (trans. W. Lovitt). In Basic Writings (pp. 287–317. (original work published 1954).
—— (1988) Basic Problems of Phenomenology (trans. A. Hofstadter) (revised edn.). Bloomington Indiana University Press (original lectures delivered in 1927).
—— (1991) Only a god can save us: Der Spiegel’s interview with Martin Heidegger. In R. Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy (pp. 91–116). New York: Columbia University Press) (original interview conducted in 1966 and first published (trans. M. P. Alter and J. D. Caputo) in Philosophy Today (1976), 20, 267–85).
—— (1992) Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (trans. M. Heim). Bloomington: Indiana University Press (original lectures delivered in 1928).
—— (1995) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker). Bloomington: University of Indiana Press (original lectures delivered in 1929/30).
—— (1998) On the essence of truth. In Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (pp. 155–82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (original work published 1943).
Malcolm, N. (1968). The conceivability of mechanism. Philosophical Review, 77, 45–72.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1983) The Structure of Behavior (trans. A. Fisher). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press (original work published 1942).
—— (2002) The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith). London: Routledge (original work published 1945).
Millikan, R. (1984) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
—— (1993) What is behavior? A philosophical essay on ethology and individualism in psychology, part 1. In White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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