Let us begin our task of establishing the primordiality of conceiving God through the categories of agent/agency/action by where we start any metaphysical reflection. Let us start with the immediate experience we have of ourselves as agents. If you have been following my presentation so far, you have been actively engaged as an agent. You have done or performed a whole variety of actions. You have held a book in your hands, you have sent your gaze across a page, you have sat down (and occasionally stood up), you have gone off to get a cup of coffee, and you have focused your thoughts upon the words in front of you. Each of these doings is an action, and you are the agent who has performed or done them. There are, of course, many things that have also been going on in you simultaneously which are not, strictly speaking, actions of yours. You have probably not chosen or intended to blink your eyes, or to keep your heart beating, or to maintain a rhythmic breathing, but these things have happened. They have occurred, but you have not consciously intended them to happen and thus they are not, strictly speaking, actions you have performed. Fortunately, we already have a basis for distinguishing between these two different kinds of occurrences: one we call actions (consciously intended by you, the agent) and the other we call events (happenings that occur without any conscious action or intent on your part).
Notice in my previous paragraph that I snuck in, as one action among many, the action of thinking—for that is the key to understanding ourselves primarily as agents rather than as thinkers. If we step back in reflection to think about our fundamental nature as selves, we perform an action. Stepping back into reflection, or engaging in a thought process, is an act of the self—it is something we choose to do. On the other hand, acting is not simply another word for thinking (though acting is often accompanied by thinking). This is the simple basis for claiming that we are primordially agents, one of whose actions is thinking about what it means to be an agent. At one point in the history of philosophy we got sidetracked (e.g., Descartes) into thinking that the primordial nature of the self was as thinker and forgot that thinking is an action. And once we started at that point, we then had to find a way to establish the fact that we were also agents. But from the view that the self is primarily a thinker, it is very difficult to establish the primordiality of action since action is not restricted to thinking, though thinking is an action. We must first be an agent in order to engage in the act of thinking, an act through which we hope to arrive at a fundamental definition of the self. But if we conclude from this intellectual exercise that thinking is the basic characteristic of the self, as did Descartes, our conclusion hides from us the very basis on which our thinking was carried out in the first place: the fact that we engaged, as agents, in an act of thinking in order to reach the absurd conclusion that we are not primarily agents but thinkers. How odd that as agents we use one of the modes of action available to us (thinking) to conclude that we are not primarily agents at all but thinkers whose thinking is divorced from the ground of action from which it proceeds. This is not to say, of course, that thinking is not essential to our fullness as personal agents, but it is only one of the many actions open to us and is embedded in the more basic or primordial characteristic of the self: our capacity for agency.
The philosopher John Macmurray, in his much underappreciated book The Self as Agent, made the significant argument that if we think of ourselves from the standpoint of agency we can establish the primordiality of being agents, one of whose actions is thinking whereas if we think from the standpoint of thinking, we cannot arrive at an understanding of ourselves as agents. It would be ridiculous to say one of our most important thoughts is action since action is not thought but doing. If thinking alone defines the self, then how is action possible? But if action defines the self, then naturally thinking is possible because it is an action of the self. The trick, philosophically, is to think from the standpoint of what is more basic to the self: thinking or action. As Macmurray argues, in thinking we want to eliminate as much as possible any of the non-cognitive dimensions of ourselves (our feelings, mental distractions, bodily sensations, etc.). In other words, we want to segregate our thinking from the inclusive range of things that constitute us as agents engaged in multiple, mostly non-cognitive, ways with the world. “The ‘purer’ our thought becomes, the more it excludes not merely perception, but all sensuous elements, and moves in a shadowy world of abstract and general ideas.”[1] But inclusion is the chief characteristic of action. “Action . . . is a full concrete activity of the self in which all our capacities are employed; while thought is constituted by the exclusion of some of our powers and a withdrawal into an activity which is less concrete and less complete.”[2] This leads Macmurray to conclude that “[t]he concept of ‘action’ is inclusive. As an ideal limit of personal being, it is the concept of an unlimited rational being, in which all the capacities of the Self are in full and unrestricted employment.” Significantly, he also adds that “as limited and finite persons, such a fullness of positive being lies beyond our range.”[3] (This raises the possibility of what I have referred to as a more sophisticated anthropomorphism because it suggests the possibility of a view of God as a fuller, less limited, more inclusive “positive” being, the full extent of whose attributes lies beyond the cognitive and practical range of our capacities, but who is not outside our ontological space entirely.)
Macmurray also suggests that “pure” thought, as an ideal limit, “denotes an activity of the Self which is purely formal and completely without content. Now purely formal thought is equivalent to nothing; for there cannot be a form which is not the form of something, and a purely formal activity is therefore an activity which is no activity. . . . ‘Pure thought’ is not merely impossible for us, it is impossible in the nature of things.”[4] I would suggest that the pure thought Macmurray refers to is equivalent to the monistic ontology of undifferentiated oneness, or the dualistic “otherness” to which the dualistic ontology refers. The attempt to preserve God’s mystery through the apophatic approach, emptiness, undifferentiated oneness, radical otherness, and nothingness are the result of pushing thought beyond all content. But one can only start down that road once one has abandoned any attempt to think reality through the basic category of agency and action, the very categories that are presupposed by someone starting down any road, either cognitive or practical.
One implication of starting our understanding of the self from the standpoint of action is that we “know” in acting that we are engaged with the “other.” The other is the world in which our action takes place. Action is the attempt to modify the world that is both outside us and in which we are simultaneously embedded. The socio-temporal-material world (STMW) is neither alien to us nor are we completely absorbed into or fully identified with it. Each one of us is an agent, an originator of action, whose actions directly affect other agents as well as non-agents in an ontological space that we jointly occupy with them. We don’t need to establish by thought the reality of the world “outside” us because we already “know” its reality through the primordiality of action that we are already part of and engaged in something other than ourselves at a more basic level than thinking. Acting establishes our knowledge of the world. If we try to establish it solely by thinking, we have no way to distinguish between true and illusory views of the world (except, of course, by acting on our ideas to find out which ones enable us to find our way successfully in the world). As Macmurray says, “thinking presupposes knowledge. [But] our knowledge of the world is primarily an aspect of our action in the world. . . . We can only think about what we already know. This primary knowledge is knowledge that arises in action.”[5] It is what is often simply called knowledge from experience.
Of course, we often find that what we intend our action to accomplish is frustrated by the often recalcitrant world in which that action is being “inserted” or embedded. For example, imagine I try to slap the wasp that has landed on my wrist. But I miss and the wasp stings me. Clearly the intention guiding my action was not realized. At this point I will be well advised to stop slapping and start thinking about what to do in such cases in the future. Thinking allows me to withdraw temporarily from direct action in order to figure out (and in this way human agents have an advantage over other animals) what other courses of action might to open to them. But whatever I come up with in my reflective withdrawal must ultimately be tested for its appropriateness by being acted upon. In other words, as Macmurray says, “the question which a theoretical activity seeks to answer can only arise in practical experience, directly or indirectly; and the answer can be true or false only through a reference to action. Thought cannot provide a criterion of truth, but at most a criterion of the correctness of the process of thinking.”[6]
Of course, one of the most serious objections to conceiving the self as primarily agent comes from contemporary science. Many scientists, especially those committed to a kind of evolutionary epistemology, regard the self as essentially a complex mechanism or biological organism composed of smaller and even more basic parts, none of which are intentional or agential. Human beings, they argue, are not fundamentally or ontologically different from the parts out of which they are composed; they are simply more complex arrangements of those parts. And if those parts are not themselves conscious or intentional, then the human beings to whom they give rise during the course of evolution are not conscious or intentional. No ontological gap needs to be crossed in the process of evolution from the non-personal, non-agential to the emergent human agent because what has “emerged” is neither personal intentional nor even an agent.[7]
I want to look at the implications of this scientific claim for our understanding of personal agency through two complementary lenses. First, I want to show that it fails to explain our experience of being agents. I will argue that our sense of agency grows out of our direct and practical engagement with the world of the “other.” Second, I want to show that as agents, we preside hierarchically over an infrastructure containing sub-acts that, at the appropriate level, can be explained scientifically. But the agent presiding over that infrastructure can be explained by categories appropriate only to agents, not to a non-agential substructure. I will draw upon the work of two major contemporary philosophers, Edward Pols and Raymond Tallis, both of whose work complements that of John Macmurray though neither mentions him at all,. No one, to my knowledge, has brought these thinkers together in a single presentation. And in the case of Pols and Tallis, neither, I suspect, would fully support the view of God that I intend to draw from their work, though I think I can tease out that view without doing violence to their fundamental categories and arguments. Following the establishment of the primordiality and explanatory power of personal agency, I will conclude by examining how to apply this category to divine actions and, in particular, to how divine actions intersect or mesh with human actions and natural events within the STMW without causing conceptual incoherence.
Raymond Tallis is a polymath of the first order. He has been a physician, a professor of geriatric medicine, a gerontologist, a philosopher, and a cultural and literary critic, among many other things. Of particular importance for this study, he is the author of a trilogy on human nature and knowing. The trilogy began with The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Human Being[8](2003). It was followed by I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry Into First-Person Being[9] (2004), and the final volume is The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Knowledge and Truth[10] (2005).
In The Hand, Tallis sets out to explore “the distinctive mystery of human nature,” “the ontological distinctness of humans,”[11] or the “exceptional nature” of humans as something not reducible to the categories of human biology or its physical infrastructure. He wants to establish what it means for the human self to have “true agency.”[12] In this sense, his project is identical to those of Macmurray, Pols, and me. In Tallis’s view, the most important original distinction between the non-human animal and the personal agent is the latter’s unique use of its hand. We should note that Tallis’s approach closely resembles Macmurray’s notion that the fundamental initial contact with the other is not through thought but through physical contact. For Macmurray, the primary sense contact with the world is touch or feel. Touch is the experience of the other as other (than me) since it resists the push of the hand or finger and thereby establishes itself as other than myself. It is significant that in the history of philosophy and epistemology it has been sight or vision that has been privileged as the basic sense metaphor for representing thought’s connection to the reality beyond the thinker. But sight operates only at a distance [13] and can easily be deceptive. Touch, on the other hand, “involves physical contact between the organ of sense and the object perceived, while vision is incompatible with this. . . . Tactual perception is necessarily perception in action. To touch anything is to exert pressure upon it, however slight, and therefore, however slightly, to modify it.” The result is, according to Macmurray, that the act of touching is prior to the act of seeing as the basis for knowing the other.[14] (Touch also involves some resistance by the object being touched to the one doing the touching. This resistance is essential to establishing the singular identities of beings independent of but not beyond relationality with the self. The implications of a being having an independent identity and as resistant to some degree to the actions of the other for conceiving God’s relation to a world that is not Godself will be spelled out in due course.)
For Tallis, the primary means we have for touching the other is the human hand. The use of the hand awakens a sense of the user (the self) as an agent with choices as to how to use the hand. Because of the versatility of the hand, it can be used for a variety of grips and when the hand-owner becomes aware of this versatility, he or she must make a choice as to which use is most appropriate for achieving the purpose he or she has in mind. And with this choice “comes a consciousness of action: the arbitrariness of choice between two equally sensible ways of achieving the same goal awakens the sense of agency.”[15] Tallis contends that the awareness of the hand as a tool to accomplish intentions enabled humans “to pass into the realm of agency [presumably from a stage in which their agency had not yet been fully developed or actualized].”[16] Non-human animals reach for things, but this is not intentional. But, says Tallis, “human fingering and manipulation are ‘doing.’ Much of what is proximal to the wrist is shared with animals; distal to the wrist we have no peers. And it is what happens distal to the wrist that, in the first instance, imports true ‘doing’ into the world. Agency (and the agentive self) grows from the tips of our ‘meta-fingering’ fingers. This, then, retroacts upon what is proximal to the wrist, importing doing into more and more of the body, and, via tools, into what happens beyond the wrist, making the world increasingly the product of doing rather than happening.”[17] (Happening is occurrence in or, to use Macmurray’s phrase, modification of the world exterior to the self but without the intentionality, consciousness, or volition essential to purposive agentive doing. It is event, not act.) “When we seize hold of things, we select the grips that we deploy. (This reference to deployment of what he will call the “infrastructure” of action will be developed more extensively in my upcoming treatment of the work of Edward Pols who will, in effect, elaborate Tallis’s claim that the tool-like status of the hand instrumentalises the human organism and “it is this that ignites the sense of agency.”[18]) Although there are constraints on the possible range of actions from which we choose, “these are not so narrow that the grips can be regarded as entirely pre-programmed and/or instinctual; nor so wide that random movements would suffice. In our uniquely human manipulations of the world outside of our bodies, we are truly agents and our hands are the instruments of our agency.”[19] In fact, one could argue that the very notion of “tool” implies its conscious use for a particular purpose by a tool-wielder. And in this sense, “tool” implies conscious agency on the part of the tool-user. A rock does not “use” its hard shell as a tool to protect it from hammer blows because it is not a conscious object capable of taking actions to protect itself. To think otherwise would truly be anthropomorphism run amuck in the downward direction. “An object becomes a tool only when it is linked to an agent, to a subjectivity, and is therefore a sign of a person” when the tool is an extension of the agent.[20] And this ability to use tools rests on the “intuition of the agentive-self through the instrumental relationship we humans, of all creatures, have to our bodies due to the properties of the hand.”[21]
The hand is the first of our tools for finding more “efficient means of interacting with the world.”[22] This fact presupposes not only the agency behind the use of the hand as a tool but also the fact of interactions with other objects/subjects in a common ontological space that we call the world. So to be an agent means to be in interactive relation with other objects, and if the world contains more than just me as agent, then some of those other objects will be agents as well. And if God is to be considered an agent, even God would need a common ontological space in which to interact with other agents (even though they may all be, with respect to their origins and maintenance, God’s creatures).
Tallis argues that if we are agents we cannot be explained completely or exhaustively in non-agential terms. We are certainly material organisms but, he insists, we are not only material organisms. “Humans are both organisms that have come into being through processes that are seen throughout evolutionary history and at the same time agents, persons, selves, who cannot be explained satisfactorily in biological, or indeed physical, terms.”[23] Tallis does not deny that human beings emerged from a biological substratum but insists that there is a “fundamental gap between instinct-driven organisms and reason-invoking, choosing humans.”[24] The problem of explaining agential action emerges when the actions of freely acting agents are subject solely to reductionist instinct-driven organic evolutionary theories. Tallis claims that “the millions of years during which we have progressively deviated from animals is enough to make most organism-based explanation of our behaviour (as opposed to our kidneys’ behaviour) totally useless. A description of the roots does not capture the rustling of the leaves.”[25] None of this, of course, denies that the efficacy of our actions depends upon and presupposes the organic and physical infrastructure into which they are inserted. “There is a constant intercutting between conscious intention, bodily mechanisms and the laws of physics. It is this that the grasping hand . . . . first brings to consciousness.”[26] In fact, what Tallis calls the “mystery of how it is possible that the ‘I do’ can stand at the centre of some of ‘This happens’ gathers force as we become more and more aware of the continual presence of natural laws and of their particular manifestations in our bodily mechanisms behind, before and within our actions.”[27]
Tallis is in complete agreement with Macmurray’s notion that the sense of the self as agent is prior to and more basic than the sense of the self as thinker. “The development of the sense of oneself as an agent, acting directly or indirectly through the instrument of one’s body, lies at the root of the emergence of human self-consciousness and the sense of self. ‘I act (deliberately) therefore I am’ has always seemed to me to pin down the basis of the sense of the self better than ‘I think therefore I am’. . .”[28]
Before leaving The Hand, we might note one or two oblique references to God in Tallis’s work. He notes that freedom to act presumes, as we have already observed, a “world” in which the actions will occur. “Freedom has to be conditioned in order for it to have particular content, for it to be exercised. Agency has to act upon, and within, a framework composed of, states of affairs it has not chosen. At its deepest level, we have to be ‘a given something’ [a theme he will develop in his next book I Am] we have not chosen to be in order to that we should act on choice.” In other words, there have to be what he calls “enabling constraints without which the agent would lack an agenda. The things that seem to determine us from outside our agency are also those things that make the notion of exercising agency meaningful.”[29] Tallis seems to be saying that action is impossible if there is no external other (or panoply of others in an ontologically constrained world) in which the action is to take place. If there were literally no resisting objects and no ontological conditions (such as time, space, and matter) then there would be nothing in relation to which the act could take place. Given this fact, and presuming the traditional or classical view of God as not limited by anything “other” than Godself, Tallis observes in passing that this is why “it is difficult to think of God as free because He has nothing to be free from, nothing to be free about, nothing to free Himself towards. No wonder he has such a dull history: he is little other than a crystal of frozen, abstract attributes.”[30] As we observed in our exploration of the implications of ontological dualism and monism, their metaphysical approaches to God do, in fact, wind up precisely in a view of God as so free from everything that God becomes nothing more than a frozen abstraction to whom no attributes can be ascribed. If God is to be truly relational, God must stand in some “relation to and with” other beings and this means within some kind of common ontological space or structure in which the mode of their interaction is both free within enabling constraints and effective in so far as it seeks to modify the other with whom it is in relation. In this sense, God will have to be “limited” in the way any agent-in-relation is limited by the freedom and existence of the other with whom it is in relation. When this is the case, then God creates a far from dull history. As much of theology and the biblical narrative make clear, God becomes an active, vibrant, and robust contributor to history.
One might, of course, explore the possibility, if one is inclined to a non-dualist/non-monist view of God, that God is the one agent whose repertoire of tools for carrying out God’s intentions is virtually (in practice) infinite or unlimited. As finite agents, we have a restricted toolbox of instruments and a limited ability to use them in enacting our intentions in the world; there are many potential instruments in the world we simply are not able to utilize given the limits on our power, imagination, and the infrastructure from within which our acts originate and are deployed. But if God is the creator of the world and is able to act within it as the practical field of God’s action, then God would have capacities and possibilities not available to us. If we say these capacities are infinite we don’t mean that they are so ontologically “other” than our own that they cannot be conceived. We would mean only that their reach, depth, or degree of power and efficacy is so much greater than ours that we can regard their presence in and availability to God as something that which nothing greater can be conceived.
In the next book of the trilogy, I Am, Tallis moves deeper into an understanding of the self as agent. In coming to know ourselves as agents, we get a sense of our individual self “as a subject haunting (using, suffering, enjoying living and being) one’s body . . . this, then, is how the hand awakens the intuition of the agentive subject.”[31] One becomes aware of one’s body “as engaged in purposeful activity, as it presents itself in the consciousness of the engaged individual.”[32] Calling this awareness that “I am this person, life, consciousness, body” (not a bare and abstract “I am”) an “existential intuition” (EI), Tallis says that it “lies at the bottom of every manifestation of (truly) first-person being; without this Intuition, which is unique to mankind, there is no self (or selfhood) and nothing corresponding to personal identity and agency. The existential Intuition is (implicitly) presupposed in them both, which is why it has tended to be overlooked; and this is also why, I believe, philosophers have found selfhood and agency so elusive, with the self apparently melting away on close inspection and agency seeming to have no place in the physical world.”[33] Fortunately “…the Existential Intuition lies at the heart of agency, explaining how, in particular, human beings can be ‘a point of origin,’ a source of true actions, and consequently be able to change the course of nature.”[34] As Tallis says later on in the book, “there is an inseparable link between the Existential Intuition and the intuition of agency—‘That I am this . . .’ and ‘That I am doing these events’ are a twin birth.”[35] With the EI “we have a new point of departure, in an otherwise boundless material universe of causes leading in all spatio-temporal directions. . . . ‘That I am this . . .’ plants the flag of ‘here’ and ‘now’ and makes our bodies a new point of origin in virtue of which humans are the true ‘arche’ of those events we believe to be our freely chosen actions.”[36] The EI establishes the unique, irreducible particularity of the self (that, of course, immediately establishes a differentiation between one self and all the others). Differentiation is an indispensable condition of interrelational agency. This fact, we might remember, is why the move toward undifferentiated oneness in Meister Eckhart led him to deny the concept of God as an agent.
The EI stands in sharp contrast with the Cartesian “I am because I think.” Descartes, from the starting point of the cogito, had much difficulty reaching the non-mental STMW in which we as agents are already embedded bodily and engaged before (even as a precondition for) beginning to think in the first place. Indeed, Tallis claims that earliest form of the EI “is the body as engaged in purposeful activity, as it presents itself in the consciousness of the engaged individual,”[37] suggesting that the primordial awareness of the self is as an agent whose agency is the primary mode of engagement. He says that the “primordial ‘am’ is an assumption by itself of a meaty being engaged with the material world. It is the engaged organism assuming itself as ‘myself.’”[38] If I begin my reflections on the primordial “am” from the standpoint of the EI. I can hardly be mistaken that I am this engaged body. It is I who am struggling to do something and doing is the heart of agency. Even the cogito argument “truly exists only through being enacted,”[39] the action in this case being that of thinking (the point Macmurray was at pains to make). And in the process of thinking I make assertions about what I believe to be the case. But an “assertion” carries the aura (and reality) of action: to assert something is to do something and thus points backward to its origin in and through an action. A self that is only a thinker is a self without a world about which to think. It would be, in effect, a disembodied self without any connection with action in relation to anything beyond itself. “Action would be neither possible nor required.”[40]
Tallis does not claim that the self-consciousness that I am this and that I am doing these things emerges full blown at the very beginning of my self-reflection. It is only subsequently that “selfhood and agency differentiate, so that it then makes sense to link together, as if they were separable, the self and its actions, and to attribute the latter to the former.”[41] Eric Matthews, writing about the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has said “even our awareness of our own subjectivity is possible only if we are aware of a world that transcends it.”[42]
Tallis also claims that “without objects in the ‘weighty’ sense, it is not clear that there can be a realm of objective truth falsehood beyond that of ‘subjective experience’ . . .”[43] since there would be nothing outside my thinking by which to judge its truth or falsity. This is not an unqualified acceptance of the so-called correspondence theory of truth or any particular version of pragmatism, but it does suggest that without some reference to a world that has something of its own ontological structure in which we act, the truth of mental conceptions will be difficult to establish.
“The creature woken out of sentience to knowledge awakes to a dangerous world outside of which is incompletely scrutable [sic]. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should arrive at the idea of a ‘true’ self that is so far ‘inside’ the body as to be insulated from the threats of the world, and the threats to that body, a self whose existence is potentially underwritten by a transcendent creature (e.g. a God) who is and knows and encompasses the inscrutable remainder of the inscrutable world.”[44] But, apart from Tallis, we have already seen the consequences of complete inscrutability in the logic of ontological dualism and ontological monism, which eventually collapse into complete unknowing. Not even God can rescue us from that unknowing unless God, too, is not so far “inside” Godself that God cannot have objective and dynamic relations with those beings that are “outside” Godself in the world of relationality, with beings with an ontological independence of each other while still occupying a common ontological space or field in which they interact.
Like Macmurray, Tallis puts a strong emphasis on the physical sensation of touch (as he develops in The Hand) as the primordial moment of engagement with what is other than us. It is the sensation of relationality at its most basic: “Touch is of particular interest because, uniquely of all the senses, it has reciprocity built into it: we touch at the cost of being touched.”[45] (Might Michelangelo have intuited this when his God at the moment of creation reaches out and touches the hand of Adam?)
But with the existence of the primordial self as agent there necessarily emerges the location of that self in a particular time and place. In order for the self to make any kind of sense of itself, “it has to be impregnated by the past and pregnant with the future . . . ‘I’ requires an historical context, a temporal depth, for it to be contentful, or for its contents to signify.”[46] The EI establishes an original “here” at which the buck starts.[47] And once it starts, a historical narrative is generated.
Acting is the creating of history. Moving beyond anything Tallis has said or even would be sympathetic toward, one might suggest that a God who is actually[48] engaged with what is other than the divine self is necessarily engaged in creating a historical narrative, through actions that occur in time and space and which, with the cooperation (or resistance) of other agents, bring about the completion of the divine intentions.[49]
Macmurray has argued that the non-personal Other is that which does not respond personally to my call to it: “The relation I have with it lacks the mutuality of a personal relation.” It corresponds to the non-intentional, non-agent part of myself. When it resists me, it does so not as an agent but passively as a material or organic object. It becomes, in effect, a means for me to carry out my intentions in relation to other agents but is not itself an agent.[50]
All personal relationships seem destined to run into difficulties at some point, for long or short periods of time. If I am rebuffed by the personal other or feel isolated from her, I become egocentric, fearful, defensive, and, in extreme cases, fall into despair. Only if the personal other can break through my defensive shell can I be restored to a loving relationship, assuming I accept the overture. But the restoration of relationality requires an initial breaking away from the other, allowing the negative dimension of relationship (fear) to gain the upper hand. Nevertheless, I cannot be a fully relational being unless I can experience my own identity as an individual self, not simply a dependent self-defining itself solely through the other. If I am to be a full, intentional, and contributing member to the relationship, I must retreat from it temporarily in order to restore it on a different or better basis. In the process, Macmurray insists, I will discover myself as an individual and through that discovery become a more mature and fulsome person. This process involves the crucial notion of resistance to the other. Macmurray is quite clear that personal relations do not involve the submerging of the individuality of the persons in relation: they require its enhancement. Only by experiencing and offering resistance to the other can the child discover himself “as an individual by contrasting himself, and indeed willfully opposing himself to the family to which he belongs; and this discovery of his individuality is at the same time the realization of his individuality.”[51] This is the “rhythm of withdrawal and return” that is essential for the healthy growth of individuality. (Macmurray notes that this rhythm is as true for societies as it is for individuals and we will take up this issue shortly.)
Temporary withdrawal from the Other becomes the basis of a moral struggle: there is an opposition to be overcome, a conflict of wills to be resolved. This opposition helps the child recognize himself as an individual agent through the experience of encountering an opposing agent who seeks to subordinate him to his will. The Other’s will must be met by my counter-will. This clash of wills gives rise to a need for reconciliation, for overcoming the fear of the Other without subordinating himself to it in a servile manner by refusing to accept his own individuality and distinctness.
The notion of resistance to an agent’s actions presupposes a differentiation between the agent and the objects (including other agents), which the agent encounters in the field in which his or her actions are being enacted. It also presupposes some kind of continuity of the agent from one act to another. Tallis notes that there is no identity without an enduring something, a continuant, to which it might be attached.[52] This is similar to Macmurray’s claim that “to be an agent a person must also be a continuant object in the world”[53] and both Tallis and Macmurray echo Thomas Reid who said that “my personal identity . . . implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing that I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks and acts and feels.”[54]
Tallis is not opposed to the notion that our EI and the self-as-agent that it requires emerged gradually over time through a process of evolution. The organisms from which we evolved were at one time without consciousness or will. But at some point we discovered “our ability deliberately or genuinely to utilize our body” and in the process we discovered that we can be “a point of true origin, a new beginning in the universe. Bodily self-utilisation transforms hominids’ sites of organic events into actors who to some extent shape their own destinies and lead, rather than merely live, their own lives. . . . It is manipulation that has awoken the intuition that, among the flow of events, there are some that I do.”[55] We move from instinctual behavior to “explicitly purposive activity, with a consequent gradual displacement of instinctive behaviour, tropisms and automatic responses to stimuli, by deliberate activity.”[56] The sense of agency, according to Macmurray begins at the earliest stages of consciousness. “Self-consciousness, the assumption of the active body as ‘I,’ and the inchoate sense of agency, are it seems reasonable to conjecture, fused in the most primitive stages of (distinctively) human consciousness.”[57] The agent builds upon the organic dimension of the self. As Tallis puts it, “the emergent human agent is built on, or out of, the biological material of the appetitive, active, animal.”[58]
Macmurray comes at this question by considering the maturation of the baby into a more fully conscious adult agent. In his chapter on Mother and Child in Persons in Relation he argues that the child’s very survival depends upon maintaining the caring/loving relationship into which she is born. Someone must think for the child until she can learn over time to control her own adaptation to the environment. The child cannot speak in words but the mother interprets her crying or other expressions of discomfort or comfort and the mother must, in effect, act for the child.[59] Until this child can achieve her own agency, her movements are “conspicuously random”[60] and, I would suggest, may well be best described in purely organic, scientific, and even evolutionary terms. The child must eventually discriminate within the field of its senses the different responses that her crying or movements evoke in others. It is only on the basis of this discrimination (dare we say differentiation) that the child can eventually become a self-conscious agent on her own. The child acquires skills to help navigate and negotiate the world in which she is placed. And this acquisition of skills is a cumulative process. But at some stage in the process “we begin to suspect the presence of deliberate intention,” a point at which “the child can form an intention and so foresee the end which is his goal, and select a means of attaining it.”[61] And so personal agency is born in the child as she moves from mere instinctual response to external stimuli to conscious intentionality.
Tallis places this evolution of self-consciousness and self-agency in the relation of the child’s body with the material world. “It is only in the context of first-person being that the material world becomes something in, on, against and for which actions act and upon which there are patients of events. It is the self-appropriation of the body that, ultimately, transforms the material world into circumstances, substrate, opportunity and constraint.”[62] This self-appropriation, he argues (very much as Macmurray had done) is the move from pure organic being to personal or agential being. The EI “inaugurates the (never complete) uncoupling of the human person from the human organism, permitting the latter to engage with the natural world on more favourable terms than are allowed to all other creatures. This uncoupling becomes more extensive with the growth of objective knowledge out of first-person awareness.”[63] And intimately related to this awareness is doing things for a reason, not simply responding organically or even mechanically to stimuli.
An action is more of an action the more it is driven by reasons. Possibilities exist only for higher-order consciousness: doing things for reasons separates humans by an ever-widening gulf from the animal kingdom.[64] “It is the expansion, over the generations, of the theatre of distinctively human action that has enabled reasons gradually to displace, override, requisition, biologically inflected causes as the basis of human activity and material causes to be displaced by human intentions. The many-layered human world of explicit reasons, artifacts and institutions buffers human freedom from the deterministic material universe with which it seems to be in direct conflict.”[65] Selfhood and agency co-emerge. “Free agents are the origins of their actions but not the causes of them—in the sense of being special (uncaused) causes.”[66] Causal explanation by itself is insufficient to explain the way in which agents bring about the realization of their purposes or intentions. In some sense the personal agent uses (without necessarily violating) the causal structures of the organic and physical world (normally explained fully by causal law) in order to utilize those laws to attain a rationally chosen end. It is this claim that will be extensively developed in my treatment of Pols.
For both Tallis and Macmurray, agency is the ability to choose how to exploit the laws of nature, to subordinate nature to non-natural ends, and it remains distinct from the idea of agency as a supernatural kind of cause. Agents are not solely physical causes of their actions.[67] This point will have significant implications for our understanding of the agency of God in relation to the world in which God presumably acts. For all agents, Tallis argues, agency is a self-positioning among causes, “a way of privileging certain events as causes so that we may use them as handles to manipulate the world. In order to act freely, we do not have to be lawbreakers, only law-users.”[68] “Self-conscious agency is situated in an almost limitless field of deliberation and explicit purpose.”[69] And it is precisely here that Pols’s work on the appropriation of the bodily infrastructure of the agent will become essential to developing the full implications of the notion of the primordiality of agency. For Tallis, “it is only in the context of first-person being that the material world becomes something in, on, against and for which actions act and upon which there are patients of events. It is the self-appropriation of the body that, ultimately, transforms the material world into circumstances, substrate, opportunity and constraint.”[70]
Tallis does say that reasons do not “break into the charmed circle of law-like material causation.”[71] But as we shall see, this phrasing does not quite do the trick. Law-like material causation is either already porous enough that it admits some “happenings” to take place in the world through rational free agency, or it is a closed causal chain into which some of those things we call reasons or intentions must break in order to bring about their intended effects. If there is no “breaking into” the world of material causation, then where do actions take place? But words like “breaking into” or “intervening in” the world of causality suggest a kind of supernatural power and Tallis rightly flees from such a suggestion. I will argue that intervention or breaking into is, in one carefully nuanced sense, what all agents do (both human and divine). But intervention does not mean annulment, displacement, or abrogation of causal law. It means only the appropriate utilization or, as Pols will call it, deployment of causal law for intentional purposes by the agent. Therefore, I will suggest, the concept of utilization of rather than intervention into the world defined by causal law is a less misleading way of understanding action, including the action of God.